Accounting info when using the internal hostapd's RADIUS functionality

[Panagiotis Georgopoulos]

Dear Jouni (and all who replied)

	Thanks for your comments, I will take them into account and rethink
my paradigm. 
> 
> > As far as I can tell from the archives of the list, hostapd does not
store
> > accounting information. Is there any add-on or other application that
could
> > store those? If not, what would be the easiest way to implement that
> > (code-wise), ie. what source files should I start looking into ?
> 
> In what kind of use case would you need this? My assumption has been
> that if someone needs RADIUS Accounting, they will most likely be using
> an external RADIUS server anyway.. Were you only thinking of this as a
> backup step when the AP does not have access to the external server?
> Would there be any useful service from that AP in general? And would the
> locally stored accounting records be pushed out to the external server
> whenever it becomes accessible again? I would have assumed the
> accounting server would be somewhere in the local network..

	The idea is to have something very lightweight at the AP's end so
that in some scenarios it will be able to do authentication and accounting
independently. For example, if you have an AP in a train's wagon offering
connectivity to passengers and the train moves to an area without Internet
connectivity (so it cannot reach the AAA server) to still be able to do
authentication and accounting locally and provide connectivity to clients
even in a local fashion until it regains connectivity. So I was thinking
here, since we already run hostapd on the AP to get benefited from its
internal RADIUS functionality for authentication and some simple accounting
mechanisms for the above offline scenarios. It seems though that a lot of
people think that getting a proper FR on the AP is a better solution.. 


> 
> I'm not sure I fully understand the use case here, but if you believe
> adding RADIUS Accounting functionality in hostapd is the best way of
> doing that, the place to implement this would be in
> src/radius/radius_server.c.

	Thanks,
	Panos