Zentyal 3.0 Announcement

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Your favorite development team proudly presents Zentyal 3.0. Zentyal is a Linux small business server that can be configured as a Gateway, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Infrastructure Manager, Unified Communications Server or a combination of them. The development of Zentyal started in 2004 and currently it is the open source alternative to Microsoft network infrastructure products aimed at small and medium businesses (Windows Small Business Server, Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Forefront…).

Let us summarize some of the new features of this new version.

Highlights

  • New distribution base: Ubuntu 12.04, providing new versions of all the packages and services managed by Zentyal.
  • Improved performance: there is now a global cache to speed up all the requests to the Redis configuration backend. Also, the MVC framework uses now a new model load system to save some CPU processing and to reduce memory usage.
  • Improved reliability: new locking and transactions systems have been developed to avoid any risk of data incoherences or corruptions.
  • Samba 4 integration: a full replacement of the Windows Server Active Directory, which allows Zentyal to join as additional controller of an existing AD Domain.
  • Kerberos integration: single authentication for HTTP Proxy, Mail and Zarafa groupware, in addition to File Sharing which is already provided by Samba.
  • New look & feel for the Web interface along with usability improvements.
  • New Master-Slave architecture: now it’s easier than ever to synchronize your users between several Zentyal servers.
  • New UPS module:it helps to keep your server always up and running in case power outages.
  • New Thin Clients module using the popular LTSP software.
  • Reviewed HTTP Proxy with a simpler interface and improved filtering by time period.
  • Zarafa 7.1: a new version of the groupware suite featuring a new web interface, multi-domain support and web chat integration.
  • Support for advanced NAT rules in Firewall module

Upgrading

Before you start

  • If you want to deploy Zentyal 3.0 on a new server, just make sure you don’t switch off your working 2.2 server until the 3.0 server is ready. That is, all the configuration has been restored automatically or manually and you have done some tests to make sure everything works as desired.
  • If you want to reinstall using the same hardware, we strongly recommend to try this first on a test machine (a VM for example) , installing Zentyal 3.0 and restoring the Zentyal 2.2 configuration backup, if everything works as expected then you can keep the 2.2 backup and repeat the process reinstalling Zentyal 3.0 on the same hardware. In any case, please make sure you have everything backed up.
  • If you don’t want to reinstall your server and prefer to do a full distribution upgrade (from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04), you can try, but we don’t recommend it, if you go ahead, you will probably need to purge the whole set of Zentyal 2.2 packages manually, and also others like the ldap ones.

Limitations

Due to the deep changes in Zentyal 3.0 we can’t provide a full migration procedure, these are the current limitations of the process:

  • Only a set of basic modules can be imported at the moment: objects, services, network and firewall.
  • Users and groups can be migrated, but without the original passwords. This won’t change as passwords are stored hashed and to generate the new hashes required for Kerberos in Zentyal 3.0 the original password in plain text would be needed. What we do is to reset all the passwords with autogenerated ones, giving the possibility to modify them before importing.

Procedure

sudo perl import-basic-modules confbackupname.tar
sudo perl dump-users-from-backup confbackupname.tar users.csv
  • Your users data will be exported to the users.csv file in CSV format with the autogenerated passwords, at this point, you can use any text editor to modify this file before importing it.
  • To import users.csv:
sudo perl restore-users-from-dump users.csv
  • Go to the Zentyal interface, make sure that the imported configuration is correct, and then save changes.
  • Continue with the manual configuration of the rest of the modules.

Known issues

Basic modules

  • If your default gateway is DHCP and you have more gateways, one of the static gateways will be set as default, but you can modify this from the Zentyal interface.
  • Services including “any” or “any tcp/udp” are not imported.
  • Any configuration in the imported modules not present in the 2.2 backup will be lost. This should not be a problem if you are using a freshly installed Zentyal 3.0.
  • Service definitions for samba may need to be upgraded to match the service definition for samba4

Users and groups

  • Currently this only works for master servers, not for slaves.

Repositories

Here are the APT source entries for Zentyal 3.0:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/zentyal/3.0/ubuntu precise main
deb http://archive.zentyal.org/zentyal 3.0 main extra

Full Change Log

You can read the full change log from 2.2 to 3.0 here.

About Zentyal

Zentyal, developer of the Linux Small Business Server of the same name, offers small and medium businesses affordable and easy-to-use network infrastructure solutions. By using Zentyal server and its cloud-based services, SMBs are able to improve the reliability and security of their computer network and to reduce their IT investments and operational costs.

Zentyal server development was started in early 2004 and currently it is the open source alternative to Microsoft network infrastructure products aimed at SMBs (Windows Small Business Server, Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Forefront…). Zentyal server is widely used in the small and medium businesses regardless of sector, industry or location as well as in the public administrations or in the educational sector.

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