misbehaving nas's send accounting to both primary and secondary servers

[Ivan Kalik]

>>> What is the best way to deal with misbehaving nas's that send
>>> accounting
>>> to both the primary and secondary server, even while receiving replies
>>> to both queries.
>>
>>   Throw it away, and buy a real NAS.
>
> The customer uses this nas for a product that is in its endoflife. It
> has been in place for quite some time. Previously, this "feature" was
> unwittingly used to have accounting sent to two different unrelated
> systems, where it was needed on both.
>
> So long as it works, there will be no more capital investments, which
> have been investigated to an extent.

Well, it doesn't work. At least not properly.

>>   i.e. post some packet contents here.  Odds are that you can look at
>> NAS-IP-Address, NAS-Port, and maybe User-Name.  If those all match, odds
>> are it's for the same session, even if Acct-Session-Id is different.
>
> They are the same.

Yes, because same packet was sent to two different servers.

>>>
>>> With the default mysql schema, I dont think there is anything to cause
>>> that query to ever fail.
>>>
>>> Tips and advice are greatly appreciated.

Break it than. Make AcctUniqueId unique:

ALTER TABLE `radacct` ADD UNIQUE (`AcctUniqueId`)

That should disable duplicated INSERT.

>
> I suppose my question is when and how is the account_start_query_alt
> used, and can I use that to prevent duplicate accounting rows in sql?

Yes, when the INSERT fails, alt query (UPDATE) will be executed. It won't
change a thing, but since you can't stop it (ie. NAS is junk) ...

Ivan Kalik
Kalik Informatika ISP