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.

More Ransomware Protection with ownCloud: Combat WannaCry, Petya & Co.

Bild von Hacker

After the waves of attack by ransomware WannaCry in May and its successor Petya in June, agitation prevails in many IT departments. The economic damage is now already in the billions and CIOs are under great pressure to protect companies and their users from new attacks. But how can you protect your company against these attacks, which have the potential to destroy all files?

In the owncloud blog we announced a number of new features to better protect your data. As the free community edition of ownCloud is also available in the Univention App Center, I am glad to share this inform with you here today:

Good bye Graduate Prize! Hello Future Ideas!

A total of 9 times we have now awarded the Univention Prize. The objective of this competition was to support the employment of Open Source in a university context and make it known to a broad public. The response impressed us. In some years, there were almost 40 bachelor, master or diploma theses submitted for the competition.

And the broad press coverage in well-known media such as heise.de, the Linux Magazine, Pro-Linux or golem.de certainly contributed to deliver the message to a wide audience that Open Source has nothing to do with spaghetti code, idealism or even stubborn dogmatism. So you could say: The goal is reached!

RADIUS – a Powerful Tool for Safe Mobile Device Accesses

Picture of mobile with earphones

Workplaces become more remote and mobile while individuals are increasingly equipped with (private) mobile devices. In this context it is good to know about RADIUS, because private end devices require simple access to an organization’s network. At the same time you need to avoid that these devices open the doors for malware or leakage. RADIUS is such an instrument for the construction of secure, decentralized work structures and equally a powerful tool for the authentication of mobile device accesses to networks.

In the following, we like to give you a brief understanding of what RADIUS is and how you can use it with UCS.

OpenVPN to Secure your Samba Authentications Automatically

Login Illustration

Samba 4 has become the tool of choice for companies with diverse clients that seek a Linux-based central identity management. However, a growing number of organizations are offering work from home options and manage distributed operations like construction companies with a computer at every construction site or an insurance provider with several offices. The securing of all authentication processes when employees log in your network also from outside, is critical to protect your data.

But how to do that?

You need to add a VPN solution which starts before the login if you want to enjoy the advantages of single sign-on and policies that Samba provides. The following how-to will describe how to add OpenVPN to an existing Samba 4 installation to automatically secure client authentications over an untrusted network.

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