What is the purpose of the default accounting-on/off queries?

[Nathan Ward]

> On 10/10/2021, at 6:11 AM, Terry Burton <terry.burton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 9 Oct 2021 at 16:03, Nathan Ward <lists+freeradius at daork.net> wrote:
>> Ah yep. It will be sending Accounting-On when a VRF (routing-instance) gets the first customer, or has its configuration changed in certain ways (depending on the version). I have this very problem.
> 
> Another issue with the MX series that we've discovered the hard way is
> that they can continue to send Accounting-On requests without backoff
> *forever*, until the request is acknowledged. So if you are "ignoring"
> them you must still send an Accounting-Response.

That sounds what I would want to happen, so I don’t think that’s an MX issue. You want to be sure that Accounting-On/Off is being handled.
But yes good point - you want to make sure you respond to any requests that you “ignore”, rather than filter them out and *really* ignore them :-)

> As well as the VRF issue, you can experience this in global context if
> the database connection is configured with a query timeout and the
> bulk session update does not complete in time.

It seems very odd to me that you would have an Accounting-On/Off query taking anywhere near what a DB query timeout is. That doesn’t sound like an MX issue - that sounds like some index tuning is required, or perhaps the query is doing a large amount of work that could be handled another way?

--
Nathan Ward