This year the first Zentyal Academy Contest took place. In this contest students of Zentyal Academies share their Zentyal based projects and show, in a business environment, what they’ve learned during their formation.
The winner of this first edition was José Cristian Cañaveras from Spain. We interviewed him asking about his experience learning Zentyal and how he developed the project he used to enter contest, and we want to share this interview:
Let’s start with presentations. Can you tell us a bit about you and your training center?
Hi, my name is José Cristian Cañaveras, and I’m a second year student of a Superior Degree in Network System Administration. My academy center, which is part of the Zentyal Academy Program, is “IES GREGORIO PRIETO” from Valdepeñas, Spain. Thanks to this I’ve been able to participate in the Zentyal Academy Contest 2014.
What kind of contents related to Zentyal covers your training center?
In my center we cover all content in general, from DHCP, DNS, Firewall services, to instant messaging, mail, Samba and so on.
Could you tell us what was your project about?
My project was focused on deploying a server cluster in a high availability (HA) environment with multiple servers, allowing you to have a infrastructure completely configured and always working even when some of the servers fail.
How long did it take you to complete the project? Did you encounter any problems?
It was a quite interesting and challenging project and it took me about a month to complete. Most time was spent on planning the infrastructure, focussing on security and redundancy issues, planning ahead, you’ll avoid future problems.
I encountered only a few problems during the development of the project, which were easily solved with the help of the Zentyal Documentation.
Now that you have some experience with Zentyal, in which production environments would your recommend to use a Zentyal server?
In my opinion, I would recommend the installation in both SMBs and big companies, because you can use Zentyal both for simple and complex environments.
Did you try the last versions of Zentyal Server, 3.5 or 4.0?
Yes, my project was based in the last stable version at that moment, which was the 3.5.
About 4.0: I’ve also tried it through the Zentyal Daily Builds, and what I liked most was the huge compatibility with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook and the more friendly GUI.
How did you spend the 400€ price you won after the contest?
I bought an Acer laptop and a SAI (1000VA OVISLINK), and I’m very happy with them.
Thank you very much José. We hope to see you in the next contest too!