Default to ack unhandled accounting requests?

[Bjørn Mork]

Alan DeKok <aland at deployingradius.com> writes:
> Bjørn Mork wrote:
>> Just stumbled across a semi-related issue (all accounting modules
>> returned "noop" for a request) which made me wonder if not the recently
>> added documentation for handling noop accounting requests should be
>> promoted to "enabled by default"?
>
>   You mean tell the NAS we logged something that wasn't really logged?

The way I see it, we tell the NAS that "we processed the request".
Whether the processing involved writing to a log or not is irrelevant. 

There are accounting requests which do not need to be logged.  At least
in our network.  Some of the NASes insist on sending "Accounting-On"
when they're booted.  We could discuss the usefulness of this, and we
could of course just log the requests, but I see no reason to do so.

Not a big matter.  I can of course implement this in my setup.  Just
thought that the issue might bite someone else too.  I believe the
missing ACKs on NOOP is a change from FreeRADIUS 1.0.x (which we used
prior to upgrading to 2.1.8)?  Only the NASes bootet after the upgrade
were continously resending their reboot accounting requests, so the old
RADIUS servers must have ACKed them.  And the config is pretty much
unchanged.

>>  It does not make much sense to ignore
>> valid accounting requests just because no module knows how to handle
>> them.
>
>   They might be valid... but the whole point of accounting is to *do*
> something with the packets.
>
>   I understand your point... but I'm a little wary of ACKing packets
> when we didn't do anything with them.

Well, looking at them and verifying that they need no further action
*is* doing something.


Bjørn