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Possible issue for clarification -- RADIUS Accounting



RFC 2866 has the following text (or similar):

"...can only be present in Accounting-Request records where 
the Acct-Status-Type is set to Stop."

contained in the description of the following RADIUS Accounting
Attributes: 

5.3.  Acct-Input-Octets
5.4.  Acct-Output-Octets
5.7.  Acct-Session-Time
5.8.  Acct-Input-Packets
5.9.  Acct-Output-Packets
5.10. Acct-Terminate-Cause

With the exception of Acct-Terminate-Cause, do folks in think that RFC
2866 intended to prohibit these attributes from also appearing in
Accounting-Request messages where the Acct-Status-Type is set to
Interim-Update?

My research shows that the text in question first appears in RFC 2059.
RFC 2059 is obsoleted by RFC 2139, which in turn is obsoleted by RFC
2866.  The Interim-Update value of Acct-Status-Type is *not* included in
RFC 2059, just Start and Stop.  One possible scenario is that when the
Interim-Update type was added, no one bothered to notice the sections of
text that indicate this "Stop only" text and updated them to read "Stop
or Interim-Update".  

Since the purpose of the Interim-Update is to provide a snap-shot of the
accounting statistics at that moment in time, I see no reason why the
octet counts and session time attributes ought not to be included.  Is
this potentially an erratum in RFC 2866? Or was there a good reason to
omit these accounting statistics from the Interim-Update messages?



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