How to deal with this ...

[Guy Fraser]

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.

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.

Good luck.