Hi Alan,
No. The standard is the RFC. The portmaster text is just additionaltext from the people building RADIUS systems. It is NOT vendor specific. Do NOT say it is vendor specific.
Ok... I deserve a good slap for that one ;)I will start thinking of it as vendor specific brokenness. But, my reality remains the same.. the meaning depends on the NAS being broken or not.
Follow the standards. Do not follow broken vendors.It actually isn't just that one vendor... in fact, if not mistaken, much of the commercial wlan gear I've worked with used the above meaning. It would be curious to see a list of vendors and how they implemented their accounting... if we all checked the manuals of the devices we use, wecould all help build that list in the freeradius wiki!Feel free to start this effort.
I will ... maybe at: http://wiki.freeradius.org/NAS_Accounting_Differences
There are many other vendor products that are very broken with respectto RADIUS. Do NOT follow any individual vendor, or even groups of vendors. Follow the standards. If the standards aren't clear, ask on the IETF RADEXT mailing list. The people there should be able to give conclusive answers.
Unfortunately, from a back-end perspective, if having to support a variety of 'broken' commercial vendors, one doesn't have much choice (apart from not supporting these vendors). I guess we have to live with it as it would probably be difficult for these vendors to change their ways now...
David