UCS Identity Management Manages Mail Platform With Over 30 Million Users

US Mailboxes

More than two years after the start of one of the largest projects in which Univention has been involved to date, a new mail platform with over 30 million managed end users finally went online in late 2016. UCS takes care of the identity management duties for all the user accounts.

I first reported on the challenges of the project almost a year ago in the article How can OpenLDAP with UCS be scaled to over 30 million objects?. However, it is now no longer a “gray theory” – the project has now gone live and the LDAP has had to cope with the strain of thousands of accesses every second in real time ever since.

Today, I would like to provide you with an update and share with you some of our most important findings from the going live process.

Monitoring with NOCTUA® Athene for UCS 4.2 now in the Univention App Center

We are pleased to present the monitoring solution NOCTUA® Athene as a Docker-based app in the Univention App Center for UCS 4.2.

NOCTUA® Athene is a flexibly configurable solution for the detection of failures on any number of systems, hardware and software. By using predefined protocols (e.g. SNMP, WMI, SSH, Ping, or SQL) as well as host and service templates, the software facilitates the work of IT administrators.

First point release of UCS 4.2 published

With UCS 4.2-1 the first point release for Univention Corporate Server 4.2 is now available.

It includes various detail improvements and error corrections. Some of the most important changes are:

  • The forwarding of e-mails per each mail user can now be saved in the UCS management system.
  • Improvements in changing the password in the Univention Management Console: From now on, also users from a Microsoft Active Directory domain can change their expired passwords. In addition, more hints are now displayed if the password change should fail.
  • The possibilities for IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) configuration have been improved in various services, for example in the Nagios or proxy server configuration and in the UCS management system.

Data Privacy-Compliant Integration of Office 365 in Fulda schools

Foto vom Rathaus in Fulda

The municipal authorities of the German city of Fulda in the state of Hesse are responsible for the administration and operation of the IT in 23 schools in Fulda – including 2 vocational schools and 2 grammar schools – for a total of 13,000 pupils and 1,000 members of teaching staff.

Unlike in the rest of Hesse, as an education authority for a small city, we have the city’s own well-developed fiber-optic network at our disposal. The majority of the schools are already connected to the fiber-optic network covering the whole city, which allowed us to do away with local servers in the schools at an early stage and focus on a centralized IT concept instead. As a result, all the school IT in Fulda now runs over centralized servers in our administration center. We operate an Active Directory domain of our own design on these servers with centralized domain controllers, to which a terminal server farm comprising both Windows and Citrix servers as well as the central file servers are connected.

Facilitate Your Work by Integrating Listener Modules in UCS

Graphic Listen to me!

Listener modules support you in your administrative work by synchronizing and controlling all changes in the UCS’ OpenLDAP Einacross all connected services – Learn how to build and use them!

You are surely using a variety of (cloud) services in your organization and, if required, these services will make changes to your directory service, either Active Directory or OpenLDAP. In heterogeneous environments, where UCS is typically used, the question is, how can service A notice the changes that service B has made to certain objects in the directory, and that are relevant to both services? For example, when a new printer has been added to the network, and has joined the UCS domain, the list of printers is updated in the configuration file of the printer service (CUPS) and the service reloaded.

OX App Suite – the whole office online

Screenshot OX App Suite

The groupware solution OX App Suite, available in the Univention App Center, is aimed at companies, educational institutions and public administrations looking for a modern and future-proof communication solution.

OX App Suite is a modular communication and collaboration platform. It is based on open standards and can be used in combination with Univention Corporate Server (UCS) for the integration into existing IT infrastructures.

Brief Introduction: Two-Factor Authentication

Fingerprint authentication
As part of our “Brief introduction” series, you will learn today what is meant by two-factor authentication.

If you are planning to use security software, you will surely stumble upon this term, as this method provides additional protection for your business when it comes to login processes, especially for data-sensitive areas. Often enough, it has happened in the past that the identities and associated passwords of users from, for example, large mail providers like Yahoo were stolen. As users often use the same password for different services, there is a risk that the criminals use the stolen data to gain access to other services, thus causing great damage. Securing user authentication against sensitive areas or business-used services not only by requesting a password but also through a second authentication, data breaches become much more difficult for attackers.

Univention Corporate Server 4.2 Released: Improved Operating Concept and lots of New Technology under the Hood

Univention Management Console in UCS 4.2
The most striking new feature of the Univention Corporate Server 4.2 release is the significantly further developed operating concept for all users – not only for the administrators, but also for the end users. In addition to new features such as the online portal, this is due to the smoother interface, faster ways to overview deployed resources and improvements in the management system.

In the past months, our development department has worked intensively on bringing all the important UCS components to the latest state-of-the-art.

Digitalization Package for Schools with Integrated E-Mail and Collaboration Functions

Logo Ucs@school und OX
As a leading provider of Open Source-based IT infrastructure solutions, we have now “bundled” a new digitalization package for schools, in the knowledge that only secure, flexible, and user-friendly solutions allow the modernization of the IT infrastructure in education so desperately desired by politicians. To this end, we have comprehensively expanded our special solution tailored to the requirements of education authorities, UCS@school, with groupware functions and the web-based office suite from Open-Xchange. The new software package was also on show at this year’s CeBIT.

It supports schools in their digitalization, and we are delighted that the city of Basel, Switzerland, is already implementing it in a pilot project for 20,000 users.