RFC 2059 (rfc2059) - Page 3 of 25

RADIUS Accounting

RFC 2059                   RADIUS Accounting                January 1997


1.1  Specification of Requirements

   MUST      This word, or the adjective "required", means that the
             definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.

   MUST NOT  This phrase means that the definition is an absolute
             prohibition of the specification.

   SHOULD    This word, or the adjective "recommended", means that there
             may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to
             ignore this item, but the full implications must be
             understood and carefully weighed before choosing a
             different course.

   MAY       This word, or the adjective "optional", means that this
             item is one of an allowed set of alternatives.  An
             implementation which does not include this option MUST be
             prepared to interoperate with another implementation which
             does include the option.

1.2.  Terminology

   This document uses the following terms:

   service   The NAS provides a service to the dial-in user, such as PPP
             or Telnet.

   session   Each service provided by the NAS to a dial-in user
             constitutes a session, with the beginning of the session
             defined as the point where service is first provided and
             the end of the session defined as the point where service
             is ended.  A user may have multiple sessions in parallel or
             series if the NAS supports that, with each session
             generating a separate start and stop accounting record with
             its own Acct-Session-Id.

   silently discard
             This means the implementation discards the packet without
             further processing.  The implementation SHOULD provide the
             capability of logging the error, including the contents of
             the silently discarded packet, and SHOULD record the event
             in a statistics counter.

2.  Operation

   When a client is configured to use RADIUS Accounting, at the start of
   service delivery it will generate an Accounting Start packet
   describing the type of service being delivered and the user it is



Rigney                       Informational