RFC 2866, "RADIUS Accounting", June 2000

Note: This RFC has been updated by RFC 2867, RFC 5080, RFC 5997

Errata ID: 4485
Status: Verified
Type: Technical
Publication Format(s) : TEXT
Reported By: Nick Lowe
Date Reported: 2015-09-27
Verifier Name: Benoit Claise
Date Verified: 2015-10-05

Section 5.1 says:

This attribute indicates whether this Accounting-Request marks the
beginning of the user service (Start) or the end (Stop).

It MAY be used by the client to mark the start of accounting (for
example, upon booting) by specifying Accounting-On and to mark the
end of accounting (for example, just before a scheduled reboot) by
specifying Accounting-Off.

It should say:

This attribute indicates whether this Accounting-Request marks the
beginning of the user service (Start) or the end (Stop).

It MAY be used by the client to mark the start of accounting for the
NAS (for example, upon booting) by specifying Accounting-On
and to mark the end of accounting for the NAS (for example, just
before a scheduled reboot) by specifying Accounting-Off.

Notes:

Some RADIUS client implementations send scoped Accounting-On and Accounting-Off Accounting-Request packets. This is seen, for example, with some wireless APs that include a Called-Station-Id attribute to scope to a Basic Service Set (BSS).

This is an incorrect interpretation of the RFC that is not backwards compatible with consumers of RADIUS accounting information, yet the RFC is ambiguous on this point.

The RFC must be clear that Accounting-On and Accounting-Off apply to the whole NAS and cannot be scoped in this manner.

New Acct-Status-Type values must instead be defined to allow this, perhaps named something like Scoped-Accounting-On and Scoped-Accounting-Off.

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