Thus spake Stainforth, Matthew
I'm half following this discussion about unlimited access offerings and wondering what billing software those who don't do "unlimited" actually use. I'd love to move us from unlimited to something like what Jeff is doing since normal people wouldn't typically use more than 150-200 hours a month. I've looked at a few packages but most of them seem to be based on radius accounting which doesn't seem to be completely reliable. On the other hand, if you guys are using radius accounting for billing data, do you also use it to limit concurrent logons? I see a lot of people on the list saying radius accounting isn't reliable enough to be used to control concurrency. Just wondering what the general concensus is...
We have a home-rolled billing system...we do get the usage from RADIUS accounting. Basically we only use the stop records as they have all the information that is needed to bill. We *don't* use it for concurrency checking because of the dangers that RADIUS based servers imply. Ie, if a start goes to one RADIUS server and the stop goes to the other for some reason...stuff like that. We do concurrency checking via a Perl script with an SNMP module...with some fairly slick Perl scripting (I'm not being arrogant here...I didn't write it :) we have a *VERY* low incidence of false positives on duplicate checking...in fact, I haven't seen any indication of any false positives. There is some indicates of false negatives...ie, people getting away with duplicate logins for a period of time...but even that is pretty low...our script is pretty accurate on that. :) -- Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456 - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.