There is only a day left before our brand new release! I want to explain you some things about the name change from the technical point of view, but if you are a current fan of eBox, I’ll explain also what other things you should do if you haven’t done them yet

First of all, our websites and emails are going to change from tomorrow on. It’s simple:

Remember to update your bookmarks and address books!

If you use Facebook or Twitter, don’t forget to become a fan of Zentyal or follow us in our new Zentyal twitter account.

IRC and mailing lists have also changed: you will be automatically switched to the new mailing lists (and probably you have already received the mails notifying that). Anyway, here’s a reminder of the new lists:

If you are an IRC user, remember to change your client configuration to point to the new channels: #zentyal and #zentyal-es (for Spanish speakers). The IRC server is still irc.freenode.net.

Let’s go now with the software-related stuff. First of all, here are the new launchpad PPA with the official packages and the Zentyal SourceForge project with the ISO images.

Finally, as doing a complete rebranding of the product just before a stable release is a bit risky, we have decided to use still some references to eBox to avoid any potential trouble. For this reason, you will still find “eBox” in the URL’s of the web application, in the name and path of the scripts, log files (/var/log/ebox/ebox.log), configuration files (/etc/ebox), etc. However, these references will be changed in the future but we’ll have to live with it in 2.0.

I think that eBox 1.4 was a pretty stable release since the beginning, but as you know, the community always helps to find issues for some specific corner cases and I want to thank all of them because we really appreciate their work in helping to make eBox a better product every day. Anyway, let me tell you a short story about the samba module (probably one of the most popular modules in eBox) in this 1.4 release.

One of the starred features in 1.4 was the support for Windows 7 clients and we added it by including a new backported version of the samba package (3.4.5). Unfortunately this version had a bug in the full_audit feature, that is required to make the samba logs work, so if full_audit was enabled, the samba module didn’t work at all. Therefore we had to do a sacrifice and temporary disable that feature to include the Windows 7 support which demand was in constant increase.

Later, samba 3.4.6 was released and according to its changelog the full_audit problem was fixed, so after backporting it and making some successful tests we uploaded the new samba package and also a new version of ebox-samba to the 1.4-proposed repository enabling the logs again. Few days later people started reporting that in some cases (only when trying to directly open or create a file instead of copying or moving it) the file sharing feature was broken after the upgrade. We only could give them a temporary workaround (manually disabling the full_audit feature again). Then we hoped to find this bug fixed in the next samba release, but it wasn’t.

So we did more research and finally we found a very simple patch in the samba bugzilla, so we applied it to our backported samba version and uploaded the new package, that has been also included in the new 1.4-2 version. As we have not received any further reports regarding this issue, it seems that we can finally have Windows 7 support and logs working together! Improvements like this, made with the help of eBox users, make us to improve eBox day after day and we’re truly excited seeing how the project is shaping up!

Some of the new features were implemented time ago, but I was waiting for a big one for the new release, and precisely my work at eBox Technologies has brought me the opportunity to do it.  We are adding multi-gateway support to eBox with DHCP and PPPoE interfaces (currently it only supported it with static ones).

With this feature implemented eBox will take a big step forward to become the reference in the open source small business server market.

Now ANSTE is capable of easily simulate DHCP and PPPoE routers, this way we can automatize all the testing of the new features.

Here is the complete list of new features and fixes:

• Added new router types with dhcp and pppoe
• Added user-extensions and single-window settings for Selenium
• Now -wait-fail option gives the opportunity of retry a test
• Added new protocol and firefox-profile settings for Selenium
• Added precondition attributes (var and eq) to <host> test elements
• Added <precondition> element to include <test> and <host> only if
  condition is satisfied
• Bugfix: use flock for allowing only one instance of anste
• Added name of the user that executed ANSTE on the HTML report
• Bugfix: missing HTML report generation time
• Added scripts executed to the test results

You can get the anste package from the usual repository:

deb http://people.warp.es/~josh/debian ./

The experience of an entire year working with the rest of the eBox team has been very positive. In this last year eBox has improved a lot and I’m very proud of being part of it. In fact, I started to work with part of the current eBox team during the spring of 2007, while I was doing developing ANSTE project, specially designed for the automatization of the integration tests of eBox Platform. But now, with a company fully backing eBox development, I believe it is our opportunity to make eBox the best Linux Small Business Server and the first viable open source alternative to Windows SBS.

I don’t want to finish this post without giving thanks to all the people that has contributed to eBox or used it during these four years. This has been a great year but I’m sure the next ones will be even better. And don’t forget to stay tuned for the 1.4 release that will be out just in a couple of months from now!

Today, I had my first experience with Windows as a server (Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition). I wanted it to serve as Domain Controller. Well, it’s not difficult, but it’s really painful. You spend several minutes clicking “next” buttons on a few wizards, watching progress bars, choosing lots of options… And finally, when it’s ready, you try to add a new user to the domain and after 10 tries you get tired because all passwords are rejected due to “insecurity”.

I spent a couple of minutes trying to find where to edit the password policy with no luck.

You’ll probably say that I have no idea about Windows. Yes, it’s true. But if you have used eBox you already know that you can deploy a Domain Controller in less than two minutes, just accessing the web interface and enabling the proper module (one click), and then you press the “save changes” button and you are ready to add users from the “Add User” menu in the same interface (intuitive, isn’t it?) and changing the password policy settings (new feature on eBox 1.2) is also immediate.

Is Windows Active Directory more powerful? Yes, that is probably true. However, let’s think about a typical small or medium bussiness, do you think they use all windows server “advanced features”? I don’t think so, and remember that eBox is constantly evolving.

I think that free software wins once again. But that’s only my opinion. Is it yours too?

Sadly, I couldn’t be there but I’m sure it was very interesting. At least we can see the slides here.

Altough ANSTE was created for testing eBox, this is a example of how it can be useful for many other projects.

Now, I’m proud to announce that ANSTE has reached the 0.6 version, that comes with some minor improvements that will make the life of the test developer easier.

You can get the anste package from the following repository:

deb http://people.warp.es/~josh/debian ./


Happy testing!