[Asterisk-Users] Re: * with RADIUS

[Greg Boehnlein]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 daryl at introspect.net wrote:

> > Explain why you think you really need RADIUS Accounting?   
> > Why not talk 
> > right to the database itself and save yourself that unneeded 
> > complication and points of failure.
> > 
> 
> I know this has come up before, and in a perfect world, where * was the
> primary app, you don't need RADIUS.  In enterprise environments where
> RADIUS accounting is already embedded into other aspects of the
> workflow, it would be beneficial.
> 
> Understand....* boxes are in real live actual production now.  Once you
> leave the vacuum of the lab, there are going to be things like this that
> come up.  And many will be for good reasons.  Others will be for crappy,
> legacy reasons.  Both scenarios are valid in the real world.

I wrote a small application that measures traffic totals for Websites, 
Switch ports virtually anything else that can be accessed via SNMP. That 
application then takes the totals and sends them as a Radius Accounting 
packets to our Radius Servers, which store the data in a SQL backend. Our 
billing system (Platypus) can then generate bills for customers based on 
usage.. in this case Gigabytes of Data transferred. For our dial-up 
customers is based on a certain block of hours with minutes charged at a 
specific rate over the limit. It is a system that makes it trivial to 
assign a value to some data point and create an itemized invoice for it.

I am in the process of deploying an Asterisk server to provide voice 
services to about 20 phones. It would be nice to be able to use our 
existing billing system to simply charge people for the minutes they have 
used and/or use the block pricing models that we already have in place 
(I.E. First 1000 minutes free, .03 each additional) without having to use 
another billing system and import/export data.

For me, having CDR data delivered as a Radius accounting packet would save 
me tons of development time, and many hours of additional work 
implementing a paralell billing system for the express purpose of accurate 
billing.

So.. I'll be happy to help out in the effort, but my C coding skills are 
rustier than hell, and more than likely I'll break many things along the 
way. ;)

On the other hand, if someone has a simple, open-source, SQL based 
billing, invoicing, CDR management program, I am all ears! If I can spend 
an hour or two setting up something that works well, with little effort, 
it would buy me lots of time.

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