Cisco Cisco IOS Software Releases 12.2 B

This document describes the RADIUS: Separate Retransmit Counter for Accounting feature in 
Cisco IOS Release 12.2(15)B. It includes the following sections:

In many environments, a single RADIUS server is used for authentication and accounting. Whenever this 
server is down for approximately 24 hours, the accounting records of users already on the router are lost 
after authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) does all the retransmissions. Before the 
introduction of this feature, the retransmissions could be configured for a maximum of 100 retries and 
the timeout could be configured for 1,000 seconds. Although these configurations keep the accounting 
records on the router for 24 hours, a timeout of 1,000 seconds is unreasonable, causing problems when 
the RADIUS server cannot be reached due to network congestion. 

The RADIUS: Separate Retransmit Counter for Accounting feature allows users to configure an 
exponential backoff retransmit. That is, after the normally configured retransmission retries have been 
used, the router will keep on trying with an interval that doubles on each retransmission failure until a 
configured maximum interval is reached. This functionality allows users to retransmit accounting 
requests for many hours without overloading the RADIUS server when it does come back up.

This feature can be configured globally (via the 

 command), per 

server (via the 

 command), or per group (via the 

 command).

12.2(15)B

This feature was introduced on the Cisco 6400-NRP-1, Cisco 7200 series, 
and the Cisco 7400 series.