The regular maintenance of UCS 4.1 ended at April 5th.
Users who still using UCS 4.1 should update to a more current version of UCS to get further security updates, bugfixes and minor-releases. To update to UCS 4.3 you have to change to UCS 4.2 first. A description of the necessary steps to update you could find in the release notes of UCS 4.2.
We’ve now finished the second round of the voting series ‘Vote for Apps’ in the Univention App Catalog which took place from February 9 to March 9. I thank all participants for their engagement and like to present the result today.
This time, you were able to vote for the Apps Cozy Cloud, a service to access personal data in the cloud, furthermore a connector to Dropbox Business as well as SOGo, an open source groupware server.
But what is Samba in general? How can it be compared to Microsoft‘s Active Directory? Where is it involved in UCS‘s identity management and how can you benefit from it?
In this article I want to present you two solutions for the central detection and authorization of the members of a domain. Both of them enable you to centrally administrate a domain network. They also help to achieve more data protection and significantly increase failure security for your IT systems.
Besides, I want to show you how UCS is able to bridge the gap between the Linux world and the Windows world. By this you can reap the benefits of both systems, instead of having to decide for one and thus restrict yourself.
Shortly before the Univention Summit, I released the Minio app for the Univention App Center. The development of the app started after Univention introduced their Docker-based apps and Minio, as a single binary that does not need much external configuration, seemed like the perfect test case. As it turned out, it was.
Using a fake identity to trick Facebook, getting paid for jogging and how to book one and the same hotel room cheaper via VPN – in their keynote speech „Data Ethics & Digital Selfdefense“ at this year‘s Univention Summit, author Pernille Tranberg and journalist Steffan Heuer showed how big our digital footprint actually is and what information we (un-)consciously publish about ourselves on the internet.
With UCS 4.3 we have integrated numerous security updates – most recently the Samba 4 update of March 13 – and closed hundreds of bugs. But not only, we also focused, among other things, on a significantly higher performance during data import and more convenience in the administration of portal pages or users, for example. In addition to an efficient and easy management of UCS, it was also important to us to create a positive user experience with UCS. Here, worth mentioning milestones are certainly a single sign-on during login to Windows or Linux desktops, which in parallel allows access to the Univention Management Console, Office 365, and ownCloud or Nextcloud, just to name a few of the improvements.
With UCS 4.3 we took another resolute step in the development of UCS into an open platform for IT operations and management in enterprises – whether it is a small organization with just a few users or organizations with hundreds of thousands of users.
The Samba team discovered a critical vulnerablity in the access control of Samba/AD domain controllers. Any authenticated user can change other users’ passwords over LDAP including the passwords of the administrators.
We strongly advise to install the updated Samba packages for all UCS versions currently supported (from UCS 4.1-5 and UCS 4.2-3) which we have distributed today via the usual errata update channels.
With the increased interest of schools to use tablets in classrooms, the Kreismedienzentrum Wildeshausen (media center of the district Wildeshausen) experienced a significant increase in inquiries for circulating tablets in 2015. In order to guarantee a safe operation of the equipment regardless of the location, the institution was faced with the task of organizing a reliable central tablet management.
Due to lack in personnel at the KMZA it was impossible to organize a manual device management, in which the tablets are connected to a laptop via USB cable and the subsequent MDM configuration is carried out individually.
In addition to the central tablet management, they planned to lend the devices to the schools as a so-called ‘suitcase solution’ and wanted to make remote maintenance possible.
Like any operating system manufacturer, Univention usually publishes weekly updates. As an administrator, you want to install them as soon as possible. However, in large UCS environments with many connected servers, manual updates can take a lot of time, which is not always available every week. The easiest way to reduce such a big workload is to automate the task by using policies.
In the following, I want to explain how you can set up an automated update of UCS systems by using the policy ‘maintenance settings‘.
