User management with exports - general operation

[Andrew Furey]

Hi all,

I apologise in advance for the somewhat vague nature of this question...

I'm setting up Freeside 1.4.1rc2 on Redhat 9 for a client. Other 
versions as requested:

Linux kernel 2.4.20
Apache 2.0.40
Apache::ASP 2.53
Perl 5.8.0
Postgresql 7.3.2
DBD::Pg 1.22
DBI 0.6.5

Most of the system seems to work (as far as adding services, packages, 
clients, etc). However I'm having trouble setting up (or understanding, 
for that matter) the exports.

In my case I'm only using the "shell commands to localhost" and "SQL to 
radius" exports, to add new RADIUS users for PPP, and local system users 
for both PPP and POP3 (a fairly simple setup, I would think).

Unfortunately when I try to provision a service for a client, neither 
export (I have them selected for the relevant services in the service 
definitions) seems to work. I was initially getting a problem whereby 
the SQL RADIUS export couldn't connect to the database (auth problems, 
which I fixed), so I know that it's trying to run _something_. However, 
the RADIUS database is not updated, nor is /etc/passwd (although 
Freeside may add the new users to a file in the local exports directory, 
I'm not sure).

The documentation on the system doesn't seem to help much (ie. the note 
at the top saying not to use it because it's out of date). I've seen a 
post to this list (archived at 
http://www.sisd.com/freeside/list-archive/msg00598.html) which says to 
run svc_acct in cron, but that doesn't seem to make sense because the 
clients would not be able to connect immediately.

There doesn't seem to be anything listed in any of the system logs 
(aside from the harmless "Database handle destroyed without explicit 
disconnect").__ The settings in the Freeside system _seem_ to be OK 
(there are no errors reported anywhere), it's just that the system 
doesn't run any of the exports that I can see.

I'm been working on this Freeside installation on and off for a few 
weeks, and I must confess to being stumped. If someone out there could 
give me some pointers as to how it is supposed to work, I would be much 
obliged.

If you need any further information on my setup, just ask.

Thanks in advance...
Andrew

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ANDREW FUREY <andrew at terminus.net.au> - Sysadmin/developer for Terminus.
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