FreeRadius with Eduroam - Accounting

Mike Diggins mike.diggins at mcmaster.ca
Wed Oct 5 02:20:49 CEST 2011


I'm running FreeRadius 2.1.3 on RedHat Enterprise Linux configured as an 
Eduroam Radius proxy server. My Cisco Wireless Lan Controllers are 
constantly failing over the Accounting Servers, due to lack of response 
from the Home Servers, or so says the log. However, I believe the issue is 
that some remote institutions Radius Servers are ignoring the Accounting 
packets, and timing out my end, making it believe the Home Servers have 
failed to respond. FreeRadius responds by marking the Home server dead. It 
then sends a status-server query, to which is gets a reply, and enables 
the Dead Home server. I believe that's the sequence of events anyway. I 
captured some of that in debug mode:

Rejecting request 288 due to lack of any response from home server x.x.x.x 
port 1813

Finished request 288.

Cleaning up request 288 ID 205 with timestamp +1161

PROXY: Marking home server x.x.x.x port 1813 as zombie (it looks like it 
is dead).

Sending Status-Server of id 55 to x.x.x.x port 1813
         Message-Authenticator := 0x00000000000000000000000000000000
         NAS-Identifier := "Status Check. Are you alive?"
Waking up in 3.9 seconds.

rad_recv: Access-Accept packet from host x.x.x.x port 1813, id=55, 
length=806

I don't have any control over Accounting Packets being accepted, or not, 
by other Eduroam members. Some do, some don't I imagine. Is there a 
configuration for FreeRadius that handles this situation cleanly? Seems to 
me that FR should check the Home server first, before marking it dead (at 
least).

-Mike




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