IETF RFC 5997 PDF

Introduction

This document specifies a deployed extension to the Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS) protocol, enabling clients to query the status of a RADIUS server. While the Status- Server (12) Code was defined as experimental in [RFC2865], Section 3, details of the operation and potential uses of the Code were not provided.

As with the core RADIUS protocol, the Status-Server extension is stateless, and queries do not otherwise affect the normal operation of a server, nor do they result in any side effects, other than perhaps incrementing an internal packet counter. Most of the implementations of this extension have utilized it alongside implementations of RADIUS as defined in [RFC2865], so that this document focuses solely on the use of this extension with UDP transport.

The rest of this document is laid out as follows. Section 2 contains the problem statement, and explanations as to why some possible solutions can have unwanted side effects. Section 3 defines the Status-Server packet format. Section 4 contains client and server requirements, along with some implementation notes. Section 5 contains a RADIUS table of attributes. The remaining text discusses security considerations not covered elsewhere in the document.