Re: Portmaster Users Digest V95 #284

Victor Muslin (vmuslin@wp.prodigy.com)
Thu, 19 Oct 1995 21:26:43 -0400 (EDT)

According to James D. Butt 'J.D.':
>
> What is the best way to handle accounting logs. We have been waiting
> till the end of the month and then cutting eveybody off the modems so
> that we get clean starts and stops in the file. We would like to do
> this every day but do not want to cut people off to create the starts
> and stops. How do you handle this??

Being new to RADIUS myself (read "not knowning any better") I did a
quick hack on Livingston's 1.16 code for an alpha test of one of our
projects. We do not use detail file. Instead we keep two files
"sessions.tbl" and "sessions.log" (they were supposed to be tables in
RDBMS, but we didn't have time to evaluate which RDBMS we wanted to
use). Anyway, sessions.tbl keeps a list of current sessions (read
"accounting start records"). When the session is done accounting stop
is matched with accounting start, duration and other miscellaneous
information is computed and the whole record is written to
sessions.log (thus sessions.log is a list of completed sessions) and
the corresponding session is discarded from the sessions.tbl
file. With another hour of work it would be possible to restart
sessions.log every so often (daily, monthly, whatever).

One thing to keep in mind, since these are just unix files, these are
not atomic transactions, so there may be a slight problem if the
system crashes. Well, its alpha (is there a "smiley" glyph for
"shrugging shoulders"?).

Also, over the last few days I have been getting a strong feeling that
Bill has implemented everything I could possibly think of in the
Merit's server already :-). So it's worth checking what they've done.

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