We've been using Mikrotik for a while now for hotspot services for our customers. One thing I've been noticing is that in our database that keeps track of the accounting data that there are nearly duplicate rows like this:

AcctStartTime || AcctStopTime || Upload (MiB) || Download (MiB)
2007-12-02 03:08:53 || 2007-12-02 13:00:43 || 33.0767 || 1905.2222
2007-12-02 03:08:58 || 2007-12-02 13:00:43 || 33.0767 || 1905.2222

As you can see they are almost duplicate entries and this is throwing our accounting off. In this customer's case it is off by almost 2GB that he never actually used.

Not every customer has these and fortunately they are only on very small data sessions. This is the first customer I've found to have a sizable amount for a duplicate entry.

The only difference between the two rows is the AcctStartTime field. What is going on? Is this an MT bug or a Radius bug or something else that I'm overlooking? Our system is also set so that only 1 session per user name can be active at any given time.

~Sean

you're getting 2 accounting records, possibly because the radius client (your access server) is not hearing the accounting ack back from the radius server, and its resending, even though the first one was received just fine, you end up with 2. check your logs for red entries that say 'accounting record not sent' (or words to that effect)

try increasing the radius timeout.

debug this with packet sniffer or radius debug logging in routerOS.