RE: RADIUS Calling-Station-Id for WiMAX

[Avi Lior <avi@bridgewatersystems.com>]

BTW, I think RFC 3580 has an issue that needs to be fixed.

Apparently there isn't single standard MAC address format for presenting a MAC address in a human readable fashion.  Forgeting the use of "-" and ":" there is - Bit reversed and none bit reversed methods.  RFC 3580 needs to state which one is being encoded. Right?  See RFC 2469 for a discussion.

The MAC over-the-wire is different for different technogologies.  802.3 and 802.4 send the bits with the least siginificant bit first, while 802.5 and 802.6 send the most significant bit first.

RADIUS would have to do some mapping based on access technology anyway. Right?

And how is the MAC presented to the crypto-layer when it is part of some crypto-binding.  Is that specified correctly.

Another point worth meantioning is that there is no STANDARD definition in IETF for a MAC representation in a Calling-Station-ID.  So when Alan is stating "to the RFC 3580 format for standards compliance" he is a little bit wrong.  First there is no SHALL or MUST or a SHOULD anywhere near the worlds MAC address and Calling-Station-ID.  And RFC 3580 is INFORMATIONAL.

So please lets call it what it is, a RECOMMENDATION, a common practice which is, judging by the emails being exchanged not exacly as common as we would think.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alan DeKok [mailto:aland@deployingradius.com]
> Sent: September 11, 2008 12:26 PM
> To: Matt Holdrege
> Cc: Mike Bean; David B. Nelson; Avi Lior; Glen Zorn; Ray
> Bell; Bernard Aboba; Congdon, Paul T (ProCurve);
> radiusext@ops.ietf.org; Dan Romascanu
> Subject: Re: RADIUS Calling-Station-Id for WiMAX
>
> Matt Holdrege wrote:
> > If your RADIUS server only needs to work with those
> devices, then you
> > are fine. However Alcatel-Lucent (as one example) has
> thousands upon
> > thousands of other installed NAS ports that use octets. If network
> > operators want a RADIUS server that serves both these NAS ports as
> > well as WiMax devices, you had better be thinking about backwards
> > compatibility.
>
>   In the interim, your AAA server could see the 6-octet
> format, and auto-convert it to the RFC 3580 format for
> standards compliance.
>
>   This is the path taken by at least one server I know of. :)
>
>   Alan DeKok.
>

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