[Serdev] Radius stop record delay

[Dan Pascu]

On Thursday 19 August 2004 17:02, Jiri Kuthan wrote:
> >I think this is an issue only when viewed from a technical point of view.
> > From the end user point of view is a non-issue. The user paying the bill
> > for his call, will surely want the call ended when he hangs up the phone,
> > no matter what the other party wants or believes about the validity of
> > the BYE message. I'm sure none wants to pay extra bills just because the
> > other party refuses to close a phone conversation.
>
> That does not seem to me so clear. For example, it would then to easy for
> me to generate a BYE which gets denied by UAS and will be taken as input
> for your accounting. What I am telling is I suggest that accounting module
> provides objective, accurate and detailed reports (no special-casing) and
> the back-end systems interpets them. Rating, fraud-detection and other
> billing functionality is a back-end responsibility and should IMHO stay
> there.

This can be seen the other way around too. It would be easy for me to have a 
modified SIP client that refuses any BYE message it receives. Then you call 
me from PSTN and when you hang up, my phone will keep the conversation open 
for days and you receive a huge bill from your PSTN provider and you can do 
nothing about it.

I see little reason to deny a BYE message (one is to avoid someone willing to 
tamper with someone's else conversation by closing it with a faked BYE 
request), but I see much more dangerous exploits that can arise from denying 
BYE messages. Probably the issue here is to correctly be able to determine if 
the BYE comes from the one of the 2 parties. In such a case I see no real 
reason for one party to keep the connection open once the other party has 
asked for it to be closed.

Anyway, regarding the accounting stuff I don't think we disagree. I'm not 
locked on the idea that accounting should be sent when BYE arrives, but only 
that I would like to know when BYE has arrived. Sending an absolute timestamp 
is problematic (depends on ser and radius being in the same timezone and 
being time synchronized). But we can send the time difference between the BYE 
request and the moment the stop accounting message is sent and use that to 
compute the real time of the BYE request arrival.

>
> -jiri

-- 
Dan