[PacketFence-users] Packetfence 14 accounting issues

[Yannik S. <ya...@se...>]

Hi,

I am doing a fresh step-by-step packetfence 14.0 / debian 12 install.
So far, I did the basic user/network interfaced setup, configured a 
switch and registered a node. Then I tested MAC authentication with the 
juniper switch and it worked fine.

Now I wanted to enable accounting to get proper online/offline status.

I configured the accounting on my switch and can confirm that it is 
correctly sending accounting packets to port 1813 on packetfence.

However, the accounting does not seem to work, I do not see 
online/offline status on my node, nor anything in reports/accounting, 
and the packets sent from the switch go unanswered.

I did enable 'Process Bandwidth Accounting' in /Configuration → System 
Configuration → RADIUS → General/ menu and restarted pfacct. (per the docs)

I could also see the pfacct container running:
473d8718b3cf packetfence/pfacct:maintenance-14-0                   
"/bin/sh -c /usr/loc…"   29 minutes ago      Up 29 minutes 
0.0.0.0:1813->1813/udp, :::1813->1813/udp, 0.0.0.0:2056->2056/udp, 
:::2056->2056/udp                       pfacct

No /usr/local/pf/logs/pfacct.log file exists for some reason. docker 
logs pfacct results in "Error response from daemon: configured logging 
driver does not support reading".

Stopping pfacct in the webinterface and running 
/usr/local/pf/sbin/pfacct manually lead to accounting to work. 
Online/offline even worked with "Process Bandwidth Accounting" disabled, 
contrary to the docs.
The command did however not emit any log messages, and it did not have 
any parameters to increase logging.

After all this testing, I stopped the manually started pfacct, started 
the containerized one via status/services, and tested again. Same issue.

Per 
https://www.packetfence.org/doc/PacketFence_Installation_Guide.html#_pfacct_track_bandwidth_usage, 
radiusd-acct is retired and pfacct should be used. I tested radiusd-acct 
anyway (after disabling pfacct), but it did not work either (raddebug 
shows thousands of lines of debug output, it no response is every sent 
to the switch). Why is this still being shipped if it should not be used 
anymore/isn't even working?

How can I further debug / fix the containerized pfacct?

Best regards
Yannik