Step by Step Guide to a Multi-Server Environment for Effective Protection against Outages and Network Attacks

The cumulative outages of the Amazon Web Services and the attacks on the global DNS network have shown that even large and supposedly professionally protected networks are endangered, too. These incidents also make us aware of the need to distribute critical infrastructures across multiple cloud providers. This distribution is particularly important for centralized authentication services, which provide users and permissions for various services and organizational offices. An outage of a single server system would be a catastrophe for services like AWS where thousands of users and their permissions would be affected simultaneously. This is why I would like to explain to you how you can safeguard your network against outages and criminal attacks. Even if the dimension of your network probably is not comparable to the one of AWS or the DNS network.

Use of Univention Corporate Server: Our 3rd Party Charts

Thousands of organizations around the world use Univention Corporate Server every day. And the number increases week after week. The reason among others is that the Univention App Center contains, in addition to many UCS modules and extensions, dozens of professional enterprise applications from various vendors which can be easily integrated and maintained via the App Center. Therefore we are monitoring very closely which of these apps are really used and to which extent. Today, I would like to share some of the insights with you.

DHCP and DNS: A Brief Introduction

Photo of old phone switchboard

DHCP and DNS are the two fundamental services in an IT network. Whilst DNS makes sure that servers, clients, and services can be found in the network, DHCP ensures that the clients in the network are also provided with the information they require to participate in the communication.

ONLYOFFICE joins the Univention family

Users and providers of Univention Corporate Server now can add ONLYOFFICE Online Editors to their infrastructure from Univention App Center.

ONLYOFFICE is now a part of the Univention App family and complements it with a full-scale collaborative suite that offers editors for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It is 100% compatible with Microsoft Office files and supports all popular document formats.

Let’s Encrypt – Making the Internet That Little Bit Securer Every Day

a free, automated, open source certificate authority

Launched in 2014 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the University of Michigan, and Mozilla, the Let’s Encrypt project recently issued its 100 millionth automated, free certificate and is thus truly living up to its slogan of “Encrypt the entire web”.

In the aftermath of the Snowdon revelations of 2013, Let’s Encrypt declared its goal of making SSL/TLS certificates available for everyone on the Internet and promoting free encryption on the web. Since then, the project has won over a wide range of notable companies and acquired sponsors such as Akamai and Cisco as well as most recently Netflix.

New: UCS 4.2 App Appliances in Own Corporate Branding

Our App Center team has been busy as usual, releasing four Apps from the Univention App Center as App Appliances. An App Appliance bundles UCS and an App in a virtual machine. The Appliances are available for the virtualization and cloud formats KVM, VMware, and VirtualBox. In addition to the pre-configured App, they also contain a pre-configured UCS system and a management system for administrating the App itself and its users. App Appliances are thus a particularly easy way to start an App without having to install it via the in UCS integrated Univention App Center.

Shed Light on the “IT jungle” with a Domain Controller

Image of a man with code in the background
The professional structure of domains and the use of domain controllers bring order to IT infrastructures. This is especially important when organizations are growing rapidly. Professional domain management allows their IT to grow dynamically. Otherwise, the infrastructure becomes a kind of “patchwork carpet” of many small solutions and unorganized resources, some of which act independently of each other, may interfere with each other and thus require a high level of maintenance. Not to mention the complexity of maintaining users twice as often and the risks associated with data replication, data protection, and system reliability.

In the following article, we first explain briefly what a domain is and then describe the tasks of a domain controller. Finally, we become practical and see how the concept of “domain/domain controllers” has been implemented in Univention Corporate Server.

Univention Corporate Server 4.2-2 released

One of the highlights of the second point release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) are the significant enhancements UCS 4.2-2 offers for managing services and apps that are hosted in public cloud services such as the Amazon Marketplace. Services installed on UCS can now be accessed directly without any further configuration effort. Our development department has extended access to these services via the UCS Portal by converting the links to relative links. For portal entries for which there are several links, heuristic procedures determine the best link.

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