Accept in Accounting Section

[Erdal Emlik]

Hi,



I have a FreeRADIUS backend–proxy setup which I was previously running on FreeRADIUS 3.2.1 without any issues.



After upgrading the backend-proxy to FreeRADIUS 3.2.8, I noticed a change in behavior:

for users with static IP addresses, a Message-Authenticator attribute suddenly appears in Accounting-Response packets.



This only happens for sessions where the IP address is not present in radippool (i.e. static IP users).

Dynamic IP (CGNAT) users do not show this behavior.



My configuration has always been the same, and the default behavior did not change on my side.



Below is the debug output from the proxy side showing where the Message-Authenticator is added to the Accounting-Response:



56)   Proxy-State = 0x323533

(56) Clearing existing &reply: attributes

(56) Received Access-Accept Id 3 from 10.2.134.250:1813 to 172.18.0.2:50949 length 43

(56)   Message-Authenticator = 0xcb7e447acd6eb189578d5ec25a844b36

(56)   Proxy-State = 0x323533

(56) server default {

(56) }

(56) Sent Accounting-Response Id 253 from 172.18.0.2:1813 to 193.192.126.156:1646 length 38

(56)   Message-Authenticator = 0xcb7e447acd6eb189578d5ec25a844b36

(56) Finished request

(56) Cleaning up request packet ID 253 with timestamp +5 due to done 



Below is the relevant part of my accounting configuration.

This has been in place for a long time, and I am not sure why accept was originally used here:



ippoolv4 {

    fail = 1

    noop = 2

    notfound = 3

}



if (fail) {

    accept

}

if (noop) {

    accept

}

if (notfound) {

    accept

}



I could not find clear documentation explaining what accept actually does in the accounting section, and how it affects the generated response.



My questions are:

Does using accept here cause FreeRADIUS to internally treat this as an Access-Accept, even though this is an Accounting-Request?

Could this be the reason why an Access-Accept is received from the backend on the accounting port, and why a Message-Authenticator is added to the Accounting-Response?

Has the behavior of accept in accounting changed between 3.2.1 and 3.2.8?



Any clarification on the semantics of accept in accounting, or pointers to relevant documentation or changelogs, would be greatly appreciated.



Thanks in advance.