[Serusers] Acct-Session-Time support

[Mike Tkachuk]

Hello Lucas,

Thursday, January 6, 2005, 5:54:10 PM, you wrote:

LA> Mike,

>> > Finally, with the help of many, I could do accounting using
>> > SER+IC-RADIUs. The thing was just setting setflag(1) at the very
>> > beginning, just after the route{. I still do not 
>> > understand why I'm 
>> > getting to Acct-Start records, but, well ... accounting 
>> > is working. 
>> > But not completely well. Because, when I receive the Acct-Stop 
>> > message, my billing system expects the Acct-Time-Session 
>> > Attribute 
>> > with the total time used during the session. As no 
>> > Acct-Session-Time 
>> > is received, no billing can be done. Anybody knows how to 
>> > send that 
>> > Attribute to RADIUS. thanx.
>> 
>> > Regards,
>> 
>> > Lucas
>> 
>> 
>> It's impossible to do with SER because it's stateless proxy, 
>> you need b2bua for this functionality.

LA> Ok, so you mean that if I want to do some billing with SER I need to
LA> implement b2bua?. Please, how do I implement b2bua with SER ???.

LA> I believe (as an active VoIP+RADIUS admin) that SER should implement
LA> some basic time-accounting. It is not that difficult to do it and it'll
LA> help many many Admins. It could, for example (and I think it'll
LA> definetively work), estimate the Acct-Session-Time by substracting the
LA> time at wich SER receives the BYE message from the time at wich SER
LA> received the 200 OK message. So then SER should build the
LA> Acct-Session-Time attribute with that value, and SER would send this
LA> attribute to RADIUS, and so help the billing systems, as the one I own.

LA> Just an Idea.
LA> Regards,
LA> Lucas

 I will cite SER's manual, 3.2.4

 Note that ser is no way call-stateful. It reports on completed
 transactions, i.e., after a successful call set up is reported, it
 drops any call-related state. When a call is terminated,
 transactional state for BYE request is created and forgotten again
 after the transaction completes. This is a feature and not a bug --
 keeping only transactional state allows for significantly higher
 scalability. It is then up to the accounting application to correlate
 call initiation and termination events.       

-- 
Best regards,

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Mike Tkachuk,     ph:380-3433-47067
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