(RADIATOR) outsourcing and unterminated sessions

[Hugh Irvine]

Hello Daniel -

My personal point of view is that this is unacceptable perfromance on 
the part of vendor A. Dropping radius accounting requests is bad 
enough, but the question to ask yourself is "what else are they 
dropping, and what sort of perfromance are your customers seeing?". I 
would be asking some hard questions and looking for some form of SLA 
(service level agreement).

Vendor B's suggestion is not a bad one, and some of our customers use 
this approach.

Note however that Radiator automatically removes all sessions for a NAS 
that is rebooted or restarted when it sees the initial accounting on 
request, assuming of course that you actually receive it.

regards

Hugh


On Saturday, Aug 9, 2003, at 04:52 Australia/Melbourne, Daniel Erat 
wrote:

> Hello, we have two servers running Radiator 3.6-1.  Since outsourcing
> our NASes in some locations to two vendors, we've been having problems
> with unterminated calls.
>
> After examining packet dumps of the traffic from Vendor A, I've noticed
> that they are often sending duplicate accounting-start packets to us,
> with the second one coming 15 or 30 seconds after the first.  They 
> claim
> that this is normal behavior, as their network drops "low-priority"
> (their words) traffic (i.e. responses from our Radius servers) between
> their Radius proxies and their NASes during periods of peak 
> utilization.
> The problem is, when one of our customers disconnects immediately after
> the session starts, our Radius servers have already terminated the
> session by the time that the retransmitted start packet comes in, so we
> see it as beginning a new session (interestingly, the stop packets do
> not seem to be retransmitted).  Vendor A recommends that we work around
> this by starting sessions based on the access-request packet, rather
> than the accounting-start.
>
> I haven't been able to examine any packet dumps from Vendor B, as our
> customers use their phone numbers much less frequently, but they claim
> that the problem is occurring because their sub-vendors' NAS servers 
> are
> sometimes rebooted or restarted, which causes all current sessions to 
> be
> abandoned.  Vendor B recommends that we start examining the
> Calling-Station-Id attributes that they are passing us and terminate 
> any
> ongoing sessions that match the phone numbers being used for
> newly-started sessions.
>
> So, my questions are
>
> a) Based on others' experiences, are these explanations
>    plausible/acceptable, or should we start looking for other vendors?
>
> b) Has anyone tried either of the "solutions" recommended above?  In
>    particular, the one recommended by Vendor B sounds like a good
>    workaround -- has anyone done this in Radiator?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Dan
> ===
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>

NB: have you included a copy of your configuration file (no secrets),
together with a trace 4 debug showing what is happening?

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