How to configure FreeRadius Server for accounting.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This is the second part of a series on FreeRadius configuration. This time we will see how to configure FreeRadius for accounting and how the process works.

Prerequisite

This article assumes that you have already installed FreeRadius and MySQL on your server and that they are correctly configured to handle the authorization process.

If you want to know how to install and configure FreeRadius which works with MySQL for authorization purposes, check my first article.

What is Radius accounting?

Radius accounting collects data on how the users use the network for statistical and monitoring purposes, as well as to enable billing of the users. The accounting process starts when the user is authorized to access the network. When the NAS (Network Access Server) receives an Access-Accept message, it sends back to the Radius Server an Accounting-Request for that specific user that informs the server that the user’s access to the network has begun. Based on the configuration on the Radius Server for that specific user, several parameters can be counted, and based on the result of these counters the authorization for that user can be rejected/revoked.