How to deal with this ...

Ezequiel O. Block ezequielb at pilar-ciudad.com.ar
Fri Sep 23 20:01:03 CEST 2005


Guy Fraser wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-23-09 at 11:55 -0300, Ezequiel O. Block wrote:
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> Using Freeradius for authorization, accounting and ip pools management.
>>
>> By mistake i turned off my NAS, and when this NAS came back online then 
>> freeradius began rejecting my users as if they were still connected, 
>> should my NAS send some kind of "Accounting restart let's start again" 
>> packet to Freeradius in order to let him know that those users are no 
>> longer connected? am i right? if not how can i deal with this kind of 
>> problems? apart from not being so stupid again to turn off a nas by 
>> mistake ....
>>
> Yes your NAS probably should, but many vendors do not include
> support for Accounting on and Accounting off.

I'm using MPD on FreeBSD as PPPoe AC, I'm going to ask on their mailing 
list to see if it does support accounting on/off.

> 
> If your NAS does not support Accounting On/Off there is little 
> you can do. If your NAS supports remote syslog, you could 
> monitor the log and watch for something that occurs at startup 
> or shutdown. You could also set up up some kind of "heart beat"
> monitor that checks to see if the NAS shuts down. You can use 
> these to close the open accounts on the affected NAS. You will 
> need to be careful how you account for the interuption in your 
> billing system because you will not have any accurate accounting 
> information or stop time. In the past when we have had NAS 
> failures we did not bill for the session that failed, but to 
> limit our exposure we set a 100 hour maximum session time, that 
> way users have to connect at least 7 times per month so we don't 
> loose a complete billing cycle.

Thanks a lot for the tip, I just switched back to plain text validation 
over the NAS itself, to recover from this situation I'm just about to

1. DELETE FROM radacct WHERE AcctStopTime is NULL and NASIPAddress = 
'a.b.c.d';

2. Restart freeRadius to clean up those ips no longer in use?

3. did I forget something?
> 
> Good luck.
> 
> 
> - 
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> 
Thanks,
Ezequiel.



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