On Mon, 25 Jun 2001 11:16:29 -0500 Chris Parker wrote:
PPPoE. Auth via radius. Same management infrastructure as used for dialup ( in terms of radius accounting from PPPoE aggregation boxes ).
1) Auth via radius is not an advantage for the customer; only for the engineer whom has a legacy radius infrastructure to support. A key engineering skill is to be able to evolve such infrastructures economically and reliably to more modern infrastructures. Therefore, this is not much of an advantage as you should know how to replace it :) 2) To balance this one special case advantage, radius auth has a number of flaws: i) it is an older protocol designed for a different model of networking and thus is missing many features of DHCP. In particular, clean mechanisms for setting an arbitrary number of client configuration values. ii) public networks, it uses username/password authentication. This is a flawed mechanism for auth. It is insecure[1] and generates a fair amount of support traffic.
You have start/stop logs with timestamps. You know who had what IP and when.
3) Inflicting a connection oriented access model on customers is unfair; the network should be always on. Only the legacy design of the PSTN requires a connection oriented model. Therefore, start/stop displease me. 4) DHCP also logs leases which tell you who had what IP and when.
Also, most PPPoE aggregation boxes record the client MAC address in the 'Calling-Station-Id' radius field, so that solves your MAC problem as well.
5) That is a good, but I don't like the cost. I already have a working model.
Before anyone bemoans the dearth of PPPoE clients, check again. Nearly every major consumer OS ( Windows,MacOS,Linux,*bsd ) has PPPoE support. Or failing that, you can pick up a nice little netgear or linksys pppoe router that does nat for ~$75.
6) I don't care about the dearth of PPPoE clients, if it exists, it will resolve itself. I do care about their bugginess, as this will be with us always. All code is buggy. Avoid adding more code (complexity) unless truely necessary. 7) NAT breaks end-to-end. NAT is evil. NAT is a sign of weakness. NAT only exists because we have failed in providing a secure network with virtually infinite addresses. NAT is a sign of shame for every self-respecting Internet Engineer. Remember what Cato said: "NAT must be destroyed". If I only knew how... a plan, I need a plan... regards, fletcher