Authentication and accounting

Hi,
we are planing to install asterisk to allow our agents to place call (internationnal call).

  1. We want to authenticate each user who want to place external call.
  2. we want to give a credit to each agent for external call so agent who has no credit shouldn’t be able to place call.
    we want to know how we can implement authencation and acccounting and wich version is better asterisk at home or the cvs version.

Asterisk@home (now known as trixbox) isn’t bad. However it’s complicated web interface may be much more than you need, and it is much harder to debug.
CVS (now SVN, they stopped using CVS several months ago) probably isn’t what you want either. It would be a development version.

You want a release. The easiest way to obtain one is to go to www.asterisk.org and download the tar.gz files that are featured on the right side of the page. This will probably be the most useful for you.

As for how to set up your system for billing, you can try A2Billing. asterisk2billing.org/ it is a free, full featured billing app that can be used for calling cards and that sort of thing. You can generate PIN numbers for your agents and ‘top up’ their credit. If configured correctly, a user without a PIN or a user with insufficient credit in their account will be unable to place a call, according to the rules you set. (IE, you could make local calls free).

Hope that helps!