(RADIATOR) Hacking around an upstream issue.

[Martin Edge]

Hi Hugh,

The normal processing of Alives is fine. The fact we get Alives ensures I
can check the sanity of the SessionTable.
Each time an Alive record comes in, it updates the SessionTable for each
user's session

The NAS's appear to be sending an Alive packet for a Session after we have
received the Stop packet for the _same_ Session.

This is due to the first attempt to send the Alive packet failing, the NAS
waits 10 seconds for a retry. During this ten seconds, the user disconnects,
the NAS sends a stop record.

The NAS then sends off the second attempt for the Alive packet.

Consequently, the session is 'reopened' in my SessionTable, as the Alive
packet triggers a delete/insert .. for all intensive purposes I see a dead
session, which was actually already closed off.

Thanks
Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: Hugh Irvine [mailto:hugh at open.com.au]
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 9:50 AM
To: Martin Edge
Cc: Radiator
Subject: Re: (RADIATOR) Hacking around an upstream issue.



Hello Martin -

What exactly is the problem?

If you just want special processing for Alives, do something like this:

<Handler Acct-Status-Type = Alive>
	....
</Handler>

regards

Hugh


On Wednesday, September 4, 2002, at 09:23 AM, Martin Edge wrote:

> Hey Guys,
>
> Want to see if anyone has any ideas of how I should deal with this
> situation.
>
> We are currently getting the following for the 'occasional' user session
> from our Upstream RADIUS..
>
> Order	Amount	Type
> -------------------------------------------------
> 1	1 		Start
> 2	Many 		Alive's (every 15 min)
> 3	1		Stop (0 sec, Acct-Delay-Time)
> 4	1		Alive (9 seconds afterwards, Acct-Delay-Time=10)
>
> We are told that what is happening, is the first attempt is made to
> send the
> first Alive packet. By coincendence, the user disconnects between these
> retries, and the Stop packet is fired off. The Retry Alive packet is
> sent
> after the Stop packet for that session has arrived.
>
> Until they can come up with a network-fix for the problem (to prevent
> Additional Packets for the Same Session to be sent before completely
> failing
> the current packet (until $x times tried), I'm going to have to
> develop a
> hack around to work out on what basis to ignore these extra Alives.
>
> I was thinking I have two options
>
> 1:- Make Radiator see whether the SessionID is still active for an Alive
> packet (could be costly on DB work each instance)
> 2:- Make Radiator store recent sessionIDs it has closed off in a DB or
> DBM
> file, and check incoming Alive packet -isn't- in the recently expired
> list.
>
> Which would be the best? Where should I start? :)
>
> Thanks,
> Martin
>
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