A2Billing Install Guide

Some knowledge of Asterisk and Linux is expected in order to install the system.

1. Install Asterisk with Asterisk Realtime, MySQL, Apache and PHP version 5.2
2. Download and explode the A2Billing tarball.
3. Move, copy or symlink the Admin, Customer, Agent and Common directories into web-root, or configure apache to display them in a directory of your choice.
4. Move copy or symlink AGI/a2billing.php into the asterisk agi-bin directory, and also copy or symlink the common/lib directory.
5. Create a new A2Billing database then create the database schema with DataBase/mysql-5.x/a2billing-mysql-schema-v1.7.0.sql
6. Apply each “DataBase/mysql-5.x/UPDATE...” SQL file in order from 1.7.0 to the latest version.
7. Place a2billing.conf in /etc/ and adjust the database settings to suit your install.
8. Move or copy your sound files from addons/sounds/ into the asterisk “sounds” directory.
9. Install the cronjobs from the Cronjobs/ directory. The comments at the top of each file give a suggested schedule for each cronjob.
10. Configure the Asterisk dial-plan for A2Billing using the files in addons/asterisk-conf/ as a guide.

The role of A2Billing is to provide public telephony services and therefore in the majority of cases, customers must be given access by both web services and VoIP. A2Billing is often better hosted on a public IP address to reduce NAT issues.
Although an aggregation or PBX distribution can be used as a base for A2Billing, most are not security hardened for connection directly to the Internet and indeed are provided with the caveat that they should be located behind a separate hardware firewall with no access allowed from outside the LAN (Local Area Network).
Note that any telephony server exposed to the internet is a valuable target where an attacker can make real money using a variety of fraudulent techniques. Therefore great care should be taken in building any telephony system to ensure that it is secure.
We recommend that all customers and users operate the latest version of A2Billing. In general we have a policy of not removing any functionality from A2Billing, so there is little or no danger in upgrading to the latest stable version.