See you there!

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

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.

What is a Captive Portal?

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…

Basic configuration

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.

Accessing trough Captive Portal

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.

Conclusions

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!

First step: Installation

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.

Second step: LDAP configuration

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!

Bonus track (Optional): File Sharing

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.

Thank you Heidi for the photos!

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 !