Re: Accounting and power cycles.
Dale E. Reed Jr. (daler@iea.com)
Sun, 19 Nov 1995 08:30:19 GMT
> >> I'm working on a new Radius daemon, and as I read and reread the
> >> accounting draft, the following scene keeps slapping me in the face.
> >>
> >> a) Customer with a pay-by-hour account signs on.
> >>
> >> b) Radacct starts an invoice for the customer session.
> >>
> >> c) PortMaster freezes for some reason. (All non-trivial systems
> >> contain bugs after all.)
> >>
> >> d) Shop lacky power-cycles PM.
> >>
> >> e) Invoice is never brought to a close and session billing
skyrockets.
> >> customers, and ISP loses significant revenue.
> >>
>
> Sounds to me like maybe you solve the problem by having the portmaster
> regularly send in an accounting packet of current connections, sort of
> like a 'STOP' record, but more of a 'checkpoint' record. The accounting
> daemon remembers those, and discards them if it gets a valid STOP
record,
> but
> if it instead gets a 'portmaster reboot' record, treats the last
received
> 'checkpoint' for any connections on that portmaster as if it were a STOP
> record. The only billable time you'd lose is the time between last
> checkpoint
> and the reboot.
The situation described, is an exception. The radius server I am
working on just looks for stops. Since the stop record contains
the length of time, this is all you need. If one PM-30 goes down, you
loose information on what, 30 accounts, of 2mins to 2 hours? This doesn't
happen that often, and over a months time period should be negligible.
If your PM's aren't that reliable, then its time to start looking
elsewhere, IMHO. :)
Dale
-
Dale E. Reed Jr. daler@iea.com
Network Engineer
CompuTech http://www.iea.com