The Proxy Accounting addon measures traffic generated by hosts or users. The amount of traffic is graphically displayed.
Automated invoices can be sent to customers and providers every month. Invoices are sent via email and archived within IPFire.
Invoices can be customized with a logo and additional information.
All data is held in a SQLite database.
Installation
Accounting can be installed with the Pakfire web interface (look for squid-accounting) or via the console:
pakfire install proxy-accounting
Configuration
The first step is to configure the addon. You need to configure if the addon writes an own log file (recommended), set the tax rate and currency as well as defining if the mail system 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.
Address Management
If you want to send bills you need to define customer and provider addresses. A customer is someone who uses the proxy server 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.
Billing Groups
Now that one or more providers are defined Billing Groups can be created.
First, define a Group-Name. Then if needed, fill in an optional bill text (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 text-box 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:
| Hover mouse over the icon to view members in the group. Icon is not clickable | |
| Click to edit the Billing Group | |
| Click folder to view all saved pdf bills. Folder will be empty if no bills has been generated | |
| Click icon to view example pdf. The "normal" pdf bills will not include watermark | |
| Click to delete Billing Group |
Maintenance
In the maintenance area you can see how much hard disk 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 disk space 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 disk space.
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.
Note
- With the Web Proxy set to Transparent mode the Accounting add-on will not track HTTPS traffic. The Web Proxy must be set to Conventional mode (non-transparent mode) to track all traffic.
- This addon is also know as squid accounting and proxy accounting and accounting.