(RADIATOR) IMPORTANT - what exactly is the Timestamp in Radiator?

[Hugh Irvine]

Hello Shanaka -

On Friday 19 October 2001 13:58, Shanaka Rabel wrote:
> Hi Hugh,
> I wrote to u sometime back regarding a pre-paid solution on a Radiator.
> Thanx for the help:-)
>
> I need one more suggestion from you. I want to call a rating engine when
> a login request comes thru, and then subsequently write the accounting
> log entry. I want to make sure that the time the rating engine gets for
> rate resolution and the time the start record that’ll go to the log are
> the same.
>
> I cant use the Timestamp for this, since the timestamp is set only when
> the ppp session is enabled, but the rating engine is called before that
> (maybe 2 secs earlier).
>
> I’m trying to use 6 variables (Y,M,D,H,M,S) to get the system time from
> the radiator into Year, Month..etc components and send these to the
> rating engine as well as the log (rather than timestamp or the system
> time) .
>
> Could u pls let me know how to define the variables and access them in
> the radius cfg file?
>

I think there may be some confusion about what the Timestamp is and how time 
is dealt with by the radius protocol.

The first thing to understand is that the radius protocol understands nothing 
about clock time or system time, it only knows about the number of seconds 
since a particular event occured. In other words, you will see things like 
Acct-Session-Time and Acct-Delay-Time in accounting packets, but these are 
elapsed times in numbers of seconds.

The second thing to understand is that Radiator's idea of clock time or 
system time is the time on the local host that Radiator is running on, there 
is no other source of time.

This means that the "Timestamp" as defined by Radiator is the local time on 
the host running Radiator (possibly corrected by a non-zero Acct-Delay-Time), 
which in most cases will be within one second of the time that the event 
occured on the NAS, modulo whatever transmission delays there may be.

Note that all times in this context are reported to one second resolution in 
any case.

Note also that there is a "Timestamp" generated for every radius request 
received by Radiator, be it authentication or accounting.

Finally, you need to understand that the special characters that are 
available in Radiator are the "Timestamp" as described above, or the current 
system time, remembering that the "Timestamp" will always reflect the 
correction due to a non-zero Acct-Delay-Time.

If I can provide any more clarification, please let me know.

regards

Hugh


-- 
Radiator: the most portable, flexible and configurable RADIUS server
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