RADIUS

Parsing RADIUS Accounting Files

One of the most useful aspects of RADIUS is the utility of its accounting portion. Logs from the RADIUS accounting server can be used for a multitude of purposes, including billing, usage planning, attack forensics, and auditing. Most Internet service providers have billing systems that directly import, analyze, interpret, and report the data contained within the accounting logs. But for corporate situations in which billing isn’t required or for ISPs wanting information not provided by the billing system, it’s useful to have a utility that will read the logs and report basic information for the outside of your standard reporting system.

Paul Gregg has created an excellent utility, written in Perl, called RadiusReport that offers this functionality. RadiusReport allows you to import log files and create different reports based on their contents. The utility supports the log files that FreeRADIUS generates, and it also has support for the following RADIUS servers:

• Livingston Radius, Versions 1.16, 2.0, and 2.01

• Dale Reed’s RadiusNT

• Merit Radius

• Ascend Radius

• Radiator

• Novell’s BorderManager Authentication Services (requires a separate utility to “massage” the format of the logs)

RadiusReport will generate all sorts of useful reports, including the projected telephone bill, reporting filtering based on specific months if you have multiple periods aggregated into a single file and parsing based on interim months. The reports are configured and constructed from ...