Re: [Dime] Comments on draft-ietf-dime-erp-03.txt

[Sebastien Decugis <[e-mail]>]

Hi, sorry for late reply.

Preliminary question: what is "Network Working Group" ?

> I wonder what the purpose of this paragraph might be: why would it be
> necessary to configure Diameter routing at all?

It is necessary to configure it in the case of an explicit bootstrapping
request, since the NAI contains the home server, but we want to
bootstrap the local server (if any). In any other case, there should be
no conflict : default Diameter routing would send the message to this
local ER server anyway. If we do not configure the routing explicitly,
the message will go to the home domain, and might not pass through the
local ER server. In such case, we loose the benefit of this local server.

> There seems to be some confusion here: an ER server will _never_ receive an
> ERP/DER message, since that is a _Diameter_ message, not an EAP message.
> Actually, the confusion starts in the Introduction: "a new Diameter ERP
> application to transport ERP messages between an ER authenticator and the ER
> server".  "Authenticator" is a technical term & refers to an EAP protocol
> entity, not a Diameter entity, so how can send Diameter messages?  Clearing
> up this confusion might go a long way toward making an acceptable
> specification.
>   

No you mean that we have to define yet *another* protocol to transport
the ERP message between a Diameter entity (that receives the Diameter
ERP request) and the ER server ? Seems like recursive to me if we don't
accept that the ER server *has* to talk "Diameter" as well... I will be
glad to discuss this further in Anaheim.

About the term "authenticator", I confess it is unclear to me what the
difference is between all the terminology for this entity (the one that
actually decides if the peer gets access or not, and generates the
Diameter EAP request in full EAP authentication scenario). Is "NAS" better?

Best regards,
Sebastien.

-- 
Sebastien Decugis
Research fellow
Network Architecture Group
NICT (nict.go.jp)