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Chapter 4. Configuring BillMax for Capturing RADIUS Accounting Records
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Chapter 4. Configuring BillMax for Capturing RADIUS Accounting Records

As previously noted, BillMax may be configured to use RADIUS accounting records to bill for Metered Billing or Usage Based Billing plans. This section describes how to capture and store the RADIUS accounting records that come from Terminal Servers (also known as NASs, concentrators, etc.).

BillMax comes with the Interlink AAA RADIUS Daemon, radiusd, that has been customized by BillMax. radiusd should be used to capture RADIUS accounting records only and not be used for authentication purposes. In addition, BillMax comes with radparse, a utility for loading RADIUS records from a file. This file will be created by radiusd in the event that the BillMax database is unavailable during receipt of accounting record by radiusd. In order for RADIUS accounting records to flow from Terminal Servers into either the datacall table and/or stats table, several configuration steps must be taken. First, the following settings must be determined:

  1. The "shared secret" that will be used by radiusd and the Terminal Servers.

  2. The UNIX port to which Terminal Servers will send RADIUS authentication packets and radiusd will listen on to receive authentication packets. In current installations, the default RADIUS ports are specified in the /etc/services file. The ports are 1812 and 1813. The default authentication port for BillMax as specified in the /usr/local/billmax/local/billmax.conf is 1646.

  3. If a non-BillMax RADIUS server is to be run on the BillMax server for authentication purposes, then a "fake" port that the BillMax Daemon radiusd will listen on for authentication packets must be specified. This should be a port to which no data is sent. Access to the port may be restricted by a firewall. There is no way to suppress the BillMax supplied radiusd from listening for authentication requests. The default port is specified in /etc/services. This may be overridden using settings in the /usr/local/billmax/local/billmax.conf.

  4. Make a list of the IP addresses of all the Terminal Servers that will be configured to send RADIUS accounting data to BillMax.

After having gathered the appropriate information, do the following steps:

  1. Edit /usr/local/billmax/radius/raddb/clients (also known as /usr/local/billmax/local/radius_clients. For each terminal server add the tab-delimited line:


    IPaddress sharedsecret radiusattributedictionary version

    A typical example is


    127.0.0.1 mysecret type=Ascend:NAS v1

    Note that this example assumes an Ascend compatible Terminal Server. How to map attributes from other Terminal Servers is beyond the scope of this documentation.

  2. If the terminal servers will service more than one namespace, enter their values into BillMax. See Configuring Terminal Servers. If they will service only one namespace, this step is optional.

  3. Configure each Terminal Server using the Terminal Server utilities to set the IP address and listening port of the BillMax radiusd Daemon for accounting records. Also set the shared secret.

  4. Edit /usr/local/billmax/local/billmax.conf and set appropriate values for radiusd. Look for "RADIUS" in the file. Note that if no Terminal Servers were entered into BillMax, then the -M for radiusd should be set in /usr/local/billmax/local/billmax.conf.

Documentation of interest for configuring/working with RADIUS are:

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Document Revision A for BillMax 2.2.0   -   Copyright © 1997-2006 The iSpark Group, Inc.

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