Who's On

Author: Mike Nice niceman@worldnet.att.net
Copyright © Mike Nice, 1999
This program may be freely used and modified for your own use, provided this notice remains intact.

There are no expressed or implied warranties with this software.
All liabilities in the use of this software rest with the user.

Purpose: To view user login information on RADIUS accounting server.

How it works

The RADIUS accounting code has a shared memory block in which it records an image of who is logged in by examining RADIUS accounting START and STOP records. WhosOn generates an HTML-formatted page with accounting information. In order to view this information, the RADIUS server must also be running a webserver, or you could schedule the CGI version to send its output to a shared network drive.

With this design, accounting records sent to a backup accounting server will not appear on the who's on page. However, you may designate backup authentication servers with no side effects.

There are 2 versions of this program included:

WHOSON.EXE - CGI version to work with any webserver.
WHOSON.DLL - PowerWeb add-in will work only with PowerWeb webserver. The advantage is that it uses Netscape's ServerPush format and provides updates as soon as they occur (no more frequently than once per 15 seconds and every 90 seconds if no one logs in or out).

Installation

CGI version Whoson.exe installation - Copy to your webserver's CGI-BIN directory.
Optional Arguments:
RefreshRate=nn - Request automatic page refresh of nn seconds.
portFormat=slot - Changes raw port number to a 3Com HiperArc style slot:port type of display.
Usage examples:

http://yourServer.yourDomain.com/cgi-bin/whoson.exe

http://yourServer.yourDomain.com/cgi-bin/whoson.exe?portFormat=slot

http://yourServer.yourDomain.com/cgi-bin/whoson.exe?portFormat=slot&refreshRate=60

PowerWeb version WHOSON.DLL installation - copy to your webserver's BIN directory.
Optional Arguments:
portFormat=slot - Changes raw port number to a 3Com HiperArc style slot:port type of display.
Usage examples:

http://yourServer.yourDomain.com/bin/whoson!WhosOn

http://yourServer.yourDomain.com/bin/whoson!WhosOn?portFormat=slot

Sample output format in straight port numbers:

Current Users

yourServer.yourDomain.com
Total users: 4
Username	Port	IP Addr	Time Online
alvin	1	10.10.3.21	00:05:02
theodore	2	10.10.3.72	01:04:54
fred	6	10.10.3.28	00:00:05
wilma	8	10.10.3.47	00:05:36

Column meanings
Username	Port	IP Addr	Time Online
Username reported by RADIUS client	NAS Port number. Some equipment reports this starting at 1, others encode a combination of slot / rack / modem number. Display is sorted by port number.	Address reported by RADIUS client	Time since accounting START record was received. Note that if the accounting server was down at the time the user logged in, the user may have been logged in longer. The accounting STOP record will record the correct online time for billing purposes. Times less than 1 minute are listed in bold.

Sample output in 3Com format:


yourServer.yourDomain.com
Total users: 7
Username	Slot: Port	IP Addr	Time Online
alvin	7:1	10.10.3.111	00:44:33
theodore	7:9	10.10.3.150	00:23:11
fred	7:23	10.10.3.145	02:27:59
wilma	7:24	10.10.3.23	00:26:15
barney	8:1	10.10.3.136	00:09:00
george	8:2	10.10.3.60	01:55:32
pebbles	8:3	10.10.3.98	00:18:44

If your equipment encodes the NAS port number differently, you can add its representation in the source code.

Security note: Consider putting this program on a protected page; if you make this information public, sooner or later someone will harvest your customer list to send spam if not worse!