Re: (ASCEND) Radius Accounting

Dale E. Reed Jr. (daler@iea.com)
Thu, 09 Jan 1997 16:41:35 -0800

Steven P. Crain wrote:
>
> I'm of the opinion that RADIUS (auth&acct) should not use the dictionary
> at all. Alot of time is wasted looking things up in the dictionaries and
> parsing things. The users database should be preparsed into a machine
> readable format very similar to the packets that will be sent to the
> client. I bet the improvement in performance would be very dramatic.

I completely agree. In fact, our Management system exports Radius users
files with numeric data to discourage people from tampering with the
file (since a new export will overwrite it). Its about 1/10th the
standard size. However, since RadiusNT reads the users in, and caches
them in the numeric structure, there is no performance gain with it.
Traditional servers who are always parsing the users file would gain
quite a bit, though.

> (Logging would similarly be basically authenticating the signature and
> dumping the packet raw into a logfile. A seperate program could easily
> use the dictionary to render it human readable as necessary.)

We just put the accounting in a DB and don't mess with text files
altogether.

-- 
Dale E. Reed Jr.  (daler@iea.com)
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