Zentyal

Zentyal (formerly eBox Platform)

Zentyal Dashboard
Developer	eBox Technologies
OS family	Unix-like
Working state	current
Source model	Open source
Initial release	July 15, 2009 (2009-07-15)
Latest release	4.0 [1] / October 29, 2014 (2014-10-29)
Available in	English (partially translated in 27 languages)
Update method	APT (Web front-end available through ebox-software)
Package manager	dpkg
Platforms	i386(x86), amd64(x86-64)
Default user interface	Web user interface
License	GPL
Official website	zentyal.org

Zentyal (formerly eBox Platform) is a program for a Linux server for small and medium enterprises (SMBs), considered an alternative to Windows Server and other Microsoft infrastructure products for SMBs. Zentyal can act as a gateway, Network Infrastructure Manager, Unified Threat Manager, office server, Unified communications server or a combination of them. Zentyal is based on Ubuntu and it can be installed either from Ubuntu repositories or from Zentyal's own installer.

Zentyal is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Spanish company eBox Technologies S.L., which holds the copyright to the codebase,^[2] and offers services embedded with commercial editions of the software. Such services include technical support, software and security updates, disaster recovery or access to remote monitoring and management platform. The project's source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License.

Zentyal development was first published in 2005 as an open-source, collaborative project of two companies.^[3] On 16 November 2006, Zentyal was officially approved as a NEOTEC project, receiving public funds from the CDTI (a Spanish public organisation, under the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism) to complete the development of version 1.0.^[4] Zentyal was first included in Ubuntu in 2007 under the name of eBox Platform, in the Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3, the third alpha release of Ubuntu 7.10.^[5] The first stable release candidate of Zentyal (eBox Platform 1.0) was published in 2008.^[6]

Features

As of September 2010, Zentyal 2.0 offers the following features:^[7]

• Networking
  • Firewall and routing
    • Filtering
    • NAT and port redirections
    • VLAN 802.1Q
    • Support for multiple PPPoE and DHCP gateways
    • Multi-gateway rules, load balancing and automatic failover
    • Traffic shaping (with application layer support)
    • Graphical traffic rate monitoring
    • Network intrusion detection system
    • Dynamic DNS client
  • Network infrastructure
    • DHCP server
    • NTP server
    • DNS server
      • Dynamic updates via DHCP
    • RADIUS server
  • VPN support
    • Dynamic routes autoconfiguration
  • HTTP proxy
    • Internet cache
    • User authentication
    • Content filtering (with categorized lists) - only in a pay version
    • Transparent antivirus
    • Delay pools
  • Intrusion Detection System
  • Mail Server
    • Virtual domains
    • Quotas
    • SIEVE support
    • External account retrieval
    • POP3 and IMAP with SSL/TLS
    • Spam and antivirus filtering
      • Greylisting, blacklisting, whitelisting
    • Transparent POP3 proxy filter
    • Catch-all account
• Webmail
• Web server
  • Virtual hosts
• Certification authority
• Workgroup
  • Centralized users and groups management
    • Master/slave support
    • Windows Active Directory Synchronization
  • Windows PDC
    • Password policies
    • Support for Windows 7 clients
  • Network resource sharing
    • File server
      • Antivirus
      • Recycle bin
    • Print server
  • Groupware: calendar, address book, webmail, wiki, etc.
  • VoIP server
    • Voicemail
    • Conference rooms
    • Calls through an external provider
    • Call transfers
    • Call parking
    • Music on hold
    • Queues
    • Logs
• Jabber/XMPP server
  • Conference rooms
• Zentyal User Corner for self users info updating
• Reporting and monitoring
  • Dashboard for centralized service information
  • Monitor CPU, load, disk space, thermal, memory
  • Disk usage and RAID status
  • Summarized and full system reports
  • Event notification via mail, RSS or Jabber
• Software updates
• Backups (configuration and remote data backup)

Development

Zentyal uses an open source model, with all the source code available for its users.

Design

Zentyal is a web application using Apache webserver with mod perl as foundation and Mason components as building blocks, mainly written in object oriented Perl, with some Javascript for visual improvements.

Its design incorporates modern programming techniques as:

• Design patterns: an Observer design pattern is used mainly to integrate different modules across Zentyal. E.g. each service reports about which ports it needs to be open. Besides this, a Singleton holds global configuration and behavior details.
• Presentation and logic decoupling: user interface uses CSS and Ajax, and include several Mason components, as a generic table used to configure services. Program logic is held inside library packages and CGI-like code.
• Fault tolerance: errors and warnings are managed through software exceptions, flowing from core to its handling routine.

It also offers debugging facilities, integrating the layout of the execution stack of the Perl 5 interpreter.

Services are monitored and automatically respawned if they die.

Open source components

Zentyal is composed of open source software packages:

• Apache web server
• mod_perl CGI engine
• OpenLDAP shared users and groups
• OpenSSL cryptography
• netfilter/iptables firewall and NAT
• BIND DNS server
• Squid proxy server and web cache
• DansGuardian content-control software - only in the paid version Small/Enterprise
• Postfix mail transfer agent
• XMPP instant messaging
• ntpd clock synchronization
• OpenVPN virtual private network
• Samba shared storage and PDC for Windows clients
• CUPS shared printers
• APT software installation and upgrade
• Asterisk VOIP services
• Snort network intrusion detection system
• OpenChange calendar sharing, address book, and webmail
• Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server

Community

Main Zentyal community work and support takes place at Zentyal Forum. Since 2011 the Community activity has increased a lot. A Community Council has been installed and in the forums several local language subforums are started to serve non English speaking community members. One of the specialised groups that is active is the Bug Hunter Squad. The BHS main task is to filter bugreports and prioritise them so the developers can work more efficiently. More specialised groups are worked on like a Community Documentation Group and a Community Translation Group.

Zentyal's inclusion on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon was preceded by some comments at Ubuntu Forums community.^[8]

There is also a very active group of Linkstation users which succeeded in porting Zentyal to PowerPC.^[9]

Zentyal Summit

Since 2011, every autumn the Zentyal Summit is held in Zaragoza, Spain. Zaragoza is where eBox Technologies is based, the founder, main sponsor and driving company behind Zentyal. The Zentyal Summit is a free event but registration is mandatory. Besides a commercial trac there is also a community trac by and for the Zentyal Community.

Documentation

• Installation guide: holds instructions about different installation methods like CD and Ubuntu packages, and how to get source code and run Zentyal from scratch.^[10]
• Official documentation (available both in English and Spanish): aimed at Zentyal users, introduces concepts and terminology, and explains different services and use cases.^[11]
• Instructions for developers: Tutorials and tips aimed at software developers, including module development guide, how to create Zentyal Debian packages or a development environment.^[12]
• Other documentation: Full list of available documentation including How-Tos, FAQ, Screencasts and other documents.^[13]
• API reference: class and method's description and parameters

See also

• Windows server
• ClearOS
• Webmin
• Control panel
• SysCP
• SME Server
• Ajenti

References

External links

• Project website
• Developer's website