 |  |
a couple concerns (fwd)
From: Host
Date: Thursday, August 6, 1998
Time: 10:39:41 am
Dear sir,
We are interested in buying your software, and are evaluating the demo
version at present. we have some concerns as below:
we are using bay networks/xylogics annexes, and they use acp
authentication (proprietary format) that produces a file called
acp_logfile. will your software work with this type of log?
we bill for excessive disk usage, with a cron job to log usage every
morning. if possible, it would be good to also be able to incorporate
this into the new billing. (attached is the script we use to log disk
usage on our system)
we also have a problem with people sharing their password and several
people logging in with a single username at once, so we have another
script to finger at the annex and see if there are more than one of any
user connected, and if so, log it - when billing them, the duplicate time
is billed at another rate in *addition* to the standard rate for both
occurences of that user. this could be done with some fancy math by
examining the dialup log, i currently do it the quick n dirty way.
one important item, the hourly rates for dialups.. there is a thing
called PNETS here, which is a "tax" charged by hongkong telecom for
``reselling telephone services''. all public dialup connections are
charged this by the telephone company, similar to an 800 number or
something where the line is metered and charged extra to the isp. we in
turn need to charge this to the customer. (we get the short end of the
stick because handshaking and negative authentications can't be charged,
but that's another story)
in conclusion, we have some corporate dialup plans where they are given
say 200 hours of "free" time, where they are charged this set hourly rate.
(they have 10 accounts, all pooled together for the usage) after their
"free" hours are up, we charge another rate on top of the previous hourly
rate.
one less important item, we do forwarding by a feature or modification to
sendmail.cf, i guess it's a popular thing to do. anyways, we have a file
in /etc called virtusertable, on each line there is listed a source and
destination, separated by spaces or tabs. the source can be either
username@domain.com or domain.com, and the destination can be a single
username or username@destination.com. in the second case of source, all
mail going to any user at domain.com will be magically forwarded to
destination. (to make changes effective, it is necessary to do a
"makedbm virtusertable virtusertable" to create the dir/pag files, then
send a HUP signal to sendmail)
i noticed you have options to set the forwarding of a user in the aliases
file, so i'm mentioning this here.
there are 145 isp's in hong kong, and this means there is a pretty big
market for your product here.. if there is a reseller program, we would
be interested in reselling your product, and quite possibly making a
traditional chinese version of the interface. (could be used in taiwan
also)
awaiting your reply, thanks and best regards.
Host
Messages In This Thread:
Return to Digital Point Solutions' Home Page