Question for the list

[Alan DeKok]

On Apr 20, 2021, at 8:14 AM, Nathan Ward <lists+freeradius at daork.net> wrote:
> I’d be very supportive of this, either as full text of the articles, or links. If you choose to do links, perhaps an abstract would be useful.

  My $0.02 right now is a one-paragraph abstract, followed by a link.  That's enough for people to get the idea, without getting pages of text.

> I think education about exactly this - how RADIUS fits in - would be great for newcomers to this list, and give something to point to when there are questions where the problem is not with FreeRADIUS the software, but more a misunderstanding of RADIUS as a protocol. I get it how users get to that point - when I first looked at RADIUS in I guess 2000 or so, I thought it was something I could use to do website filtering. I semi-regularly have off list discussions with folks who have those sorts of misunderstandings, when I have time to engage, and try give them “ecosystem” advise to steer them straight.

  There's also the FreeRADIUS technical guide, which is a good introduction:  https://networkradius.com/doc/FreeRADIUS-Technical-Guide.pdf

  Maybe it would be better to split that work out into multiple articles.

> More easily accessible high quality background information would be a very welcome resource, in my view.

  We're also working on that for v4.  And trying to update the docs so that they're clearer and better organized.

> 1) I don’t know if the articles have comments/questions/whatever. If they do, perhaps it’s good to mention that in the posts, to keep that non-FreeRADIUS-software discussion off the list.

  The articles don't have comments or questions.  I really don't want to turn each article into an endless series of "Hi, nice article!  How do I configured <unrelated topic>".

  I'm sort of OK with discussing some of the contents here.  But realistically, this list isn't the place to discuss "how RADIUS works".  It's not really the place to learn more about RADIUS.  The success of this list has been in part due to extreme focus on technical content.

  We regularly get generic questions about RADIUS.  "Hi, I'm writing a new RADIUS thing, can you explain how...".  And the answer is "no".  Such topics are not relevant for this list.  Beside the morality issue of "Im getting paid to do this work, but because I don't know anything, I'm asking you to help me for free, on topics unrelated to FreeRADIUS".

> 2) Note that the articles are posted by Network RADIUS who develop FreeRADIUS, and that the list isn’t somewhere for any old person to advertise their poorly researched blog post.. :-)

  Yes, we'll do that.

  Alan DeKok.