Stale sessions and simultaneous use issue

[Alan DeKok]

Fernando Pizarro wrote:
> I had configured MySQL to store sessions of the users and I have a lots
> of records with wrong acctsessiontime value because NAS are sent
> Accounting On/Off packets and the database is update with the actual
> timestamp.

  Please be clear: Accounting On/Off is used when the NAS reboots.
Accounting Start / Stop is used when a user logs in.

> I change deletestalesessions = no in sql.conf but the database is update
> too. What is the function of this parameter?

  The comments in sql.conf explain what it does.

> There are some attribute to avoid stale sessions? I remember
> Idle-Timeout attribute but if the NAS isn't live the server never kill
> that session right?

  Tell your NAS to send accounting packets.

  Set Session-Timeout, and record it in SQL.  Then if you don't see an
Accounting Stop after Session-Timeout, you can *usually* delete the
stale session.

  But some NAS equipment ignores Session-Timeout.  This is RADIUS.  It's
very imperfect.

  Alan DeKok.