User-Manager and System Time

RouterOS The User Manager
1

I have a small, simple network. Subscribers pay a set fee per month for a data limit and a higher rate if they go over it. All I - and they - need is a way to check their monthly usage, and I need a way to reset the counters to zero at the beginning of each month without losing the history for previous months.

In yet another attempt to use User-Manager this way I set up U-M on a clean, new machine and early on 1st June I manually disabled and then enabled the PPPoE client on everyone’s CPE to end any sessions begun in May and start a fresh one for June. What could go wrong?

Well, in setting up the fresh, new machine I forgot to set the time zone for the administrator as customer, and here in New Zealand currently it’s GMT+12. So as far as I can tell from the resulting shambles the sessions I intended to start at 5.00am on 1st June in fact start at 5.00pm on 31st May, and as a result several day’s worth of usage for several subscribers at the beginning of June is now included with May’s usage.

OK. Now I know and so do you if you didn’t before. But why? All my routers and CPEs are on New Zealand time, synchronised by NTP. Everything else uses system time. Why doesn’t User-Manager?

Having now been experimenting with U-M for many months, plumbing its impenetrable depths and tripping over its many foibles - like its disdain for system time - I’ve come to the conclusion that my only hope is to have U-M running on half-a-dozen routers and move from one to the next on the afternoon of first of the month, telling all my subscribers the new address for their user?= checks in the newsletter.

I’m glad it’s not a big network, and that it’s not-for-profit as we’d have a hard job making one with User-Manager.

2

For User Manager you need to use ‘time-zone’ for the customer, it doesn’t work correctly without it.l

3

Thanks sergejs, I know that now having found out the hard way.

I’m just baffled as to why. Why does User-Manager assume a different time setting to the system it’s running on? Surely RADIUS packets are time-stamped when they leave the server. Does U-M actually and actively convert these to its own time before logging them? In my case both the router acting as the RADIUS server and the one U-M was running on had as system time 0500 Jun/01/2008 but as far as I can tell the sessions I started in the gloom of dawn run from 1700 May/31/2008?

Presumably twice a year, when Summertime kicks in and when it’s kicked out, I’ll have to remember to change the customer’s ‘time-zone’, although the time-shifting consequences of that boggle the mind.

4

Timezone is present, because User Manager client routers can be located in different timezone.
Well, it sounds like a good feature request, by default to take time from router and when different timezone is necessary, then configure it with timezone option.

5

I’d vote for that.

And making their system password accessible to the logged-on user?