January 15, 2012
by exekias
0 comments
One more year, I’m going to FOSDEM. This time almost the whole Zentyal team will be there also! So if you want to hang out with us we will attend the Friday beer event and, of course, Saturday and Sunday tracks.
See you there!
November 19, 2011
by exekias
4 Comments
Zentyal Summit 2011 is over, and I think we had a very good time, thank you all for coming!
Heidi and I did this little video to acknowledge all contributions made by the community (forum support, bug reporting, translation, howto’s, patches…). We showed it at the summit, I hope you like it 
If you couldn’t attend Zentyal Summit take a look at the presentations, most of them are already published, I’m sure you will find them interesting! We will also publish videos of each one soon, stay tuned 
August 28, 2011
by exekias
12 Comments
Zentyal 2.2 RC2 was released on Thursday, so we are almost there, Zentyal 2.2 stable version will be ready in a few weeks. One of the new features that was not present in 2.0 is the new Captive Portal module. We raised enough money in our fundraising initiative so finally the module was included in 2.2 release
Official doc is still in the oven so I’m going to explain how to use the module, this will help you if you want to join testing efforts.
A captive portal limits users access to the Internet redirecting any web request to a login page. When the user correctly authenticates he/she is allowed to navigate and use any of the network services.
Captive portals are typically used at WiFi hotspots but also in wired networks at hotels, schools, airports…
Zentyal Captive Portal is very easy to configure, you just need to select interfaces where you want to control access and the group of users who will be allowed to log in:
Also, if you installed Bandwidth Monitor module, you can setup a bandwidth usage quota. This will measure and control bandwidth usage for each connected user, forbidding access to those who exceed it.
From the user point of view this is what will happen:
First time you connect through a captive interface your web browser will redirect to a login for any request:
Once you have logged in, a popup window will open. This window is in charge of keeping your session alive. It’s used by Zentyal to know if you left just closing the web browser without logging out.
I think Captive Portal has been a very requested feature and I’m glad Zentyal finally has it! This was a good example on how the community helped us to make a decision about a new feature we should include and crowdsourcing made the funding possible.
If you liked this tutorial, give the module a try and give us feedback! Zentyal 2.2 is just around the corner!
June 12, 2011
by exekias
0 comments
De casualidad descubro a GranBob y su último disco “Pedaleando”. Teniendo en cuenta que ya vió la luz hace un año, digamos que no es una primicia, pero me pareció tan simpática la canción que aquí la pongo:
Y es pues como la vida, mordiendo el polvo aprendes a sudar cuesta arriba, apretando los dientes, a avanzar con el viento de frente… Y es un bichejo de diseño amable, le sirve igual al broker y al paleta. Es revolucionaria y una elegante guerrillera con armas de poeta.
Y es que ahora ya sí que estamos en pleno verano, y es cuando más apetece coger la bicicleta!
Por cierto, para los que estéis por Zaragoza este fin de semana quizás os interese asistir a la manifestación ciclonudista. No será mi caso, toca retirada a la tierra…
March 6, 2011
by exekias
4 Comments
I really love services like Spotify but I feel like loosing my freedom when I get used to them. Because of this lately I have been looking for open source alternatives to (eventually) replace these services with ones hosted by myself. This is the case of Subsonic, which lets you to listen all your music from a web browser or even from an Android phone. Also this is a very good example on how easy it is to integrate 3th party software with Zentyal. Let’s see how to do it:
We will start from a working Zentyal server and install Subsonic on top of it. You will need to follow installation guide for Debian/Ubuntu. Basically these are the steps:
Install Java and the previously downloaded Subsonic .deb package:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre
sudo dpkg -i subsonic-x.x.deb
It is also recommended to install typical multimedia transcoders: sudo apt-get install lame flac faad vorbis-tools ffmpeg
After installing, open the Subsonic web page on http://zentyal-ip:4040. A wizard will show up letting you configure basic Subsonic features.
Remember that you may need to configure Zentyal’s firewall to open 4040 port. Firewall section of documentation is a good source for that.
Subsonic includes a LDAP backend, so you can configure it to bind to Zentyal’s one. Go to Settings > Advanced and fill LDAP info as seen on the image:
LDAP URL: ldap://localhost:389/ou=Users,dc=zentyal,dc=com
LDAP Search Filter: (uid={0})
If your Zentyal Users and Groups module is configured as slave you will need to change the port in the URL to 1389.
Congratulations, it’s done! Now your Zentyal users can login into Subsonic and play and share music!
You can take advantage of Samba based File Sharing module. By configuring a share pointing to the place where the music is stored users will be able to upload and organize their music. In the following screenshots you can see a share and its access list configuration, giving read and write permissions to developer’s group.
As you see it’s very easy to integrate Zentyal with other applications through LDAP, service hooks or even writing your own module! If you have any doubts I’m sure you can find help in Zentyal mailing lists or community forum.
February 11, 2011
by exekias
1 Comment
Ya hace casi 3 meses que compré una bicicleta para moverme por Zaragoza y es de las mejores ideas que pude tener. Siempre dudé si mi rechazo a utilizar BIZI Zaragoza era debido a pura vagancia o incomodidad. Finalmente la segunda se ha alzado con la victoria.
No me malinterpreten, creo que el servicio de bizicletas es una gran idea y que además funciona razonablemente bien. Pero carece de la versatilidad que te ofrece una bicicleta propia bien acompañada de un candado: libertad de localización y de horarios. Mi bicicleta ya me acompaña a todos lados y ya no tengo reparo a aparcarla a la espera en ninguno de ellos
Así que ahí va mi consejo. ¡Dale Zagal!
PD: Hice esta foto en un servilletero del Barrio Sur
January 27, 2011
by exekias
1 Comment
January 13, 2011
by exekias
0 comments
For second consecutive year I’m going to FOSDEM! This time with more friends from Zentyal. We will be in Belgium for 6 days so I think this time we will pay a visit to Brujas, Liege or other Belgium cities.
There are a lot of interesting talks in the published schedule, and more are about to appear; furthermore this year we will more involved, bencer is giving a Zentyal talk! See you there!
December 12, 2010
by exekias
1 Comment
Now that we have some time after our 2.0 release I want to start a series of post about how to improve Zentyal performance (what we’ve done, what we will do, and what you can do). In this first post I’m going to talk about one of the new Zentyal features. Redis as config backend.
Redis is a persistent key-value database written with performance in mind, it stores the whole database in memory and syncs to disk asynchronously.
Before Redis, Zentyal stored configuration in GConf, the engine that Gnome Desktop uses to store user preferences. Besides few minor problems, our main issue with GConf was it is intended for desktop applications and does not provide much performance. We searched for alternatives that would be fast, lightweight and easy to use (protocol, api…) and finally chose Redis as it had all this and more!
Migrating from GConf to Redis was not a trivial task, GConf keys are organized into a hierarchy while Redis is a flat key-value store. Javier Uruen did most of the work as a Zentyal contributor, he rewrote our backend to be compatible with old code! For those interested in the internals you can see Redis.pm, for example:
sub all_entries
{
my ($self, $key) = @_;
my $length = length $key;
my @dirs;
for my $path ($self->_redis_call('keys', "$key/*")) {
push (@dirs, $path) if (index($path, '/', $length + 1) == -1);
}
return \@dirs;
}
There are some features that can take advantage of Redis and will use in some moment: make a better use of its rich instruction set or benefit from its replication features, stay tuned for future updates!
If you also want to contribute you can do it! You can translate, test, help people using Zentyal… Visit our contribute page for more info!
November 14, 2010
by exekias
0 comments
Un saludo desde Budapest! Ya llevo unos días por aquí visitando a la amiga Vico, ya os contaré cómo va la cosa, de momento os dejo unas fotos, esta ciudad es preciosa.
