i have been working with our upstream dialup provider for a week now and he has come to the conclusion that freeradius is passing the data as ascii rather than abinary. his tests used flat files while we use mysql. the filters we define are listed below from our support tech's email: -------------------------------------- That too did not change anything. In my testing If I just plug the ascend attributes in my users file as follows Ascend-data-filter += "ip in forward tcp est", Ascend-data-filter += "ip in forward dstip 64.113.34.0/24", Ascend-data-filter += "ip in drop tcp srcport = 80", Ascend-data-filter += "ip in drop tcp dstport = 25", Ascend-data-filter += "ip in forward", And they translate to Abinary fine. This leads me to believe it has to do with the way sql is passing it to you radius server. ----------------------------------- any idea why /how this is happening? it is affecting our entire structure since we are also a proxy for approx 25 realms and it affects many of their setups too. these need to be passed to our upstream as abinary. -- Chuck