Travis Dimmig wrote:

I have FreeRADIUS acting as a proxy server in an environment with a temperamental ACS server as the home server. The ACS server is known to be unreliable, an NPS server is being staged to replace it. In the meantime, however, I have to work as well as I can with the ACS server, and have no access or control to modify it.

Hmm... ACS....

The ACS server regularly does not respond to requests, initiating the zombie period. It just as regularly doesn’t respond to the status checks (I’m using auth request type checks to ensure compatibility). The requirement of 3 successful responses in a row to be marked alive again is difficult to meet with this server.

That is unusual, even for ACS.

I realize of course that the best solution is to fix the home server, but while that is being worked on I need my FreeRADIUS server to try to proxy requests as much as possible. I have dug through the configs, but found no way to completely disable the zombie period and status check behavior of the server. My goal is for FreeRADIUS to always consider the home server alive and proxy all requests to it, regardless of the fact that some do not get responses. Is this possible?

Set "zombie_period = 120". That should help. If the ACS server is unresponsive for 2 minutes, there's not much else you can do. The only other alternative is to edit the FreeRADIUS source code. Change it so that home servers are *never* marked zombie. But really... fixing ACS is a priority. There's no reason for it to be dropping packets all of the time. Alan DeKok.