Send custom accounting packet on login

[Alan DeKok]

Julius Plenz wrote:
> whenever a user successfully logs in, I want to send a custom
> accounting packet with derived information to a server. Is there a way
> to do that from the config directly?

  No.

>  I have searched for some time
> now but couldn't find anything like that... Right now I'm using a
> script that uses the "Authen::Radius" Perl module, but I want to get
> rid of this solution.

  That works.  I'd keep it for now.

> If there's no built-in mechanism, my plan would be to write a module
> that uses libfreeradius.so's library functions (and already
> initialized dictionaries etc.) to create a queue, send a packet etc.
> -- are there any problems with this approach?

  Threading.  Event handling, timers, etc.

> Functions like
> fr_packet_list_create(), rad_send(), fr_packet_list_recv() etc. are
> all reentrant, aren't they?

  No.  The fr_packet_list* functions aren't thread-safe.

  One of the things we're looking at is making the core a little more
generic.  Right now, the server can receive an Access-Request, and
originate a CoA packet.  It can't originate an Accounting-Request packet.

  Fixing that requires a series of careful changes.  But it's a fair
amount of work, and likely won't be in 3.0.x.

  For now, I'd suggest keeping the Perl solution.  It's fine until you
get 10K+ packets/s.

  Alan DeKok.