eap Mailing List: a question related to the eap network discovery solution draft

[Jari Arkko (jari.arkko]

A question has come up that may relate to Farid's EAP
network discovery solution draft. The draft currently
does not say anything about this, but I'm wondering if
it should.

Here's the problem: the EAP Identity Request packet
with the discovery information is usually triggered
from one of the access network proxies, due to seeing
a NAI that can not be directly routed. Having all
APs send an EAP Identity Request packet with the
discovery information initially may not be possible
due to the capabilities of those APs and/or
provisioning effort.

Now, people might want to get the discovery information
in every case, not just if they have a failure. This
might be useful, for instance, if you wanted to have
the user, not the host, be in charge of the selection.

I can see a few possible ways of doing this:

1) Have the proxies issue an additional request
regardless of whether they have a working NAI
or not. The disadvantage of this is that an
additional roundtrip is imposed. And as far as
I understand options 2 and 3 in the appendix,
this isn't allowed by the draft.

2) Have the clients issue a fake realm in
order to cause a discovery packet to to be
sent to them. Ugly...

3) Avoid this requirement (at least until
link layers can provide the information).

What do people think? Should the document
say something about this case?

(Personally, I think the third option is
the reasonable one.)

--Jari