PPP Connection Costs Logger

The easy way to monitor your phone costs

What is it?

ppplog keeps track of your ppp online sessions. Once started it detects when you are online and automatically calculates costs according to your local phone company.

I wanted to make it simple and flexible.

Flexibility
It doesn't matter whether your company still calculates by units (fix price for a unit, units differ in length) or by seconds (unitlength = n sec, price differs). Everything can be easily configured.

Simplicity
The setup for your phone company is stored in a config file. I wanted to make it as intuitive as possible. The cost calculation is based on „zone“ definitions. See below for an example.

ppplog is released under the GNU/GPL licence ( see http://www.gnu.org for more information )

The project files are hosted on SourceForge and can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ppplog/

If you have questions don't hesitate to send me an email — Clemens Wacha

Download

ppplog-1.2.tar.gz

Documentation

Documentation and configuration

Examples

Lets say your phone companys pricing model looks like this: every unit is one second long but it's cost differs from time to time:

Weekdays	Cost / Hour	Zone Name
08:00 - 17:00	2.8	Normal Week
17:00 - 23:00	1.8	Low Week
23:00 - 08:00	0.7	Night Week

Weekends	Cost / Hour	Zone Name
08:00 - 23:00	1.7	Low Weekend
23:00 - 08:00	0.6	Night Weekend

The definition in the config file would look like this:

# first: define the days when the zone is active
day 1 2 3 4 5
zone "Normal Week" 08 00 17 00 2.8 1
zone "Low Week" 17 00 23 00 1.8 1
zone "Night Week" 23 00 08 00 0.7 1

day 6 7
zone "Low Weekend" 08 00 23 00 1.7 1
zone "Night Weekend" 23 00 08 00 0.6 1

That's it!! Wasn't that easy?

Example logfile:

Starting date and time       stop time duration costs   total time total costs
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thu, 27 Feb 2003  22:51:09 - 22:59:53  00:08:44 CHF0.03 (00:08:44  CHF0.03)
Thu, 27 Feb 2003  23:30:59 - 23:35:35  00:04:36 CHF0.08 (00:13:20  CHF0.10)
Fri, 28 Feb 2003  01:29:09 - 01:42:12  00:13:03 CHF0.16 (00:26:23  CHF0.25)
Fri, 28 Feb 2003  01:52:10 - 01:55:12  00:03:02 CHF0.06 (00:29:25  CHF0.31)
Fri, 28 Feb 2003  10:53:31 - 10:59:09  00:05:38 CHF0.19 (00:35:03  CHF0.50)
Fri, 28 Feb 2003  12:57:57 - 12:58:44  00:00:47 CHF0.05 (00:35:50  CHF0.55)
Fri, 28 Feb 2003  17:07:09 - 17:14:25  00:07:16 CHF0.21 (00:43:06  CHF0.76)
Fri, 28 Feb 2003  17:59:02 - 18:02:03  00:03:01 CHF0.08 (00:46:07  CHF0.84)
Fri, 28 Feb 2003  18:03:46 - 18:14:48  00:11:02 CHF0.03 (00:57:09  CHF0.87)

Changelog

24. March, 2003
Here is a new version of ppplog. I have fixed a bug that caused the pidfile to be overwritten when starting the program twice. I also added a new FEATURE: you can now log more than one phone comany at the time. Each such configuration set has its own log- and savefiles.
04. March, 2003
This is the *initial* release of ppplog for the public. As you can see from the version number the release is already stable. Well.. that's the trick with small tools