[RadiusNT] radiusNT service stops dead in the water

Andrew Fort ( afort@staff.powerup.com.au )
Sun, 6 Aug 2000 19:54:24 +1000

Hi,

We're experiencing a problem whereby our RadiusNT box stops authenticating
users, but the service doesn't stop, and the program has not crashed.

I have precious little debugging at the moment. Our RadiusNT talks to SQL
server 7 (sp1) over a TCP/IP connection (in the same subnet). Logs indicate
nothing unusual. We have a large number of total users (about 60,000
subaccounts under one master account; our only other master account is used
for test users which have a different Framed-Service attribute).

The machine is a P3-550, on an ASUS P3BF board, with 256Mbytes RAM.
NT is NT4 Service Pack 3 (do we need to run 4 or above for RadiusNT?)

RadiusNT version info:

RadiusNT 3.0.172 Copyright (c) 1995-2000 IEA Software, Inc.
All Rights Reserved, Worldwide

Some portions Copyright (c) 1992 Livingston Enterprises, Inc.
and Copyright (c) 1995 Ascend Communications, Inc.

radius: RadiusNT 3.0.172 4/25/00
NOSHADOW BINARY_FILTERS ASCEND_SECRET SNMP_UPDATE WindowsNT ODBC VSA SNMP

I dont have a netstat -a output or details on if the process still accepts
socket connections when this problem occurs (I have always been remote from
the machine when it's happened).

It's happening a few times a week at the moment.

I have seen a Virtual Memory error on the machine also - so I'm wondering if
we need more memory to handle the large number of users? We have a _very
low_ authentication rate at present (less than 10 auths an hour at present).
Most of the work the RadiusNT is doing is receiving Accounting-Start cleanup
messages from the dialup-access-network we purchase service from.

Any ideas or suggestions to debug this?

(btw, when further hardware arrives I will be running up a second server to
make sure it is not an obscure hardware problem - can we use the same
license in the SQL database whilst running two servers? is it wise to run
two RadiusNT against the same datasource anyhow?)

--andrew fortwebcentral

For more information about this list (including removal) go to:http://www.iea-software.com/support/maillists/liststart