Home servers constantly zombied, and I can't figure out how to fix it

[Alan DeKok]

Adam Bultman wrote:
> How do I change that functionality?  I'd *love* it if it didn't zombie
> their servers for no reason.

  No.. it marks the servers zombie for a reason: they're not responding.
 But it may be too aggressive.

> When I do a radiusd -CXXX, I see options I don't see documented for the
> latest releases of freeradius:
>  - ping_check
>  - ping_interval
>  - num_pings_to_alive

  Those are for backwards compatibility with pre-releases of 2.0.  They
should be removed.  They are just different names for the status-server
checks.

>  - max_outstanding  (I can't even find what this is for)

  You can put a limit on the total number of "outstanding"  packets sent
to a home server.  i.e. put it at 256, and if there are 256 packets sent
without a response, the proxy will *not* use that home server again,
until it gets at least one response.

  This is a way to do load-limiting on home servers.

> As it is, my *.work files are "stuck" (And I've googled for that, and
> found other list posts regarding that) which seems to indicate that the
> home servers aren't responding... except that even when my detail.work
> file is 'stuck' at 24k, and the detail file keeps growing, I'm still
> sending data to the other side.  So something's working, but only sort of..

  It's re-transmitting the same packet over and over.  If you install
2.1.9, you can use "radmin" to see its progress in reading the detail file.

> I'm about to shoot an email to them to see if they can explain their 4
> year old radius software, and perhaps maybe that's part of the problem.

  Yup.  They can upgrade to a (cough) real radius server. :)

  Alan DeKok.