Partially Specified Policy

A partially specified policy is one that has “No change” selected for filters, default topology, or default qos. When two policies are applied to a station and one of them is “partially specified”, the “No change” settings are overwritten by the settings of the other policy. When a station successfully authenticates and is assigned a partially specified policy, the “No change” elements of the policy are replaced with the corresponding elements of the WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) Service‘s default authenticated policy.

Consider the following example. Suppose a VNS is defined that uses policy P1 for its default non-authenticated policy and policy P2 for its default authenticated policy. Policy P1 assigns the station to topology T1 and policy P2 assigns the station to topology T2. Suppose there is a policy P3, which has "No change" set for its topology.

A client on the VNS will be assigned to P1 with topology T1 when he first associates to the VNS. Now suppose the station is assigned P3 by the RADIUS server when the station authenticates. Even though the station is on T1 and P3 has no change set for the topology, the station will be assigned to T2. When the client is authenticated, internally on the controller, the client is first assigned to P2 then P3 is applied.

A similar scenario exists when the hybrid mode policy feature is set to use tunnel-private-group-id to assign both policy and topology but for some reason the VLAN-id-to-Policy mapping table does not contain a mapping for the returned tunnel private group id. In this case a station that successfully authenticates would be assigned the filters and default QoS of the WLAN Service‘s default authenticated policy and the topology with the VLANID contained in the Tunnel-Private-Group-ID of the ACCESS-ACCEPT response.