Second milestone of Univention Corporate Server 4.0 available to download


Completely redesigned management console for added user-friendliness in IT administration

Bremen, 7th October 2014 +++ Univention GmbH, a leading European provider of Open Source products for the cost-effective operation and efficient administration of IT infrastructures (www.univention.de), has released the second milestone release of its enterprise server operating system Univention Corporate Server 4.0 (UCS 4.0). The most striking change compared with the current version, UCS 3.2., is the fundamentally revised and optimised user guidance in the UCS management system. It offers a completely new, modern and easy-to-learn user guidance and adapts its display dynamically to the various client devices.

IT for Afghanistan: German project supports the training of young IT professionals


Computing centers of universities in Afghanistan migrate to Univention

AfghanischeInformatiker26.06.2008Bremen, September 25, 2014. Since 2002, the center for international and intercultural communication (ZiiK) at the Technical University Berlin (TU) supports universities in Afghanistan with building basic IT services and training IT specialists, students and lecturers.

Since the beginning of the project, more than 4,500 members of the universities’ staff and professionals as well as dozens of academic lecturers were trained. An essential factor for the project’s success was an easy administration and maintenance of the newly installed IT systems from the start without making any compromises when it comes to functions or security. Over the years many different systems had been tried and tested. The most recent computing center at the university of Kandahar has eventually been built on the basis of the enterprise Linux distribution Univention Corporate Server (UCS) by the German company Univention GmbH. After just six months, the good performance of UCS had convinced the persons in charge in Afghanistan and Germany: Until the end of 2015, the remaining four computing centers, which were set up by the Ziik, will have migrated completely to UCS.

Bacula Enterprise Edition new in Univention App Center

Integrate the network enterprise backup solution Bacula Enterprise Edition in heterogeneous IT environments with just a few clicks

With the launch of Bacula Enterprise Edition there is now a further professional enterprise solution for the backup and restoration of data in heterogeneous environments available in the Univention App Center. Users of the enterprise IT management solution Univention Corporate Server (UCS) can test the software with unlimited functions for 30 days and 5 jobs.

Technical overview of the first UCS 4.0 preview

Univention Corporate Server Source codeThe first preview of our upcoming UCS 4.0 release is available. On this occasion I would like to give you an overview of the major technical changes in this preview release.

16.500 new source packages

With UCS 4.0 the underlying Debian distribution is updated to Debian 7 Wheezy. That means all of the 16.500 source packages have been updated and adapted to UCS needs. A major part of the UCS packages is written in Python. We switched from Python 2.6 to Python 2.7 for these packages. To allow an easy migration from UCS 3 to UCS 4, we decided to build the modules still for both Python versions.

One major new feature in Debian 7 is multiarch. Multiarch lets you install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This is useful in various ways. The most common is installing both 64 and 32-bit software on the same machine and having dependencies correctly resolved automatically. The Debian wiki has an extensive manual on how to make use of this functionality if you need it.

UCS installation

The UCS 4 installer is based on the Debian Installer and replaced the previous own implementation. The installer asks only for the important basic settings such as language, network and partitioning. Thereby a graphical RAID configuration is possible during the installation. The UCS-specific installation steps are done in a web-based setup assistant. Thus, a UCS system can be configured either by a locally installed web browser or via remote which makes cloud setups really easy. The setup assistant is already used in the UCS 3 appliance.

Hardware support

We decided to update the Linux kernel to 3.16. This will also be the default kernel for the next upcoming Debian stable release aka Jessie. The kernel development has an amazing speed and we are very happy that we rarely find unsupported server hardware.

Active Directory

One major part of UCS is the possibility to act as Active Directory domain controller which, for example allows the Microsoft Windows client management via group policies. This function is based on Samba. The Samba team is currently working on Samba 4.2. We integrated a previous snapshot of Samba 4.2. That allows our partners and customers to get a feeling for this new version.

OpenLDAP performance

At the beginning OpenLDAP is a main component of UCS. Currently, we are using Oracle BerkleyDB (BDB) as database backend. We’ve made a lot of performance and comparative tests with different OpenLDAP backends. The results for the memory-mappend database (MDB) were incredible. So, we decided to switch the database backend to the mdb backend.

We are very grateful for any kind of feedback, either here or in our forum.

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