(RADIATOR) Accounting setup

Robert von Bismarck robert.vonbismarck at smart-telecom.ch
Mon Mar 19 07:41:48 CST 2007


Hello,

I need some professional advice here, regarding our "next-gen" accounting setup for our ADSL/dialup network. 
Currently we run three radius servers that have one authentication and one accounting instance each. Each server is co-located at the telco exchange point where we host our LNS and NAS equipment.
The current accounting instance is using an AuthBySQL statement, that sends the data to a central MySQL-4 instance via mysql. This server is getting quite old, and will be replaced soon by a master-slave-replication MySQL-5 "cluster". Some guys around here have been asking if it would make more sense to actually run the radius process directly on the database servers, as there have been no outages of the radiator instances, unless there was some planned maintenance, or network issues.

We came up with following setups during the planning phase :

1) do as currently, have radiator on the AAA servers send accounting data to the db server over mysql connections
2) run a radiator instance on the DB server and have the network equipment connect to that
3) do both, using an AuthByGroup using radius as primary transport
4) same as 3) using sql as primary transport
5) run a local "slave" mysql, replicated to the cluster, with local accounting instance.

Which of those would be considered as being best practice ? It's certain that we can't do extensive testing, as this is a production network handling about 10-12'000'000 requests per month, and we expect a new wholesale customer that will possibly double this number by end of the year.

Our current platform is :
Three P4 Xeon, dual-cpu, 2.8Ghz with 2Gb RAM, for the AAA servers
One P4 Xeon dual-cpu, 2.6Ghz with 4Gb RAM for the db server, running on software RAID5.
These are running under SuSE Linux 9.3 with MySQL 4.0 for the DB and local OpenLDAP replicas for the authentication.

The new accounting platform will be :
Two quad-core 2Ghz Xeon, 4Gb RAM and a hardware RAID 0+1 on SCSI or SAS (depending on  budget :)
This will run CentOS 4.4 and mysql 5.

Thank you for any advice,

Robert von Bismarck
Senior systems engineer UNIX
RHCT

VTX SERVICES SA 
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