4 Administration

Radius events monitor runs under CentOS 6.5 or higher. The administration tasks are solved by means that are typical for this OS.

This chapter depicts peculiarities of monitor's installation and operation that are essential for a system administrator.

The main process is named fdpi_radius. It uses CPU resources even in an idle state (no data transmission). This mode is essential to minimize network delays and relates to peculiarities of LAN cards operation. The system treats this process as a service. The latest is controlled by common service commands.

For example, to restart the services:

service fastradius restart

This process is monitored by the system watchdog. It restarts the process in case of abnormal termination. The process has internal self-monitoring means. They support some failure conditions. The process is self terminated in case of critical errors or suspension and then restarted by the watchdog. The latest is configured by the file: /etc/watchdog.d/wd_fastdpi.sh.

Monitor's configuration parameters are stored in /etc/dpi:

fdpi_radius.conf configuration file
prefixes.info regional settings (subscribers' login prefixes). The file is omitted if not required

There are "hot" and "cold" configuration file parameters.

The "hot" parameters take effect immediately with no need to restart the service. The "cold" parameters require the service to be restarted to become effective.

For example: modification of "hot" parameters without restart:

service fastradius reload

/etc/pf_ring directory holds licenses for DNA and Libzero. The service runs for 5 minutes only if some of these licenses are missed.

Monitor's logs are stored in /var/log/dpi:

fdr_alert.log messages' and errors' log file
fdr_stat.log statistics' log file

Log files' rotation is handled using the standard tool logrotate. The logs are stored for 24 hours by default. The logrotate is configured by the file: /etc/logrotate.d/fdpi_radius.

The available disk space must be checked before modification of logs' storage time by an administrator.

Depending on its configuration, the Monitor can record to /var/dump/dpi directory the following information:

spdu_*.pcap - are pcap files containing records of bad or all radius packets
uip_*.txt - are text log files containing information on allocation and release of IP addresses

One can take care of timely removing of this information to avoid disk space overflow.

The exact time synchronization runs on the computer via ntpd service. ntpd configuration is stored here: /etc/sysconfig/ntpd.