Subject: [AAA-WG]: RE: load balancing

From: "Bernard Aboba" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 08:56:51 -0800

>I have been thinking about this alot more, and even tried to put this in
the
>I-D to see what would fall out, and I am not sure how it would be used.
Unlike
>DHCP, Diameter nodes do some capabilities exchange, so a client knows
whether
>a particular request should be forwarded to a next hop or not, based on its
>supported extensions.

Why does a NAS need to distinguish between proxies based on extensions?
Shouldn't
proxies be able to proxy any extensions?

>The hash, as I understand it, would allow a node to hash the NAI and use
the
>result to identify the next hop.

That's the basic idea.

>However, doing this will now require that a separate hash table exist for
>server+extension.

Don't understand why a NAS would need this -- unless it was talking to AAA
servers directly. The NAS should be able to assume that configured proxies
can handle any extensions, no?

>So all servers with the NASREQ extension would be in one hash, and the
>same servers MAY also be present in the Accounting and Mobile IP hash
table.

Seems like this would only come up in the case of proxies talking to more
than one AAA server, where the AAA servers had different capabilities.
Personally, I'd leave this aspect to the implementations.

>I think this is unnecessarily complex

I would agree, but the source of the complexity lies in the need to
distinguish
proxies by their capabilities.