Time-of-day RADIUS accounting

[DataWizApp]

Thank you both. I have another question below.

Suppose that we have many NAS devices supporting INTERIM UPDATE  and
one main RADIUS server. Rather than changing all the NAS servers
update their usage regularly using some cron jobs or scripts, it may
be useful that the RADIUS server puts an intended INTERIM UPDATE
interval to each Access-Accept message. I may be wrong or it may not
be supported from the current standard, but want to hear your
opinions.

The RFC 2866 describes that "If the server wishes to receive interim
accounting messages for the given user it mush include the
Acct-Interim-Interval RADIUS attribute in the message, which indicates
the interval in seconds between interim messages. It is also possible
to statically configure an interim value on the NAS itself. Note that
a locally configured value on the NAS MUST override the value found in
an Access-Accept."

For example, assume that we have 5 NAS devices, one RADIUS server and
five user sessions connect to five NAS devices respectively, and we
would like to charge users based on the usage in each hour.

User 1 initiates the connection at 01:01
User 2 initiates the connection at 01:11
User 3 initiates the connection at 01:21
User 4 initiates the connection at 01:31
User 5 initiates the connection at 01:41

For this case, what I think is that the RADIUS server can sends an
INTERIM-UPDATE with different interval to each session -- e.g., 59,
49, 39, 29 and 19 mins. I wonder whether we can do like this way.
Certainly if the flow ends before that it will send a STOP message.


On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Phil Mayers <p.mayers at imperial.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 09/13/2012 08:51 PM, DataWizApp wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I wonder whether RADIUS can be easily extended to track the usage in
>> every hour (or 30 mins) of the day?
>> The current ACCT START/STOP and INTERIM UPDATE INTERVAL are
>> per-session basis and hence it is hard to track the usage of each
>> session in every hour.
>
>
> This is better done by polling, such as with SNMP or other APIs. RADIUS
> doesn't let you control the time of an accounting packet - just the
> interval.
>
> In any case, as others have said, this would be something the NAS did, not
> FreeRADIUS.
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