Unstable FreeRadius

[George C. Kaplan]

Bill Schoolfield wrote:
> 
> Last week I reported an issue I had with FreeRadius 1.0.5 on Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux ES release 3. It had to do with dropped MySQL connections.
> 
> We continue experience severe problems with FreeRadius. The server will
> run for upwards to 8 hours, sometimes more, before getting into some
> unknown state where it stops responding to requests. At this time
> FreeRadius consumes all the system's cpu cycles and won't stop without a
> kill -9.

I can't speak to the MySQL problems, but we've observed the same lock-up
behavior of the daemon:  unresponsive to RADIUS requests, 98% CPU usage,
only a 'kill -9' will break it loose.  (We're running FR 1.0.5 on
FreeBSD 5.5).

In our case, the daemon appears to get wedged only if a signal (HUP,
e.g.) arrives just as it's handling a kerberos authentication request.
If I can speculate, perhaps the signal-handling bug is not just in the
rlm_krb5 module, but a more general problem that can also affect rlm_sql.

When I asked about our problem back in March, it was suggested that we
upgade to 1.1.0 (now 1.1.1), as that release has some signal handling
bug fixes.  We're finally ready to upgrade (tomorrow), so we'll see if
that helps.

-- 
George C. Kaplan                            gckaplan at ack.berkeley.edu
Communication & Network Services            510-643-0496
University of California at Berkeley