IPA -- Pluggable Accounting System

Brief description
=================

IPA is the ``Pluggable Accounting System''.  The IPA distribution
consists of three utilities for general purpose accounting and well
defined APIs for external modules (modules are not part of the IPA
distribution). These utilities allow to solve several accounting
related tasks (not every possible task).

These utilities are: ipa -- utility for accounting, ipactl -- control
utility for ipa and ipastat -- statistics viewer.  All utilities are
system independent and should work on any Unix-like operating system.

There are three kinds of modules: accounting, database and statistics
modules.  Accounting modules are used for gathering statistics from
sources which are supported by particular modules (source of statistics
can be anything).  Database modules are used for storing statistics
to databases which are supported by particular modules (here database
is an abstraction and it can be not real database).  Statistics modules
are used for querying statistics for some time interval.

Accounting and database modules are used by ipa(8), statistics
modules are used by ipastat(8).  ipactl(8) does not use any module,
but it allows to send control commands to ipa(8) and influence on
statistics on-the-fly.

To describe all features of IPA it is necessary to include content
of all manual pages here.  So, if you want to understand the idea
of IPA and how it works start reading from ipa.conf(5), then read
ipa(8) and ipactl(8); then read ipastat(8) and ipastat.conf(5).
If you want to know how IPA works with modules, read ipa_mod(3).

Home page
=========

Complete documentation, source files distribution and relevant
information about IPA are available on http://ipa-system.sourceforge.net/
site.

License
=======

Read the LICENSE file.

Installation
============

Read the INSTALL file.

Bugs and patches
================

Send bugs reports and patches to the author.

Author
======

Andrey Simonenko
simon@comsys.ntu-kpi.kiev.ua