Hello Mark, It is fairly easy to come up with a Perl script that outputs all of the customer radios into a text file that you can then parse and put into Nagios. We do that with Xymon for all of our customer devices, and it works very well. You can also come up with a pgsql request coming from your Nagios box that just extracts the wanted information out of the Freeside database and reloads Nagios.
For inventory tracking, we have a separate item number for each radio type. Fairly easy to generate a report showing how many of each type of radio we have in the system, and we use the MAC address of the radio as the serial number. I do not use Freeside to keep track of inventory that is outside of the billing system, we have a separate program for that task. Freeside documentation is kind of lacking, and it takes some time to get figured out. Unfortunately, when you get to a certain size billing gets quite complicated and just about anything you use is going to be complex. I've been using Freeside for 8 years now. It is hands down better than all of the other billing systems that I have had direct experience with (Rodopi, Billmax, Emerald, Powercode) but I cannot give any recommendation one way or the other toward Platypus or Wispmon. Being able to modify it and adjust it to fit our needs is very important to me, and probably one of the biggest issues I have had with other billing systems. Once we got over the initial hump, it has been excellent for us. Matt Larsen mlar...@vistabeam.com On 8/22/2010 10:57 PM, Mark Dueck wrote: > I too have been "working" on putting up a billing system for over a year > now. I have a working VM from Freeside, but it really seems like it's > not a full install. I can't get anything to really work in it, or maybe > it's just that there's no documentation and I don't know how to get it > working. > > > From what I've played with it, it does not have half the inventory > tracking that I would like, and the whole table structure looks so darn > complicated, it would take me a few full days studying all the tables to > come up with a python script that would generate my nagios config file > for my clients -- which are my full intentions for whichever system I > put in unless it has it's own monitoring system. > > I found this page a few weeks ago: > http://www.cio.com.au/article/324595/5_open_source_billing_systems_watch/ > > I've taken a quick look at each, and so far the CitrusDB seems to be the > easiest one to work with and extent to what I would like to have. > > Unless we can put our heads together and document how to get freeside > working because I've heard that you can without much effort extend it to > do most anything. > > > > Mark > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
