Re: Authentication and Power Outages

Ben's Mail Lists (toaster@ibs-us.net)
Thu, 17 Oct 1996 14:56:09 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Scott A. Lagos wrote:
> We lost power at one of our POPs. The PM2e rebooted and was ready to accept
> calls before our routers were able to re-establish the link. When we tried
> to get authenticated on the PM which talks to a RADIUS server accross the
> link, the authentication would not happen - even though the link finally
> came up. The PM had to be rebooted and then everything was fine. COMOS is
> 3.3.3. Does any know why this would happen and/or how to correct it in the
> future?

One way of handling this (and perhaps an overkill) would be to keep your
primary or secondary auth and accounting server on the same subnet and even
the same UPS as the PM. I've used this before in several locations to do
some interesting things. Merit radius has some neat features that allow
you to have users paul@portland and paul@vancouver. In our case we use
the @ to signify which radius server should be contacted to authenticate
this user. Radius can work as a distributed system among POPs.
Hope this helps,

Laughing in the Machine, www.ibs-us.net/~ben 45.5183754N/-122.6750031W
--Ben Kirkpatrick IBS 503.227.7010 fax 503.227.5778 page 503.229.3199
I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give
the wrong answers.