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<P>Accounting-On /-Off events do NOT occur for every session.<BR>They are, as the text says, indicators of the global state of the NAS Accounting.</P>
<P>Usually you should get an On event when the NAS powers up and RADIUS starts.<BR>If a NAS Administrator turns Off accounting, or makes a controlled shut down, then you may see an Off event.<BR>The purpose is to indicate the liveliness of your accounting stream, and since RADIUS is not a "stateful protocol" this is where scraping stateful session data from Accounting can get into trouble. To further muddy the water, there is no indication if the Accounting state toggles, that the session state on the NAS is lost or not.</P>
<P>I don't know about your detailed database issue, but you may want to think about how to handle this issue. You may want to ignore these messages, or find some other state checking method.</P>
<P>Dave.<BR><BR><BR>Mar 13, 2008 02:08:13 PM, freeradius-users@lists.freeradius.org wrote:<BR></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="BORDER-LEFT: rgb(102,153,204) 3px solid">Hi,<BR><BR>RFC 2866 (5.5) States 'An Accounting-Request packet MUST have an <BR>Acct-Session-Id' but for Accounting Request packets with <BR>'Acct-Status-Type' set to Accounting-On or Accounting-Off, there can be <BR>no Acct-Session-Id, as these are global events on the NAS...<BR><BR>Unless the NAS is meant to send an Accounting-On or Accounting-Off <BR>packet for every session on the access point, when an Accounting-On or <BR>Accounting-Off event occurs...<BR><BR>Does anyone know of a later RFC that clarifies this ?<BR><BR>Also the index 'acctsessiontime' is missing for the radacct table in the <BR>default schema; makes the Accounting-On / Accounting-Off queries very <BR>slow doing a table scan on 1.4 million rows... Is this intentional or an <BR>oversight ?<BR><BR>Might be an Idea to specify the default engine as InnoDB for the MySQL <BR>schemas. MyISAM (with it's table locks on every update/insert) just <BR>doesn't cut it with a reasonably busy RADIUS server; all connections in <BR>the db pool get used and users start being rejected.<BR>Not good ...<BR><BR>Thanks,<BR>Arran<BR>**<BR><BR>-- <BR>Arran Cudbard-Bell (A.Cudbard-Bell@sussex.ac.uk)<BR>Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting Officer<BR>Infrastructure Services | ENG1 E1-1-08 <BR>University Of Sussex, Brighton<BR>EXT:01273 873900 | INT: 3900<BR><BR>-<BR>List info/subscribe/unsubscribe? See http://www.freeradius.org/list/users.html<BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></html>