====== General description ======
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Subscriber Management (SM) allows to enable services, to control the available bandwidth and apply other actions on level of individual operator's subscribers.

DPI platform identifies subscribers by their IP address as there is no other information in IP packet. Therefore, in case of dynamic IP addresses' assignment, one should integrate DPI with the addresses assignment node. The latest can be Radius, DHCP, BRAS. Alternatively one can use Radius events monitor.

In order to send commands to DPI SM creates TCP link with DPI via its control port. Therefore one has to enable external access by control port on the firewall. However it is advised to run SM on the DPI platform itself. SM is configures to communicate with DPI via IO interface by default.

You have to [[dpi:dpi_components:platform:dpi_admin:admin_db#Activating the built-in database|activate the built-in database]] in order to preserve subscribers' profiles configuration upon restarts of the platform. Alternatively you can place the initialization scripts into /etc/dpi/init.d/ directory - (similarly to a common Linux method to control shapers and boot processes). The latest method has some advantages. It may be a suitable solution for fast migration from Linux/FreeBSD or hardware shapers with no own database.