The astpp-ani-map.agi application can be used to support ANI based user authentication. This involves work in the dialing plan that we do not have samples for at present. This application can also be used to perform password authentication on ASTPP accounts however this application is so new that we don't have everything finalized yet.

ASTPP has support for both postpaid and prepaid billing. I will attempt to outline a few of the differences.

Prepaid Accounts

Prepaid accounts are the most basic. When a call goes through, astpp-authorize checks to make sure the user has enough credit left to place the call. If they do, the call is allowed and a timelimit is set based on the amount of credit the user has left. A potential weakness in this is that if a user is allowed to place multiple simultaneous calls they can spend more than their credit limit. For a prepaid account, having the credit limit field set at other than 0 will allow them to spend the specified number of dollars past their prepaid amount.

Dynamic DID & extension mapping is handled with astpp-did-map.agi as shown in the Asterisk Integration section.

Least Cost Routing is managed with the use of astpp-lcr.agi as outlined in the Asterisk Integration section.

Credit control is managed with the use of astpp-authorize.agi as outlined in the Asterisk Integration section. Credit control works using a combination of the account balance as well as the credit control which is set per account. The number of simultaneous calls allowed is used to ensure that customers are not allowed to exceed their credit limit. To calculate the maximum length for a call we take the available funds and divide it by the number of channels allowed.

The call rating engine in ASTPP has 2 different modes it can run in, realtime and batch. To run it in batch mode, put “/usr/local/astpp/astpp-rate-engine.pl -runtype-sweep” into your crontab. For realtime, you need to run “/usr/local/astpp/astpp-rate-engine.pl -runtype=realtime” upon startup.

This page needs to contain information detailing the different fields in the Routes table. Any volunteers?

I will start here with the following:

Pattern This is a regex pattern that astpp will use to match dialed numbers to a price. Here is an example ^1403.* means that the number must start with 1403 but after that anything goes. Using standard North American dialing patterns this would capture southern Alberta, Canada.

You should now have a working install of ASTPP. However at this moment it won't do you any good. You need to make a few modifications to Asterisk to get ASTPP to work.

1.

We will start by editing the Asterisk CDR database to work with ASTPP. We need to add a field to the 'cdr' table. This can be done by the following commands on the box where the mysql database is hosted.
1.

“mysql -u root -p”
2.

Enter password and hit enter.
3.

“use asteriskcdrdb” If your CDR database is a different name enter that name here.

You have ASTPP installed on your system. Now we must perform the initial configuration. You will need to go in and manually confirm the contents of /var/lib/astpp/astpp-config.conf. You will also need to edit the settings stored in the database using phpmyadmin (Sometime in the near future, we'll have an editor available.) I have outlined the variables and fields below.

ASTPP Database Configuration
Host: Enter the ipaddres or dns name of the machine which is running MySQL where the ASTPP database will be hosted. - $config{dbhost}
Username: The username in MySQL with the necessary permissions to create the ASTPP database. - $config{dbuser}

Enhanced Configuration

The enhanced configuration cannot be done from the gui. This is largely because there is information in here that can cause real damage if changed. Please exercise extra caution in editing this file. Here is the file as it comes. I have added extra comments.

# This file contains the more advanced ASTPP variables which should remain

# mostly constant between installs and which you do not want to change too easily.

# Changing this variables without knowing exactly what you are doing could have

# far ranging consequences.

# The Author

results_per_page = 30 # ASTPP breaks up the results into pages when there

Instructions for Asterisk(TM) Installation

1. Download ASTPP as per the instructions at http://www.astpp.org/?q=node/163  Please be aware that if you want Freeswitch support you will need to download svn trunk.
2. Extract the astpp archive into its own directory
3. Move to the astpp directory: cd astpp
4. If you've not already resolved all the perl dependencies, do the with the following command: make resolve_perl_dep
5. Install ASTPP.  If you're using Asterisk then run "make install_asterisk".  If you're using FreeSwitch then use "make install_freeswitch"