Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 14:06:11 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org> To: Murray Stokely <murray@freebsdmall.com> Cc: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Two new articles for review Message-ID: <20050830110611.GA80696@orion.daedalusnetworks.priv> In-Reply-To: <20050830101853.GC20599@freebsdmall.com> References: <20050830101853.GC20599@freebsdmall.com>
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On 2005-08-30 03:18, Murray Stokely <murray@freebsdmall.com> wrote: > I've committed two new articles to the tree and both could use some > review and improvement before we announce them to the world. If you > have time, please take a look and see what improvements you can make : > > Argentina.com Case Study : > > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/casestudy-argentina.com/ Some proposed fixes attached. Very nice case study :) %%% Index: article.sgml =================================================================== RCS file: /home/ncvs/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/casestudy-argentina.com/article.sgml,v retrieving revision 1.1 diff -u -r1.1 article.sgml --- article.sgml 30 Aug 2005 00:00:25 -0000 1.1 +++ article.sgml 30 Aug 2005 11:04:48 -0000 @@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ <title>Overview</title> <para>Argentina.Com is an Argentine ISP with a small infrastructure - of fewer than 15 employees and whose primary source of income + of fewer than 15 employees, whose primary source of income originates in the free dialup business. It began operation in the year 2000 with barely one server for mail and chat.</para> @@ -52,8 +52,8 @@ factor of 10 with regard to the mail user base.</para> <para>Our competitors in the Argentine market of free dialup include - Fullzero which is owned by the Clarin Media Group, Alternativa - Gratis, and Tutopia which is funded by IFX and promoted by + Fullzero, which is owned by the Clarin Media Group, Alternativa + Gratis, and Tutopia, which is funded by IFX and promoted by Hotmail. Some of these large corporate competitors started their free dialup business with multi-million dollar investments and aggressive television and Internet ad campaigns. Argentina.Com @@ -61,8 +61,9 @@ It has climbed to the fourth position and to an 8% market share during the last two years thanks to superior quality of service.</para> - <para>In Argentina and Latin America in general people who don't - have computers at home go to so called <quote>Locutorios</quote> + <para>People who live in Argentina and other parts of Latin America do not + always have computers or Internet access at home. As a result, they + frequently use one of so called <quote>Locutorios</quote> (Internet Centers), where for a few pesos they can use a computer connected to the Internet and usually read and write emails through popular webmails like Hotmail, Yahoo or @@ -80,8 +81,8 @@ <para>The main challenge for Argentina.Com is to achieve a dialup uptime of at least 99.95%, or less than 5 hours yearly downtime. Due to the high rotation and volatility in this - business, things have to work correctly so the user doesn't switch - -voluntarily or not- the dialup provider or the number he calls to + business, things have to work correctly so the user does not + switch—voluntarily or not—the dialup provider or the number he calls to connect. The dialup business involves a support structure to deal with the Telcos about telephony problems and quality of service, plus a technical structure where latency and packet-loss should be @@ -104,12 +105,12 @@ made it necessary to design the new system with at least 300M user disk space, but at a cost lower than 3 US dollars per GB with some degree of redundancy. Bear in mind that rackmountable hardware is - hard to find in Argentina, and is between 30 and 40% more + hard to find in Argentina, and is between 30 to 40% more expensive than in the US. Our total budget for equipment - acquisition in two years was 75,000 USD, which is only a fraction + acquisition in two years was $75,000 USD, which is only a fraction of our direct competitors' investments.</para> - <para>With regard to the antispam service, it became necessary to + <para>As part of our antispam service, it became necessary to develop a product that could compete with the systems offered by the big ones. Given the hostile conditions imposed by the existence of spam (dictionary attacks, spams with high degree of @@ -117,11 +118,11 @@ it becomes very difficult to achieve an excellent uptime while repelling attacks. One must also be careful that the user doesn't lose mails because of false positives in the classification - strategy, that he doesn't become flooded with spam or spam - notifications, and dangerous mails don't make it through to his + strategy, that he does not become flooded with spam or spam + notifications, and dangerous mails do not make it through to his mailbox. In addition, the technical infrastructure for spam - classification shouldn't introduce noticeable delays in the - delivery of mails. Finally, the mail system has to be protected + classification should not introduce noticeable delays in the + delivery of messages. Finally, the mail system has to be protected from spammers who might misuse it to send spam.</para> <para>The opensource paradigm tends to require hiring large teams of @@ -135,7 +136,6 @@ Computer Science professionals are hard to find, most of them live and work abroad, while the remaining have stable jobs either at the government or big companies.</para> - </sect1> <sect1 id="freebsd"> @@ -152,7 +152,7 @@ a Megaraid card, but the disk latency was enormous and the mail application never really worked.</para> - <para>The first step depicted towards the "FreeBSD solution" + <para>The first step depicted towards the <quote>FreeBSD solution</quote> consisted in migrating this hardware and commercial software to FreeBSD 4.8 with Linux emulation.</para> </sect2> @@ -179,8 +179,8 @@ double-Xeons and a few double-Opterons to be co-located in the Datacenters where we have dialup and hosting operation contracts. All of them run FreeBSD, ranging from 4.8 (there are - a couple with two years uptime and zero trouble) til currently - 6.0-BETA2.</para> + a couple with two years uptime and zero trouble) to fairly recent + versions, like 6.0-BETA2.</para> <para>The general policy for the operating system is to try to bring all servers periodically to the stable code branch by @@ -202,16 +202,15 @@ and making it possible to deal with TTLs between 60 and 600 seconds to have quicker response in case of trouble.</para> - <para>Second step was to deploy two more boxes of the same class, - again in different Datacenters, to only deal with Radius and + <para>Our second step was to deploy two more boxes of the same class, + again in different datacenters, to only deal with Radius and recursive DNS. The Network Access Servers at the Telcos were configured to send Radius Authorization and Accounting to those - servers, and to assign these recursive DNSs to dialup users.</para> + servers, and to assign these recursive DNS servers to dialup users.</para> - <para>The third <quote>golden rule</quote> never to put SMTP + <para>The third step was to apply the <quote>golden rule</quote>: never to SMTP incoming and outgoing in the same servers. We deployed separate FreeBSD boxes with postfix for incoming and outgoing mail.</para> - </sect2> <sect2 id="freebsd-email"> @@ -238,14 +237,14 @@ defined a few spam levels going from the least to the most tolerant, each one with cutoff or discard levels. Every email with a score below the one associated with the selected spam - tolerance goes to the user's Inbox. Emails between this level - and the cutoff level go to a user's folder named Spam, and those + tolerance goes to the user's <quote>Inbox</quote>. Emails between this level + and the cutoff level go to a user's folder named <quote>Spam</quote>, and those above the cutoff level get discarded because it's a very obvious spam. For the sake of simplicity, we transparently associated - the use of the Address Book with the antispam system, so that + the use of the <quote>Address Book</quote> with the antispam system, so that every personal contact gets automatically whitelisted.</para> - <para>With the introduction of Spamassassin 3.x, the DNS traffic + <para>With the introduction of Spamassassin 3.x, the DNS traffic to query global blacklists grew considerably, so we signed agreements with SpamCop, Spamhaus and SURBL to install public mirrors of their databases in our FreeBSD equipment. Thanks to @@ -256,9 +255,9 @@ soon as we started building a new Cyrus-Imap back-end with MySQL authentication, we needed to multiplex incoming mail to users in both old and new maildrop formats. Finally, we managed to - migrate hundreds of thousands of mailspools to the new Cyrus - architecture using a great tool named imapsync, which is - directly installable from ports. We also put perdition, a POP3 + migrate hundreds of thousands of mailspools to the new Cyrus architecture using a great tool named + <filename role="package">mail/imapsync</filename>, which is directly installable from ports. We also put + <filename role="package">mail/perdition</filename>, a POP3 and IMAP proxy, in the middle to assure a transparent migration and distribution of mailboxes across several servers. Briefly, all information of where a user's maildrop is located resides in @@ -270,17 +269,17 @@ biggest are Pentium IV with 4G of RAM and 3ware cards in chassis with 12 hotswappable bays, organized in 3 RAID-5 units of 1 Terabyte each. The 3ware software sends you en email whenever - the RAID is degraded -mostly because of a failing disk- and lets + the RAID is degraded—mostly because of a failing disk—and lets you rebuild the RAID with everything up and running. We use - smartmontools in the cases where we have less redundancy, to + <filename role="package">sysutils/smartmontools</filename> in the cases where we have less redundancy, to have immediate alerts of disks with temperature problems or failing selftests.</para> <para>As webmail software, we chose a commercial product named Atmail, which is available with perl sources and utilizes - mod_perl. Under FreeBSD it's extremely easy to deal with perl + <filename role="package">www/mod_perl</filename>. Under FreeBSD it's extremely easy to deal with perl modules, you don't even need to use the CPAN shell, you just - have to choose the right port and run "make install". After + have to choose the right port and run <quote><literal>make install</literal></quote>. After several months of integration work, we integrated the Client-only version of Atmail that talks IMAP with our back-ends. We had to modify some parts of the code to adapt the @@ -296,7 +295,7 @@ <para>With the adoption of FreeBSD, there was almost no additional effort necessary to setup a working Apache, PHP and MySQL environment in minutes. Even the upgrades from PHP4 to PHP5 were - painless. The ports system was again extemely useful in these + painless. The ports system was again extremely useful in these cases, and permitted us to do things like compress text and html contents in Apache with just a few lines of documentation. In addition, we have experienced excellent performance and @@ -317,13 +316,11 @@ other fields like hosting for resellers and housing with presence in three Argentine Datacenters.</para> - <para>We offer now also corporate dialup for roaming users in - Argentina and Peru thanks to our presence and contracts with most + <para>Now, we also offer corporate dialup for roaming users in + Argentina and Peru, thanks to our presence and contracts with most Telcos. Among our indirect customers, there are major American companies like Ford, Exxon and Reuters. We now run the free dialup business in Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Panama as well.</para> </sect1> </article> - - %%%
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