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RE: AD review of draft-ietf-radext-tcp-transport-05



Hi Alan,

Thank you for the answers. The proposed changes answer my concerns and I
suggest that you go ahead with issuing a revised I-D. 

The only terms I am still a little bit uncertain about are 'common
Internet MTU' and 'common Ethernet MTU' but I understand what you mean
and I cannot find a better term. Let us use them, and  maybe other will
find something better as a term in future reviews. 

Regards,

Dan
  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alan DeKok [mailto:aland@deployingradius.com] 
> Sent: Monday, April 26, 2010 7:56 PM
> To: Romascanu, Dan (Dan)
> Cc: radiusext@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: Re: AD review of draft-ietf-radext-tcp-transport-05
> 
> Romascanu, Dan (Dan) wrote:
> > The issues are divided into Technical (T) and Editorial (E). 
> > 
> > T1. The document is marked as EXPERIMENTAL. It would be 
> useful if it 
> > mentions in one of the introductory sections what are the goals and 
> > limitations (if any) of the experimental deployment and 
> what would be 
> > the success criteria of the experiment that would allow for 
> taking the 
> > document to the standards track later.
> 
>   Suggested text for Section 1 (Introduction).  Move the last 
> paragraph from Section 1.2 to higher up in the document, and 
> add some text:
> 
> ...
> Since "bare" TCP does not provide for confidentiality or 
> enable negotiation of credible ciphersuites, its use is not 
> appropriate for inter-server communications where strong 
> security is required.  As a result the use of "bare" TCP 
> transport (i.e., without additional confidentiality and 
> security) is NOT RECOMMENDED, as there has been little or no 
> operational experience with it.
> 
> "Bare" TCP transport MAY, however, be used when another 
> method such as IPSec [RFC4301] is used to provide additional 
> confidentiality and security.  Should experience show that 
> such deployments are useful, this specification could be 
> moved to standards track.
> ...
> 
> > T2. Section 2.2: 
> > 
> >>  Since these ports are unused by existing RADIUS 
> implementations, the
> >    assigned values SHOULD be used as the default ports for 
> RADIUS over
> >    TCP.
> > 
> > Why is this a SHOULD and not a MUST? 
> 
>   No reason...  I'll change it.
> 
> > T3. Section 2.3 needs a complete re-writing: 
> ...
> > The correct solution is for the MIB documents to be updated in the 
> > future with new MIB objects of appropriate syntax. For the 
> time being 
> > the only thing that this section should say is that the MIB 
> modules do 
> > not support RADIUS over TCP and that they will need to be 
> updated in 
> > the future.
> 
>   Suggest replacing the text in 2.3 with:
> 
> The MIB Module definitions in [RFC4668], [RFC4669], 
> [RFC4670], [RFC4671], [RFC4672], and [RFC4673] are intended 
> to be used for RADIUS over UDP.  As such, they do not support 
> RADIUS over TCP, and will need to be updated in the future.  
> Implementations of RADIUS over TCP SHOULD NOT re-use these 
> MIB Modules to perform statistics counting for RADIUS over 
> TCP connections.
> 
> > T4. The following section in 2.6.1 is confusing: 
> > 
> >>  Much of the discussion in this section can be summarized by the
> >    following requirement.  RADIUS requests MAY be re-transmitted
> >    verbatim only if the following 5-tuple (Client IP address, Client
> >    port, Transport Protocol, Server IP address, Server 
> port) remains the
> >    same. 
> 
>   I think it's best to simply delete that paragraph.
> 
> > T5. The last paragraph in 2.6.1: 
> > 
> >>   The above requirement is necessary, but not sufficient 
> in all cases.
> >    Other specifications give additional situations where 
> the packet is
> >    to be considered as a new request.  Those 
> recommendations MUST also
> >    be followed.
> > 
> > Having a MUST requirement over undefined 'other 
> specification' is not 
> > implementable. I would suggest to either clarify what are 
> these 'other 
> > specifications' or take this out.
> 
>   OK.  I'll delete it.
> 
> > E1. Please expand TLS at first occurrence. 
> 
>   Done.
> 
> > E2. The Introduction section speaks about 'the default Internet MTU 
> > (576). Strictly speaking this value is not standardized in 
> any place,
> 
>   That should be the "common Internet MTU".  The text could say:
> 
> These packets are larger than the common Internet MTU (576), 
> resulting in fragmentation of the packets at the IP layer 
> when they are proxied over the Internet.
> 
> > and later in section 1.1 reference is made to RADIUS packets being 
> > restricted to 1500 octets in size. Looks like an unnecessary 
> > inconsistency.
> 
>   That is for a different use-case.  I can update that text to say:
> 
> For example, where EAP-TLS authentication [RFC5216] is 
> attempted and both the EAP peer and server utilize 
> certificate chains of 8KB, as many as 15 round-trips can be 
> required if RADIUS packets are restricted to the common 
> Ethernet MTU (1500 octets) for EAP over LAN (EAPoL) use-cases.
> 
> > E3. Section 1.2 - the syntax in the RADIUS server definition is 
> > inconsistent with the syntax of the rest of the definitions
> 
>   OK.  That could say:
> 
> A device that provides one or more of authentication, 
> authorization, and/or accounting (AAA) services to a NAS.
> 
> 
> > E4. Section 2.6.7: 
> > 
> >>  We RECOMMEND that implementors of this specification
> >    familiarize themselves with TCP application programming 
> concepts.  We
> >    RECOMMEND also that existing TCP applications be 
> examined with an eye
> >    to robustness, performance, scalability, etc.
> > 
> > The use of capitalized (a la 2119) keywords in a 
> personalized phrase 
> > does not make much sense. RECOMMEND is not a keyword actually. I 
> > suggest rephrasing.
> 
>   Changed to: "It is RECOMMENDED that..."
> 
>   If this looks OK, I'll issue an updated draft tomorrow.
> 

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