Pls help: missing Stop accounting packets

[Leigh Martell]

Well, there are many reasons why this could happen most of them caused
between your NAS and Radius server; since you have already checked the
detail file you should check your AP logs for reboots and radius
timeouts(although it is UDP based there is an accounting ack sent). I am not
familiar with the aruba gear, but if they do not support accounting
persistence then once they are rebooted they loose records of all the active
sessions; this is most likely the cause.

Here is a list of question you should ask your self:
- Does this happen accross the board?
- Are there any accounting errors in radius log?
- Is there a trend between AP, radius logs and missing stop packets?
- Are these duplicate starts that were not closed?

I any setup you will most likely always encounter missing start/update/stop
packets, one way to ensure you do not loose the entire session is to enable
Interim accounting updates; then you will at least have partial session
statistic. In my setup I have a nightly script that closes all the stale
sessions and completes then based on the last interim update and sets the
terminate cause to 'Admin-Reset' as our AP will never use that terminate
cause; this allows me to track what I have closed and still have some what
complete accounting data. That being said every setup is different and you
will have to determine the best way for you to handle it.

Hope this helps a bit.

--
Leigh

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 10:17 AM, ST Wong (ITSC) <ST at itsc.cuhk.edu.hk>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
> I'm using FreeRadius 2.1.3 on 2 Linux machines with accounting data stored
> in both radacct file and MySQL database.  Recently we found that some 'aged'
> records have AcctStopTime = NULL.    Seems Stop accounting packet for these
> records are not received.  The problem is consistent in both cases - such
> Stop packets didn't recorded in radacct file and MySQL database.     I've no
> idea whether the stop packet sent to radius server was not recorded, or if
>  stop packet was not sent from AP.   As we're using Aruba AP, I wonder if
> Stop packet will be missed under particular situation, e.g. session timeout,
> disconnect without proper logout, etc., or if I configured our radius
> servers incorrectly so that some stop packets are not received or recorded.
>   Meanwhile, I'd also like to know if there is any solution to clean up such
> orphan records if they can't be avoided.
>
> Would anyone please help?  Sorry for the newbie question.  Thanks a lot.
>
> Best Regards,
> /ST Wong
>
>
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