Squid Accounting

Attention All Versions from 1.0.4 on need IPFire core 94 upwards. Otherwise the addon won't work.

This addon can be used to measure traffic generated by hosts or users. The amount of traffic is graphically displayed and you are able to generate customers and providers to send automatical bills every month. The bills are send via Email and archived within IPFire.

Furthermore you are very flexible to adpat the bills with a logo and set individual bill positions that don't need to have anything to do with the traffic.

All Data is held in a SQLite database.

1. Installation

Just go to the Webinterface of your IPFire system into the tab "Pakfire". Then select from the left Listbox the "Squid-accounting"-Addon.

Then click on the "install" Button and you're done.

2. Configuration

The first step is to configure the addon. You need to configure if the addon writes an own logfile (recommended), set the tax rate and currency as well as defining if the mailsystem should be activated to send the bills later automatically. Also set a mail sender address and a mail text.

Then just save the settings and you will be redirected to the main page.

2.1 Address Management

If you want to send bills you need to define customer and provider addresses. A customer is someone who uses the proxyserver to access the internet and should pay for the generated traffic. A provider is mostly your company which provides the internet connection to one ore more customers.

For a customer you just need to fill in the address data and an EMail address to which the bill is send at the end of each month.

When configuring a provider you need to fill in address data, and as much fields as possible from the right side (bank account, telephone number,...) This data will be displayed on the PDF bill.

2.2 Billing Groups

Now that you have defined one ore more customers and providers you are able to define Billing Groups.

First, define a Group-Name. Then if needed, fill in an optional billtext (this text will be displayed on the pdf bill for this group). Sample Text may be:

Amount payable within 14 days to one of our bank accounts.

Now select a provider and a customer address for this group.

The next Textbox will display all hosts/users that have been found by the addon so far. If you see nothing in this field, the addon has not begun to collect data or you disabled the proxy or proxy logging.

When you see some hosts/users in this box, you may select multiple users/hosts which should be in this Billing Group.

Last part is to define the amount of money for one MB. The value depends on the average traffic. You need to test the best value for your environment.

All Billing Groups are displayed in a table on the bottom of the page. You can see the group name, provider, customer and how many Members (hosts/users) are in the group.

On the right side there are several icons:

Computer icon: Just move the mouse over the icon to see which member are in the group (this icon is not clickable)
Pencil icon: Edit the Billing Group
Folder icon: Open the folder of the group where all pdf bills are saved. If no bill has been generated so far, the folder will be empty
New Page icon: See a preview pdf for that group. All data collected so far for this month will be taken and a pdf bill is generated on the fly. This is only a preview and thats the reason why there is a watermark on the pdf. The "normal" pdf bills will not have this watermark.
Trash icon: You can delete this Billing Group.

3. Maintenance

In the maintenance area you can see how much harddisk space is needed by the addon. There is the database file which can grow over time and the size of the folder where the bills are stored. Also you can check, when the addon collected the latest data.

If you run out of diskspace and the addon runs several months, you may want to delete all database entries older than 2 Months. This will shrink the database and free some diskspace.
Please note that this addon generates official bills. Therefor you should not delete already sent pdf bills from the system without making a proper backup!

If you feel that the data is useless because of several tests, you can also completely delete the whole database and begin from zero. But take in mind that erasing the database will also delete all traffic data, addresses and all data from the database.

4. Uninstall

If you want to uninstall the addon, you can simply uninstall it via webinterface in the tab "Pakfire".
Just select the installed addon from the right Listbox and klick on uninstall.