About Diameter in the Communications Server Environment

The Diameter service consists of connection information for an individual Diameter peer. A peer configuration contains details of a listener, peers, and a set of one or more Diameter applications.

A Diameter listener is a local Diameter peer which defines details such as the following:

• Vendor ID

• Product name

• Firmware version

• Mode, such as, client, server, relay, or proxy

• Address/port/transport of the local peer (bindto)

• Flag indicating if unknown peer connections will be accepted or not (accept-unknown-peer)

• Time interval for retrying peer connections (tctimer)

• Realm name used by the local peer

A peer configuration can also include a list of known peers. Each peer points to the application, including the host/port/transport of the peer, and also to the realm. A peer configuration includes a list of Diameter applications to run.

Applications can be either authentication or accounting applications supported by a particular vendor.

Other configurables of the Diameter service are max-threads, which denotes the maximum number of threads in a Grizzly pool configuration, msg-buffer-size, which indicates the size of the byte buffers in the pool used to store and parse incoming messages, and enable-msg-persistence for enabling and disabling message persistence.

Diameter Tools

After installing Diameter Adapter 1.0, you must configure Diameter for Sun GlassFish Communications Server before you can use the Diameter tools.

The following topics are addressed here:

• Admin Console

• Command-line Interface

• Code Generation Tool

Admin Console

The Communications Server Admin Console is a browser-based utility that features a graphical interface for performing administrative tasks. The format for starting the Administration Console in a web browser is http://hostname:port. For example:

http://localhost:4848

After you create the Diameter service, the Diameter node appears in the Admin Console. You can then use the Admin Console pages to perform Diameter administrative tasks. Navigate to the Diameter pages as follows: Configurations->config-name->Diameter Service. You can display the help text for a page in the Admin Console by clicking the Help button on the page.

Command-line Interface

Alternatively, you can use the asadmin commands to configure and administer the Diameter service from the command line. You can run the asadmin commands either from a command prompt or from a script. The format for starting the asadmin utility on the command line is as-install/bin/asadmin command --option. A multimode example:

asadmin> monitor --type httplistener

For a list of all the asadmin commands for Diameter, see Appendix A, Diameter Commands for the asadmin Utility.

You can display help information for a command by typing help followed by the command. For example:

asadmin> help create-diameter-application

For a collection of the help pages for all Communications Server asadmin commands, see Sun GlassFish Communications Server 2.0 Reference Manual.

Code Generation Tool

The Diameter Adapter provides a tool for developers to add or edit attribute value pairs (AVPs) that are available in the current API. The tool can be used to generate Enums, grouped AVP interfaces, implementation classes, and factory methods to simplify application code development. For information and instructions on using this tool, see Chapter 3, Generating Diameter Code for Communications Server.