RE: DISCUSS and COMMENT: draft-ietf-radext-design

["Glen Zorn" <glenzorn@comcast.net>]

Alan T DeKok [mailto:aland@freeradius.org]

> Cullen Jennings wrote:
> >
> > On May 8, 2009, at 20:48 , Glen Zorn wrote:
> >
> >>   Next, the format
> >> recommended was widely and immediately recognized (except, perhaps,
> by
> >> the
> >> guardians of orthodoxy in the IETF) as being woefully inadequate and
> >> therefore ignored by many large vendors.
> >
> > Folks, is this statement is true - I am very concerned about this
> being
> > ready to be a BCP. Was there a consensus call on this? Does the WG
> have
> > consensus on this?
> 
>   Based on the vendor files I have:
> 
> ~100 vendors
> ~4 use non-RFC format
> 
>   Lucent
>   Starent
>   USR (going back to 1994 or so)
>   WiMAX
> 
>   i.e. the overwhelming majority (> 95%) of the major and minor vendors
> find the RFC VSA format acceptable.

I wonder, does your survey include only actual vendors or just distinct
vendor IDs?  I suspect the latter, since 3COM (not on your list) bought USR,
inheriting that type space.  It also appears that the same weight is given
to vendors like Cisco & Lucent as to "Bob's NAS Factory".  Is this
important?  It certainly seems important to me, since small vendors are
unlikely to put RADIUS to the number and variety of uses that would push the
envelope of the type space.  It also ignores the internal structure of those
"RFC format" VSAs, in many cases chosen to avoid exhausting the VSA type
space (see below).

> 
>   This includes Cisco, who uses the RFC format, and then extends it to
> encapsulate (almost) free-form text.

Perhaps you are unaware of the fact that a major purpose of the
encapsulation of "(almost) free-form text" was to extend the inadequate VSA
type space.

> 
>   I doubt very much that any other RADIUS server will have different
> statistics.

So do I, which would be damning indeed if these statistics had any meaning
at all.   

>   Alan DeKok.


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