Service manual

Appendices 127
Billing
The console server family of products may be used as an intermediate buffer to collect serial data
(like billing tickets from a PBX), making them available for a posterior file transfer. Different ports
may have simultaneous billing sessions.
NOTE: Billing is supported only on ACS 5000 Advanced Console Servers running firmware version 3.3.x or
earlier.
General feature description
The console server reads the serial port and saves the information to Ramdisk files, which is limited
to the maximum number of records per file. After the files are closed, they are available for transfer
at /var/run/DB or an alternate path defined by the user in the pslave.conf file.
Once the cy_ras program detects the protocol as billing, it starts the billing application. The billing
application then opens the port (as configured in pslave.conf) and starts reading it. Records
terminated by billing_eor string are expected to be received. The console server doesn’t change the
termination method, transferring the same sequence to the file. The name of the temporary file used
to write these records is,
cycXXXXX-YYMMDD.hhmmss.tmp
- where -
XXXXX is the "hostname" or "alias"
YYMMDD is the year/month/day
hhmmss is the hour:min:sec
This name helps the user archive and browse their directory as the file may be chronologically
listed, not based on its creation or modification times, but based on when its contents were
recorded. Also, whenever hostname is not significant, the user may use the alias name (s1.alias in
pslave.conf) to match their actual plant (like PABX-trunk9). The temporary file described
previously is closed and renamed to cycXXXXX-YYMMDD.hhmmss.txt and a new temporary file
is opened when,
• the maximum number of records specified by billing_records is reached
• the lifetime specified by billing_timeout finishes
If no record is received within a file lifetime period, no file is saved.
NOTE: A zero-value for billing_record stops the application and a zero-value for billing_timeout means no time-
out is desired. The file is closed after billing_records are received.