Previous backend: GConf

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!

Integration with Zentyal

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;
}

Future work

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!

After choosing Zentyal as the new name for eBox we obviously needed a logo redesign. It had to transmit Zentyal values, already explained in previous posts, but we also wanted to keep green and orange colors.

Our designer proposed five different drafts, and choosing the definitive one was a funny process. For a week we had all the logos posted on a board, and wrote down what each logo transmitted to us. After some days of talking we reached a quorum, we had a brand new Zentyal logo!

What I most like from this logo is that it keeps the soul of eBox, but with a new identity. I think we all feel very comfortable with it. So, what do you think? I hope you like it too! Feel free to comment here or in the forum !

As many of you know, recently I started to work in eBox Technologies. In this post I will show my first development for eBox Platform: Network bridged mode, now available in eBox 1.5.

But, what does bridge mode mean?

Bridging

A bridge is a way to connect two network segments, but unlike routing, in a bridge packets are forwarded at Layer 2 (Ethernet), so all protocols can go transparently through it. This is very useful if you want to insert a firewall into an already working network without reconfiguring anything (clients IP addresses nor gateway).

A typical scenario for a bridge is filtering traffic from one network segment (internal LAN) to another (Internet), for example, firewall and content filtering on web access through a HTTP proxy.

eBox as bridge

Let’s see some screenshots on how to set up a bridge using eBox. First of all we have to configure network interfaces that will be bridged. When doing this on the first interface a new bridge will be automatically created (br1).

After that all you need is to add the other interfaces to the bridge. Don’t forget to mark whether they are external or internal!

Now you can configure the bridge interface in the same way than any other interface, this process is well described in Network configuration with eBox Platform section of eBox documentation.