dictionary.rfc2865 discrepancy?

[Alan DeKok]

Geoff Silver <geoff+freeradius at uslinux.net> wrote:
> With the stock dictionaries, when radiusd returns a Class, it's in
> hex, not as a string.  Looking at the RFC, it looks to me like the
> dictionary is wrong.  Can someone confirm this?

  This has come up before.  The type octets/string in the dictionary
has *nothing* to do with what goes on the wire.  All it affects is
printing and parsing of configuration data on the server.

  And for historical reasons (on both sides), the RFC's use "string"
to mean opaque binary data, where FreeRADIUS uses "octets" to mean
that.

> If I change dictionary.rfc2865 as follows:
> 
> -ATTRIBUTE       Class                                   25      octets
> +ATTRIBUTE       Class                                   25      string
> 
> It works just fine (ie. I get back Class = "OU=MYCOMPANY.COM").  Am
> I misusing the class attribute (ie. should it not be a string?), or
> is the dictionary wrong?

  If you use Class like that, it works for you.  But not everyone uses
class like that.  Some people send opaque binary strings in a Class
attribute, and expect to see that data when it's printed, rather than
weird characters with umlauts.

  Alan DeKok.