Hi fellow eBox users,
The eBox development team proudly presents the release of our last beta version for the 0.10.x series. We keep adding cool stuff to your favourite administration tool.
If you are going to get tired of reading a long announcement, skip the following part and go to the bottom to see how you can help us test eBox .
Let me introduce some of the new features this new release sports:
- Firewall: this module has been extended in such a way that you will not need to hack eBox anymore to add custom rules to the INPUT or OUTPUT chain. Now it’s more flexible, and it’s easier to add rules for services which are not managed by eBox itself. The UI totally has been totally pimped out and takes advantage of the generic AJAX table
- Services: this is a new module that has been introduced for convenience. It allows the users and other modules to create services which can be used by modules using iptables-like rules. So far, only the firewall module and some parts of the core use this module, but modules like traffic shaping or networking will eventually use it too.
- Events: we have included a neat framework to inform our users whenever an interesting event happens. Currently, we have just implemented a few events such as the machine is running out
of disk space, a service has been stopped unexpectedly or eBox is up. The cool thing about all this is you can be told what is happening through your favourite Jabber client, so yes, it’s what you think, now eBox talks to you if we have a situation 🙂 - Objects, DNS: And again, we are glad to announce that these two modules are joining the group of modules whose UI exploits the user experience provided by Ajax technology. Also, the DNS module automatically configures reverse resolution.
- Control center: This new module is meant to be used for those system administrators who want to deploy machines running eBox in different locations. It provides a unique point of control to ease the management of a group of eBox machines. It automatically configures openVPN and apache under the hood to create a secure connection with the control center. Currently, the control center has no graphical user interface as it’s just a bunch of useful commands to carry out the necessary operations to set up the scenario. It uses SOAP to expose the eBox API to remote scripts which can be executed within the control center. Now we have the necessary infrastructure to implement the required features for this sort of scenario. So the next step is to get feedback from users who wish to have several machines running eBox and what they would expect from this control center. Once we agree which features are required we will think how to create a more friendly interface on top of it. Some examples of using the control center are: accessing every eBox connected to your control center, receiving events and alerts from a group of eBoxes, synchronising LDAPs amongst a group of machines, forcing software updates, uploading periodic backups…
eBox needs you
As this version version is shipping a rewritten firewall, and that is a key module for eBox. We would like to ask you to help us test this version.
To do so we have uploaded the packages to the unstable repository so you will have to explicitly add the apt sources to your installation if you are willing to help. An easy way to test eBox is installing it on a virtual machine and restoring your production backup and check everything is ok.
deb http://ebox-platform.com/debian/unstable/ ebox/
deb http://ebox-platform.com/debian/unstable/ extra/
Execute the following commands to install the new version:
apt-get update
apt-get install “^ebox-.*”
An installer-cd and a live-cd will be available very soon.
If you experience problems send us a bugreport and you will be helping the project in a great way.
What’s next?
We will test this release for at least one week. After that, we will officially release 0.10 with the bug fixes added during the week and some UI changes which could not make it to this one.