(RADIATOR) IMPORTANT - what exactly is the Timestamp in Radiator? Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 11:31:35 -0400

[Dave Kitabjian]

One question I've always had...

Given an accounting record:

Wed Mar 28 17:08:50 2001
        User-Name = "foobar at yo.net"
        Service-Type = Framed-User
        NAS-IP-Address = 103.73.154.6
        NAS-Port = 1234
        NAS-Port-Type = Async
        Acct-Session-Id = "00001234"
        Acct-Status-Type = Stop
        Acct-Delay-Time = 0
        Acct-Session-Time = 1000
        Acct-Input-Octets = 20000
        Acct-Output-Octets = 30000
        Timestamp = 985817330

Is the "Wed Mar 28 17:08:50 2001" the time when the record was logged,
whereas the "Timestamp = 985817330" is the actual time that the event
itself occurred?

Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hugh Irvine [mailto:hugh at open.com.au]
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2001 2:30 AM
> To: Shanaka Rabel
> Cc: radiator at open.com.au
> Subject: (RADIATOR) IMPORTANT - what exactly is the Timestamp
> in Radiator?
>
>
>
> 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 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.

-------------------------------------------------------

-- 
Mike McCauley                               mikem at open.com.au
Open System Consultants Pty. Ltd            Unix, Perl, Motif, C++, WWW
24 Bateman St Hampton, VIC 3188 Australia   http://www.open.com.au
Phone +61 3 9598-0985                       Fax   +61 3 9598-0955

Radiator: the most portable, flexible and configurable RADIUS server 
anywhere. SQL, proxy, DBM, files, LDAP, NIS+, password, NT, Emerald, 
Platypus, Freeside, TACACS+, PAM, external, Active Directory etc etc 
on Unix, Win95/8, 2000, NT, MacOS 9, MacOS X
===
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.