I am running Radiator 2.14.1 on my site. I recently set it up
to write session data into a DBM file, which we use for blocking
multiple logons. I have a secondary server too, which does not
authenticate, but only logs accouting data (I realise that this
can cause a problem with Session Databases, and I'm trying to
use SQL instead of DBM. In the meantime, I just delete stale
entries from the Session DB by hand).
Yesterday I noticed a problem. A user had connected at about 10.30 am
and he then disconnected at about 11.15 am. However, the session
database still showed him as logged in, and he therefore was unable
to log on a few minutes later. I thought it might have been because
the stop accounting packet from the NAS might have been logged
to the secondary accounting server instead of the primary. So I
went and looked at the detail file on the secondary. However, the
stop accounting packet was not there either. Strangely though,
the NAS (3COM total control) is also configured to do syslogging
of events to the secondary accounting server, and in the syslog
message file, the user is shown as logging on and then logging
off. We however, don't make use of the syslog for any particular
billing. I rely on the detail files for time-based billing. When I
combined the 2 detail files from both servers, and ran it through
the radacct.cgi script, there was no information about this
particular user, presumably because the script uses the stop
packet for determining the connect time, and it was missing.
So my manager is worried that if this is happening to more users,
then we may be losing accounting data. I know that RADIUS uses
UDP for accounting, and UDP can sometimes lose data, because there's
no acknowledgement. However, usually UDP is fairly reliable on a LAN
(or so I've read and I'm told).
Have other people experienced this kind of problem? If so, then
it may give me some proof to present to management that we are
not alone in experiencing this problem.
Any pointers will be much appreciated.
--
Anand
===
Archive at http://www.thesite.com.au/~radiator/
To unsubscribe, email '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' with
'unsubscribe radiator' in the body of the message.
