Best news I've heard all week! Everything I want to do today, a2billing can do. Awesome!
jroper wrote:
The answer to 1 in respect of outbound calls , is that you have to authenticate the caller in some way. You can do this via caller ID or by setting the accountcode. I would recommend the latter in your case given your last point.
What exactly do you mean by "set the accountcode"? The 10-digit "accountcode" slash "username" gets auto-generated for every new customer. So I guess I've got an accountcode, but nowhere to "set" it. As for "authenticate", see below.
jroper wrote:
The answer to 2 is that if you bring an incoming call into into A2Billing as a DID for onwards delivery to an endpoint, then no authentication is required or necessary.
OK, very good, except it's obviously not already working. I've set the Asterisk/Trixbox end to forward the phone call through into a2billing. I still see this in the logs:
-- Goto (a2billing-did,DDDDDDDDDD,1)
-- Executing [DDDDDDDDDD@a2billing-did:1] DeadAGI("SIP/XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXX", "a2billing.php|1|did") in new stack
-- Launched AGI Script /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/a2billing.php
-- AGI Script a2billing.php completed, returning 0
where DDDDDDDDDD is the incoming DID and the XXXX is the inbound sip trunk. cid_enable is currently set to No and cid_askpincode_ifnot_callerid is currently set to No and I don't see ANY other toggles to toggle in order to get it to ignore Caller ID on inbound calls. So I have then EXPLICITLY set the system to NOT use CID to authenticate incoming calls, and yet it STILL looks up the inbound CID before passing the call through. And calls with no CID get hung up on immediately.
Setting verbosity_level to 4 reveals only that it's failing specifically with "a2billing.php|1|did: file:Class.A2Billing.php - line:1253 - uniqueid:1276268444.29 - [A2Billing] DID call friend: AUTHENTICATION FAILS !!!"
So silly me, I manually edited the source file /usr/src/a2billing/AGI/lib/Class.A2Billing.php line 1252, changed it from "if ($this -> callingcard_ivr_authenticate($agi)!=0)" to "if (1==0)" and now inbound calls are passed through unmolested. This is obviously a bad solution, but I can't see any other way right now.
jroper wrote:
In respect of your last point, if you are identifying and authenticating a customer on the basis of caller ID, the caller ID's have to be unique, and each individual caller ID can only belong to one customer, otherwise you would not know who to bill for the call. It would be a bug if it did allow the same caller ID to be entered against multiple customers.
As for authentication and billing, a sip phone logs in to the system with the accountcode and a password. So, IMHO, it should ALREADY be authenticated to make calls out.
Inbound voip calls to a sip phone are FREE. We aren't being billed for inbound calls, and we aren't charging for inbound calls, and so there's nothing to bill.
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