> Boils down to this I would not want radius or the portmaster to track
> multiple logins if it seriously affected the latency time. I'm not sure
> if I want to commit a host nt,unix, or linux to constantly scan the
> portmasters just to make sure all the customers are behaving. The cost in
> labor and in hardware usage is just to much for us. More important things
> like web business exists. It really is a question of priorities...how
> much are you willing to spend? What's it going to get you in return?
We looked at this and decided it wasn't worth our time. There exists
a product called pmmon, it's commericial software and it combines a few
nice things together.
1) It's a daemon that's always running and will scan your portmasters
at your request interval (none of the diskaccess you're afraid of since
it's always resident)
2) It will throw off multiple users, you setup access classes and decide
how many are allowed on when. It'll even check your remote POP's so that
someone isn't here and another in a far away city. It will even mail
you and the user when it does so as a warning. (You can configure
after how many times will it email them, after how many times wil it
email you)
3) It limits users based upon the time per call or frequency of call. If
you kick someone off 'cuz they were on for 20 hours, or because they
had 15 people on, it'll keep kicking them off for XXYY minutes.
4) (The *REAL* reason we got it.) It monitors all ports on the portmasters
for how many lines are in use on all your portmasters, show the #free,
show the % of the time an individual line is in use, and show how many
bps incoming/outgoing a particular call has. (This part is done via
cgi scripts that connect to the server.)
So, as Livingston has said, it is in the place not of the portmaster
or Radius but third party utilities, as this is not a perfect solution,
it is an adaquat one for our tasks. (In 3 years of running, we've only
had one case of sharing an account and that was taken care of to
everyone's satisfaction. (Well that we know of, by sharing an account
in that sense I mean two people on the same account at the same time))
Note, I don't work for whoever wrote pmmon, I don't even remember
the URL, I just like it, and use it. We got it during a promotion
for like $300, and I think being able to instantly pinpoint a
modem that's not working well in a remote pop is worth that.
(S17 had 55% useage, S18 had 12% useage, S19 had 40% useage, wonder
if there is something wrong with S18)
Anyway, this has gone beyond reambling, and I've said my two cents
worth =)
--- |Douglas ``Wildcat'' Warren |Email: dwarren@netusa.net| Jura gur tbireazrag |Network/Security Consultant|Phone: (516) 543-0234 | bhgynjf Pelcgbtencul, |President of SBCS a chapter| Fax: (516) 543-0274 | bayl pevzvanyf jvyy |of the ACM. | PGP: finger dwarren | unir cevinpl