I have read the Max radius manual and searched through the mailing list
archives but I'm still unclear on this. Let's say the Max is configured like
this:

Acct Timeout = 30
Acct Max Retry = 3
Acct Reset Timeout = 300

How will radius accounting proceed with this setup? Let's sey a user goes
offline and the Max tries to send an accounting packet to the radius server
and due to the nature of UDP packets, the packet gets lost. So the Max will
wait for 30 seconds for an answer and if it doesn't receive an answer, will it
retry sending the packet to the SAME radius server or will it switch to the
secondary radius server?

I have the strange feeling it will switch to the secondary server. Just why oh
why??? Is there a way to tell it to resend the packet a couple of times to the
SAME server (because it could very well be alive?) and if it doesn't receive
an answer retry with the secondary server?

We have four Max 6096 running 7.2.4 on a switched full-duplex 100baseTX
ethernet together with a FreeBSD server (also on 100baseTX and running
Radiator as the radius server). Every couple of hours one of the Maxes decides
to switch to our secondary server. After comming back (because of the Acct
Reset Timeout), it sends an Accounting-On packet which clears the session
database on the radius server and when looking through our user list it comes
up empty (because the radius server thinks the Max has rebooted). It's only
the Maxen that do this, we have a Portmaster 3 and a couple of Cisco 2511's
left in our network and they behave as expected.

I consider the current behaviour broken and will probably file a bug report
(and if it isn't accepted as a bug report, I'll masquerade it as an enhancment
request). I mean, we *know* UDP packets get lost, so why not retry sending to
the current radius server, because it could very well be alive? I don't want
our secondary server to be used if the primary is not down.

Blaz Zupan,  Medinet d.o.o, Linhartova 21, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia
E-mail: blaz at amis.net, Tel: +386-2-320-6320, Fax: +386-2-320-6325

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