RadiusNT 2.2.41and Dr. Watson

Josh Hillman ( (no email) )
Mon, 15 Dec 1997 20:02:15 -0500

I'm using RadiusNT 2.2.41 in ODBC mode and about 45 minutes ago, RadiusNT
crashed for no apparent reason, causing Dr. Watson to do it's thing.
Unfortunately, the system (128 MB RAM) nearly ran out of memory/virtual
memory creating the file, so the process had to be killed. In the meantime,
I could not remotely get RadiusNT to start back up because of Dr. Watson!
Someone had to go into the office, log onto the machine, kill the Dr. Watson
process, then restart RadiusNT.

When I became aware of the initial problem, I made a users file from Emerald
2.1.11 and replaced the older version on our backup RadiusNT server--RadiusNT
2.2.41 on this machine is normally turned off because if I leave it on, our
Maxes will periodically stop using the primary RadiusNT machine and roll over
to the backup (running in text-mode only). If I have ODBC running on the
backup RadiusNT server, and SQL (6.5) dies or is shut down for some reason,
RadiusNT (on either machine) crashes with Dr. Watson and I get
screwed--especially if I'm out of town.

After turning on the backup RadiusNT server with the new users file, no one
could log on--everyone was getting LAN security errors (PAP authentication
failed). I had posted a note about a week ago regarding "Expiration" vs.
"Ascend-PW-Expiration" in the users file and never got a response about it.
Emerald 2.1.11 automatically enters in "Expiration" into each user's radius
info. It appears that RadiusNT doesn't know what to do with this. If I do a
search/replace "Expiration" with "Ascend-PW-Expiration" on all users, there
doesn't seem to be a problem. Am I going to have to do this everytime I
create a users file?

If Radius dies while I'm away next week, we're obviously going to run into
some problems because there won't be anyone to physically go into the office
and kill Dr. Watson, just so Radius can be restarted.

If anyone could shed some light onto this, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Thanks,
Josh Hillman
hillman@talstar.com