On Wednesday 05 March 2003 12:54, Steve Langasek wrote: > After far too long evaluating prepackaged products, we're using > freshly-built homebrew software. Most of the packages that claim to do > what we need have a price tag higher than that of hiring someone to do it > right the first time.
Same here. I'm writing some software for a small internet company in town to do their billing (they used some really horrible cobbled up system now and Peachtree with some VB interface to do invoicing). I found that most products didn't do much of what they wanted, was way too complicated to setup and maintain or the cost was prohibitive. What they paid me total last year for doing system admin tasks _and_ writing this billing software was less than purchasing some billing packages not counting the recurring cost. All a person really needs is a database with tables to hold account, contact, plan, provisioning and invoicing data (with associated intermediate tables as well of course). Then you need a web interface (I used PHP) to manipulate this data, and a backend to do invoicing and optionally automatic provisioning (I used Perl). I use Mysql as the accounting backend so retrieving the monthly dial-up usage is as easy as a one line SQL statement. This is my vision of a billing system anyway. So, I have my data store (Mysql), my frontend (PHP), and my backend processing / provisioning / cleanup (Perl and cron). Simple and easy - I can tailor it to any need. I think hand writing something on a smaller scale would take very little time and one can always add to it later. -- Brendon Colby Systems Administrator Midcontinent Communications - List info/subscribe/unsubscribe? See http://www.freeradius.org/list/users.html
