Re: [Help-gnu-radius] Acct. warning: acct_stop_query updated X records

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Dale <address@hidden> wrote:

> Is this fairly common?

Yes, unfortunately. 

> I find it odd that several different brands of NAS's are all having
> the same "problems" with this.

That's not their fault, actually. The problem itself lies in RFC 2868,
which states in Section 4.1:

  The Identifier field MUST be changed whenever the content of
  the Attributes field changes, and whenever a valid reply has
  been received for a previous request.  For retransmissions
  where the contents are identical, the Identifier MUST remain
  unchanged.

  Note that if Acct-Delay-Time is included in the attributes of an
  Accounting-Request then the Acct-Delay-Time value will be updated
  when the packet is retransmitted, changing the content of the
  Attributes field and requiring a new Identifier and Request
  Authenticator.

So, whenever the NAS adds an Acct-Delay-Time to the request being
retransmitted, it changes request ID and authenticator, thereby
breaking the duplicate detection algorithm. 
                     
> Since the packets don't look different in the detail log,

That's because the detail log does not show request ID and authenticator.

> how do I go about finding what is being changed in them?

The two fields changed are request ID and authenticator, that's almost
sure. Request IDs are displayed by the default logging prefix hook, so
you may always check them if the hook is enabled. Here's a sample
log file entry (with newlines inserted):

Non 06 12:38:24.713715 [26027]: Acct.warning: (Accounting-Request nas7
87 "990-482496852" CLID=482496852 CSID=990): acct_stop_query updated 0
records

In this example the request ID was 87.

You may also enable debugging level radpdu=1 in your raddb/config. This
will print the following info for each incoming request:

Nov 06 22 13:39:16.634057 [1620]: radpdu.c:415:grad_decode_pdu: Request
from host 0d451235 code=1, id=87, length=59

Regards,
Sergey