[freeside-users] FreeBSD Ports, Asterisk Provisioning

[Tony Shadwick]

Hello everyone.  I just got my first Freeside installation (1.5.7) 
completed on FreeBSD 6, using Apache2.  I've added the last few Perl 
modules that were missing from the FreeBSD ports tree and added the 
appropriate pr's so that everyone can use them.  I'm hoping to get a 
full port of Freeside into the ports tree "soon".  I think I have the 
logic around the initial installation down, presuming that the user is 
installing Postgres on localhost.  The only thing I'm trying to wrap my 
brain around is how to get the user to set up httpd.conf to run as user 
freeside and getting appropriate entries for securing freeside in there 
as well, aside from leaving a nice note for them that says "by the way, 
you need to do (this) before freeside will work correctly".  If you have 
suggestions on this I'd be happy to hear them.

Switching gears from this though, we're a small company just getting off 
the ground, and we've been offering Asterisk voice service using IAX2 
channels for a while.  We have cdr's that are going to a csv file in 
/var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/Master.csv, which is Asterisk's default.  I 
know I can read Asterisk's documentation on getting this into a Postgres 
database, so I'm not concerned about that, but I was wondering if anyone 
would care to expound upon how Freeside handles VOIP provisioning and 
billing?  I see an entry in there that looks for radius information, but 
I guess I'm not following the logic on how that ties to provisioning and 
  billing (ie, how does this add an entry for iax.conf for sip.conf, and 
create appropriate dialplan information?), and I'm not sure if Freeside 
is set up to provide a self-service interface for that voice service - 
say, allow them to make dialplan changes, perhaps change the behavior of 
their voicemail, etc.

Is this a customization beyond what is already available in Freeside?  I 
don't see it in the wiki or docs, and I've browsed the mailing list 
archive going back about a year.

Thanks!

Tony Shadwick
OSS Solutions