[Chilli] Using acctupdate option

[Phyo Wai Soe]

Hi All,

I would like to ask a beginner's question on acctupdate option in Coova. I know this has been asked/answered many times but I still can't get it right. My setup is Coova, FreeRadius (with daloRadius) and MySQL. 

I am trying to set up an ISP environment which will bill customers based on usage (ChilliSpot-Max-Total-Octets). Most customers will be prepaid users. The issue I still can't resolve is how to update a user's data quota (MB) if he tops up his account mid-session. I don't want to terminate a user's session to get the updated data quota for him. After much reading, Radius' CoA messages and Coova's own acctupdate option are most probable solutions. I wish to try acctupdate first because it looks simpler than setting up CoA.

>From the changelog, acctupdate "will allow for session parameter updates with RADIUS Accounting-Response". From David's reply in the mailing list - "the acctupdate option means that accounting responses from the radius server may have session parameter options like bandwidth and time limits. In a way, it is the poor man's CoA which is useful for when you do not have a direct route back to the router to use CoA." Does it mean that Coova will recofigure session attributes at every interim accounting update?

How does one go about configuring acctupdate after enabling it in the config file? Is there any change necessary in FreeRadius? (Sorry, I am also new to FreeRadius.) I specified ChilliSpot-Max-Total-Octets as a radreply attribute for a user. With debug messages, I could see that cb_radius_acct_conf function is called many times during a user's session but changing ChilliSpot-Max-Total-Octets in MySQL (mid-session) doesn't reconfigure that session attribute in Coova. I also tried putting ChilliSpot-Max-Total-Octets as a radcheck attribute but that session attribute doesn't even get set with that value.

Please enlighten me which settings I am missing.

Thanks so much.

Regards,
Phyo Wai Soe