provided by Star2Billing S.L.

Greetings,

I am having a serious problem. A2Billing is suddenly not updating the CREDIT of my customers. CDR catches all calls, every record shows the values to bill to the customer but it is NOT being reflected in the database! For example, a customer has a $21.56 of credits, makes a call worth of $1.56 and the credit should be $21.00 but it's still stuck in $21.56 !! Please help, I am losing money with this.

Also, the same happens when I try to refill an account. The refill and payment are saved on the DB but the customer's credit is still stuck in the previous value.

Please somebody help me ASAP.

Best Regards,

Paul

Hi there! I found the solution of my problem so for all those who have experienced the same problem, here it is:

Two days ago, I updated my CentOS 5.3 box with yum update and among other things, it updated my MySQL Server to version 5.0.77

I got no error message so I assumed everything was alright until today when I tried to top up an account with a refill to no avail. I tried deleting and refilling the account at least 10 times.. nothing. Then I wondered if the problem would also happen when the system tried to decrement an account and for my unpleasant surprise, A2billing wasn't charging my customer for their calls either, something that really shocked me.

After calming down, I started to find a way to solve the problem. Fortunately, the CDRs were working fine and I captured the calls of all my customers in the last 2 days and decided to manually change the cc_card table on the mya2billing database using webmin 1.480 to minimize the damage until I could find a solution. When I tried to update one record, I got this error: Mysql.proc doesn't exist! and after trying again a couple more times I googled that error and found out that sometimes MySQL upgrades don't go smoothly and that file that allows the store procedures to run is missing. I forced a new upgrade of MySQL and then I tried to manually update the credit of one record through webmin. Presto! It worked! Then I tried to refill an account using A2billing...... and worked! i made a test call against my own account..... and it worked! My account was decremented for my pleasant surprise.

To summarize things up, if you recently updated your MySQL and your A2Billing starts to act up, it probably is a problem like mine. If that is the case, calm down and follow these steps:

1) Download and install WEBMIN 1.490 It's the most powerful free tool to administrate your Linux box.
2) Perform a /usr/bin/mysql-upgrade with the --force parameter to force a reinstallation of the MySQL DB engine to the latest version. That will create the Mysql.proc file again!
3) Try a refill and a test call against your own account and prove that everything is working fine.
4) Use the CDRs and the MySQL server admin module of Webmin 1.490 to manually edit the credit field of the cc_card table on the mya2billing database unless you are willing to afford the loss of money with the calls that were not charged against your customers' accounts!

And voila! You are done! Hope this post becomes useful for someone else.

Just a side note for the developers: You should provide a tool to track and debug these errors easily. The platform never mentioned that the MySQL.Proc file was missing. It simply pretended that everything was working fine when it wasn't.

Best tregards,

Paul Fabre

Hi

I would generally advise against mass upgrading on a live system, unless there is something that you need to achieve which requires an upgrade - e.g. upgrading PHP to allow A2Billing to be installed.

Before upgrading, it may be an idea to have a test system - say in vmware, where you can execute upgrades, before applying them to a live system, which hopefully should highlight any problems.

I would argue that it is not the job of a high level application such as A2Billing to tell you that what you about to do may be courageous, but not necessarily wise.

Joe

I would have to strongly disagree there. While a2billing may not know the exact reason an update failed I would have expected it to email and log the fact that it was getting errors writing to the database! A2billing is a billing system and therefore having it report something as important as not been able to write to the database or getting errors trying to call stored procs to bill customers would have been a requirement i would have thought.

Chris

Hi guys,

I am having the same issue as explained above. I am running A2B-1.4.1 on Fedora Core 8 with MySQL version 5.0.33. The MySQL version have not changed from what it was. (i.e 5.0.33). The App just suddenly stopped updating accounts. I cant even import new rates. It always return errors.

How can I get this fixed. I tried upgrading with yum upgrade mysql, but it returned" Nothing to do". If its truely a MySQL (or mysql.proc file) error, How can this be fixed/corrected on Fedora 8.

Any clue will be highly appreciated.

Cheers,

K.

Hi

I had a similar problem, but I cannot remember the exact sequence of commands.

This is how I identified it:-

I enabled the PHP Quick Profiler - see common/lib/customer.defines.php
I then did something to a2Billing, e.g added a new customer, and checked what queries it ran.
I manually copied and pasted each one in order into a MySQL console at the command line.

This gave me an error message, that I pasted into Google, and a few seconds later, I was up and running again.

Joe