randomly crashing

[Matt Garretson]

Hi...

Matt Ashfield wrote:
> We're running FR to authenticate users on our wireless network. It appears
> that radius is randomly stopping/crashing. I have checked logs, but have
> been unable to locate the problem and am wondering if someone could point me


For what it's worth (probably not much!)...  a month ago, I was 
having "random" segfaults with a new installation of 1.1.7 on 
Fedora 7 x86_64.  In most cases, the crash seemed to correspond 
with this log entry you've mentioned:

> Mon Sep 17 00:31:30 2007 : Error: rlm_eap: Either EAP-request timed out OR
> EAP-response to an unknown EAP-request

My segfault would typically occur right after the above log 
entry.  Analyzing with gdb usually gave a serpentine backtrace 
into threading libraries and SSL-related functions -- well beyond 
my ability to debug.  

I was about to give up, when an openssl package update was issued 
by Fedora (0.9.8b-14.fc7, around August 14).  The changelog wasn't 
very descriptive, but ever since updating the openssl RPMs,
freeradius hasn't segfaulted at all.

Was it an SSL bugfix that fixed it?  Beats me.  Maybe it was
simply the running of ldconfig after the update.  Maybe it was
something else entirely.  But the point is, it might pay to make 
sure your libraries are in order.  :)  (Previously I'd also had 
seeming 64-bit library issues with Kerberos which were causing 
Freeradius crashes.)

-Matt

PS: I do still see the "Either EAP-request timed out OR EAP-response
to an unknown EAP-request" rlm_eap error maybe 5-10 times a day, 
but the Freeradius daemon no longer crashes from them.  And the client 
auth succeeds on the retry ~30 seconds later.  Never saw this 
behavior with Freeradius 1.1.2, but I wouldn't be surprised if it
was happening back then, and that 1.1.7 simply has more verbose
logging of such occurrences now.