(RADIATOR) Database support fault tolerance

[Hugh Irvine]

Hello Dan -

It would be fairly simple to have Radiator write to a flat file for 
accounting, and then have a cron job or similar load the data into the 
database periodically. You will find a simple utility to do this in the 
file "goodies/radimportacct".

regards

Hugh


On Tuesday, Jul 1, 2003, at 09:19 Australia/Melbourne, Dan Melomedman 
wrote:

> Our users are getting sick and tired due to RADIUS service
> unavailability every time something happens to the network where the
> database server sits, or the database server itself. To remind, we use
> LDAP for authentication, and SQL Server for sessions/logging. LDAP has
> been great, where database connectivity has been problematic, and a
> major pain in the arse in general. In some cases, Radiator would hang 
> if
> there are database connection failures. A failure with the unixODBC 
> client
> translates into Radiator process failure.
>
> Right now Radiator's availability is directly dependent on the quality
> of the Perl libraries, including the database libraries/clients.
> Our service could be much more available if SQL was handled by an 
> outside
> process with a queue in the middle. If something happens to this SQL
> helper process, the network, or the database server, then the queue 
> simply
> grows in size, and Radiator continues running happily, authenticating 
> users.
> When the problems are fixed, the queue is relayed to the SQL server, 
> and
> no logging records are lost. If we want to be fancy, this extra process
> may even be temporarily handling sessions in place of RADONLINE 
> (instead of
> simply ignoring them returning OK back to Radiator), and notifying
> system administrators when it can't talk to the SQL database. This
> system is not only a more resilient design, but more scalable too since
> Radiator will return as soon as it writes to the queue, not waiting for
> the database server.
>
> Please let me know your thoughts; let's discuss this idea further. 
> Thanks.
> ===
> Archive at http://www.open.com.au/archives/radiator/
> Announcements on radiator-announce at open.com.au
> To unsubscribe, email 'majordomo at open.com.au' with
> 'unsubscribe radiator' in the body of the message.
>
>

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

-- 
Radiator: the most portable, flexible and configurable RADIUS server
anywhere. Available on *NIX, *BSD, Windows 95/98/2000, NT, MacOS X.
-
Nets: internetwork inventory and management - graphical, extensible,
flexible with hardware, software, platform and database independence.

===
Archive at http://www.open.com.au/archives/radiator/
Announcements on radiator-announce at open.com.au
To unsubscribe, email 'majordomo at open.com.au' with
'unsubscribe radiator' in the body of the message.