Subject: RE: [AAA-WG]: Edits to Diameter 11 to resolve vendor-specific commandcode issue

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 14:46:06 +0300

Hi Johan,

Just to play the devil's advocate,

> If I were to define some messages to e.g. exchange state information 
> between AAA servers the contents of that message almost certainly would 
> depend on the implementation and would be useful to me but probably of 
> little use to anyone else.

If you did the above, why would the proposed statement in the Diameter
base:

   The extension MUST be documented through an IETF process.  The 
   documentation MUST describe interaction with Diameter peers 
   that do not implement the extension.

cause you problem?  If you didn't document it, no one is going to come
after you.

John

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From: Johan Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 14:30:15 +0200

John,

with all due respect, I think you have it backwards. The question is not 
why the rule is not needed but why it is needed. As you hint at 
yourself, it will not be adhered to since it doesn't make sense to 
implementers. So far we have no explanation of why this rule is needed, 
only the AD's word that this is indeed the case. I do not see the 
benefit of making constraints that we don't expect to be followed, nor 
can I find any gain in claiming an implementation to be non-compliant if 
it behaves correctly towards other implementations.

j

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From: "Glen Zorn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 05:40:42 -0700

> cause you problem?  If you didn't document it, no one is going to come

Exactly.  In fact, no one is going to come after you no matter what you do
with/to Diameter (a fact that has been amply proved w/RADIUS - see RFC
2882).  There are no "protocol cops".  However, it seems to me that if
someone _does_ evil, non-standard things w/Diameter and tries to claim to be
following the standard, it should be pretty obvious.  For example, if a
vendor-specific request is sent to a box that doesn't support it, the
resulting answer (same command code for easy identification) will have the E
bit set and a result code of DIAMETER_COMMAND_UNSUPPORTED.  How much simpler
can you get?