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RE: The Emperor Has No Clothes: Is PANA actually useful?

2006-05-25 23:10:54
Yes, that individual I-D is productized as a proprietary protocol by one
company (Cisco).

As I understand it, EAP over UDP is one of the items proposed for
standardization in the NEA WG.  

You misunderstood it, despite the clear text in their charter:

...

  Requirements need to
  be defined for an EAP over L3 transport for L3 access scenarios.

...

  * Review ongoing work in IETF (e.g. EMU WG, Radext WG, PANA WG, NEA WG)
    and work with ADs to identify the WG responsible for accommodating
    protocol requirements that are not currently being met.


That leads me to wonder whether the IETF
will be chartering multiple WGs to standardize EAP encapsulation over IP.

Although my understanding of both PANA and NEA is no doubt
incomplete/wrong/confusled, having multiple EAP encapsulation standards
seems duplicative to me.

It is not suggested anyways.

As for 3GPP2, I can get into really gory details of what has been
happening
there, but it's not technical at all (if you are familiar with 3GPP2 and
the
relevant players in this discussion, you can guess).

The issue is that integration of PANA with link layer technologies
requires the support of the organizations that own those link layers.

Not necessarily. Why do you think so? 802.11 is a counter example. DSL is a
counter example. 

Without that link layer integration (for whatever reason) the scenarios
can't be realized, at least in a mainstream way.

It seems to me that one of the motivations for PANA is to *avoid* link
layer
dependencies in situations where link layer technology is inadequate/can't
be deployed, and a forklift upgrade isn't in the budget.  In those
circumstances, integration with link layers or IPsec VPN technology is
not under consideration -- because that would require a forklift upgrade.

For example, the wireless hotspot case where something more sophisticated
than a Web portal is needed, but a forklift upgrade to WPA2 or a VPN
deployment isn't a realistic alternative.  Or the shared wired media case
where "network port authentication" doesn't really work, and wholesale
switch port replacements aren't affordable.  In both of those cases, EAP
over IP might provide a light weight, easily deployed solution.

Are you referring to NACP as "EAP over IP"? You acknowledged it is designed
for wired networks. It is not even useful for wireless. Won't work.

Yet, rather than focusing on the specific scenarios in which PANA might
be compelling, the PANA framework document tries to cover a wide
range of potential uses, trying to position PANA for use in scenarios
where the case is less obvious.

I think that would have been unnecessarily limiting, given that we designed
a protocol that can naturally work in variety of scenarios.

Alper








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