Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) Radius-980618 release



At 19:05 1998/06/29 -0500, Tim Jung wrote:
>pays for 2 dialups to 2 and no more. The multiple-sessions option in the MAX
>will only limit it to 1 not allow a max of some defined number per account.

right and this is not something that you can do with
an internal profile in the max, is it? why should any normal (simple/stateless)
radius have any way of controlling this if the max can't do it internally?

plus there is the situation where users may be connecting to multiple
NASes, this pushing the focus to an external method of tracking.

>Are we saying that I am the only ISP in the world doing this? I doubt it. Thus
>it should be a supported option in Ascend Radius, and don't tell me to buy the
>Ascend Access Control software since it isn't supported on Linux which is what
>we run here, 15 Linux servers.

Ascend's Access Control does this flexible limiting in
a sort of "out of band" method by keeping track of which users 
are already logged in (radius accounting) and incrementing/decrementing
some statefull table of users that it checks when it gets a radius request.
(remember, the free radius is stateless)

Ascend is, after all, a business, and it costs money to hire
programmers to write a radius server. I don't have any evidence to it,
but it wouldn't surprise me if some of the engineers simply work on
the free radius server in their spare time they way they did 
"way back when" in the early days...  Whereas the AAC is
a fully supported commercial app that can have a programming staff
because it is supported by the revenue of its own sales.

the "free" radius is just that "free"... 
which means that, among other things, if it doesn't do exactly 
what you want you can modify it to your liking.

It sounds to me like the Linux users just need to make Ascend
aware that there is a demand for AAC under Linux, and once 
there _is_ enough of a market it _will_ get ported.

-Jim H
----
Jim Howard             Sr Network Engineer        Lyceum Internet
jhoward@lyceum.com     http://www.lyceum.com/     404.248.1733     

My PGP Public Key: http://www.lyceum.com/~jhoward/pgp-key.txt
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