Hi fellow eBox users!

Your favorite development team proudly announces the availability of eBox 1.0.

After years of development we have finished implementing the following feature set, which  we have deemed good enough to deserve the 1.0 badge:

• Networking
  • Firewall and routing
    • Network Configuration
      • DHCP server
      • NTP server
    • Filtering
    • NAT/Port redirections
    • Multi-gateway support and traffic load balancing
    • Traffic shaping (l7 filter support)
    • Traffic rate monitoring
  • Web proxy
    • Cache
    • Content filtering
  • Instant Messaging server (Jabber)
  • Domain Name Server
  • E-mail server
    • Spam and antivirus filter for mail
    • Support for greylisting
    • Transparent POP3 proxy filter
  • OpenVPN support
  • Certification Authority
  • Event notification via jabber, mail and RSS
  • Web server

• Workgroup
  • Windows user, file sharing
  • PDC support
  • Printing server
  • eGroupware: calendar sharing, address book, webmail…

• Reporting
  • Summarized reports
  • Full reports

• New dashboard to centralize service information
• Full and configuration backup

• Software updates

• Disk usage information
• RAID status

You can install the new packages using our stable repository. Note that the new packages are only available for Ubuntu Hardy at the moment. Packages for Intrepid and Jaunty are underway.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ebox/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

The 1.0 milestone, besides being a great achievement by itself, does not imply a slowdown in our development process, quite to the contrary, it provides a solid foundation for further and faster eBox development. The immediate eBox future is full of interesting new features that we are craving to see working in your production eBoxes. You can have a look at our roadmap to get an idea about what’s coming next in eBox. Some of the highlights are:

• Asterisk integration
• Hooks to allow service customization by the local administrator
• User corner for user-oriented features (i.e., password changing, …)
• Captive portal

Changelog

ebox

Bugfix: fix SQL statement to fetch last rows to consolidate
Bugfix: consolidate logs using the last date and not starting from scratch
Backport fix for EBox::Types::Union::isEqualTo
Bugfix: DomainName type make comparisons case insensitive
according to RFC 1035
• EBox::Module::writeConfFile and EBox::Service escape file’s path
• Bugfix. Configure logrotate to actually rotate eBox logs
• Fixed bug in ForcePurge logs model
• Fixed bug in DataTable: ModelManager was called with tableName instead of context Name
• Fixing an `img` tag closed now properly and adding alternative text to match W3C validation in head title
• Backup pages now includes the size of the archive
• Fixed bug in ForcePurge logs model
• Now the modules can have more than one tableInfo for logging information
• Improve model debugging
• Improve restart debugging
• Backups and bug reports can be made from the command line
• Bugfix: `isEqualTo` is working now for `Boolean` types
• Add support for reporting
• Refresh logs automatically
• Reverse log order
• Remove temp file after it is downloaded with FromTempDir controller

CA

• Set SSLv3 extensions correctly to user certificates
• Bugfix: Expire days cannot be zero anymore

firewall

• Bugfix: Add redirect migration script to Makefile.am
• Add support for reporting
• Add rules to allow DHCP requests from interfaces configured via DHCP
• Improve redirects

mail

• Backport from trunk: Added aliases for whole domains
• Bugfix: alias are deleted when user account is deleted
• Bugfix: when already exists the maildir, create a new account is
  not allowed
• Bugfix: Postgrey daemon is disabled by default
• Bugfix: MDSize attribute should not be restored in systems with MDSize feature disabled
• Bugfix in logs: mail relayed to external smarthost is now logged, external smarthost relay denied action also logged, relay field now only logs relay data and no unrelated data
• Summary changed to reflect the changes in mailfilter module
• Added greylist support
• Added authentication for external smarthost
• Added TLS support for external smarthost
• Add support for reporting

mailfilter

• Bugfix: validation of General model now works properly
• Added POP transparent proxy
• SMTP filter separated from main module
• Interface overhaul to reflect changes in SMTP filter and addition of POP proxy

openVPN

• Fix status reporting on dashboard
• Daemon names are restricted to alphanumerics and ‘-’. ‘_’, ‘.’ characters
• Bugfix: servers and clients cannot get any longer the same interface number
• Added log rotation using logrotate

samba

• Bugfix: restore machine accounts properly
• Bugfix: set force directory mode and force create mode to 0660 in shares
• Bugfix: `printers` method returns an empty list when `ebox-printers` package is not installed
• Add per-user disk quota

software

• Add depends on dpkg-dev to parse debian changelog entries
• Add missing backslash to display update form correctly
• Restart apache once and not for every package when upgrading or installing

squid

• Add support for reporting

trafficshaping

• Detect if there’s an l7 capable kernel using modinfo xt_layer7
• Add traffic shaping rules to POSTROUTING

usersandgroups

• Add “allow bind_v2″ to slapd.conf
• Increase maximum password length
• Make and restore backup more robust: removed slapd.conf parameters in both slapadd and slapcat, so we can use the module with sldap with configuration stored in the directory itself. Ignore missing users in a group

libebox

• Bugfix: Use ‘window’ as variable instead of ‘Window’ since it is more portable
• Bugfix: Remove bogus mason tags
• Remove bogus div end tag
• Fix items list for titles with single quotes
• Add new table view without actions
• Add javascript library to generate report charts
• Fixing redirect URL coming from proxy
• Added Chinese from Taiwan and Galician translations

eBox Technologies has recently signed a collaboration agreement with the San Jorge University (USJ) to offer internships for the USJ students. This collaboration aims to give the students an opportunity to gain experience and new knowledge that will help to accomplish their career goals as well as to introduce them to the job market.

The first eBox-USJ intern Alejandro Sanclemente, 4th year computer science student, centers on carrying out his undergraduate thesis project “Virtualized solution of Global VoIP in centralized WIFI setting, based on OSS” during the internship. This project, supervised by the USJ and the eBox Development Team, aims to migrate the services offered by the existing phone system of the USJ to Asterisk 1.6, as well as to allow the use of VoIP.

Within the project, eBox Platform is used to control the network traffic. Besides, the project aims to develop a part of the eBox Platform module that allows the control of certain parameters configured by Asterisk user and administrator profiles with no harm in the administrative configuration. Other features of the project include integration of eBox Platform and Asterisk in LDAP making the user profile sharing possible, carrying out the installation in virtual machine monitor (Xen) or implementation in centralized WIFI setting.

eBox Technologies is proud to announce that Javi Vázquez will join the company as Chief Operating Officer, starting 10th of March, 2009. In this newly-created position, Javi Vázquez will be responsible for developing, designing, managing and continuously improving company’s internal operations to continue to guarantee delivery of efficient products and services for the growing number of partners and clients of eBox Technologies.

Vázquez joins eBox Technologies after eight years at Igalia, company that he co-founded in 2001 and where he served as Managing Director since its foundation. In this position Javi Vázquez was responsible for management, finance, general coordination, recruitment, communication and sales of the company. During this time, Igalia has become one of the largest OSS companies in Spain employing currently 40 people.

“Javi Vázquez is one of the most experienced and qualified professionals in the Spanish OSS business and we are extremely pleased that he has decided to join our team” said Ignacio Correas, CEO of eBox Technologies. “There are few people in the OSS business with the in-depth experience of Javi and we are certain that he is just the right person to help us to develop and scale our business globally”.

“I’m truly excited to join team eBox” said Javi Vázquez. “On the one hand, I think that eBox Technologies counts with an extraordinary team where I believe I can contribute with my experience in management and business development. On the other hand, eBox Platform has become one of the most efficient system administration tools with enormous growth potential”. Vázquez continues “I’m convinced that the combination of excellent team and product will permit us quick and sustained growth. Besides, the current financial situation puts our value offering -reductions in time, problems and costs in the administration of computer networks- in a privileged position.”

Javi Vázquez
Co-founder and Managing Director of Igalia from 2001 until 2009. President of the AGASOL (Galician Association of OSS Companies) from 2007 until 2009. Javi Vázquez received a MS degree in Computer Engineering from the University of A Coruña in 2001 and a master’s degree in IT Business Management from the Escuela de Negocios Caixanova in 2004. Besides he has carried out Marketing of Technology studies at the San Diego State University (SDSU) in 2005.

We are glad to announce that the Centro de Tecnologías Avanzadas (CTA) will deliver the first certified eBox Platform course in May 2009 in Zaragoza. The course is aimed at companies located in the region and it will be held in Spanish. The official name of the course is “Administración de sistemas con Ubuntu – Aplicación eBox” and it will be held from the 11th until the 28th of May, in the evenings and with a total duration of 48 hours. All the interested parties can already apply on-line.

The course is aimed at IT professionals who already have a basic knowledge of computer network management, for example, Windows system administrators who are interested in managing computer networks with Linux based systems. The course aims to consolidate the key concepts of computer network management and to allow the students to become productive with eBox Platform in 48 hours.

The course includes a large set of practical exercises with eBox Platform, all of them carried out in a virtual environment installed on each students’ PC. Besides introducing the students to the platform virtualization, this allows them to model computer networks with different servers and clients and to try by themselves multiple network environments and configurations. The detailed course program is available at the CTA web page.

The maximum number of students accepted for this course is 15 and the students are selected based on their curriculum vitae.