From Practice

This article is about the Domain Name System (DNS) and explains how the “Internet’s telephone book” works. Alongside the fundamental details of name resolution on the Internet, we also look at special topics like administering DNS records in dynamic environments and debugging DNS setups during operation. We look at it within the technical framework of […]

Can you imagine conducting an online event solely with self-hosted open-source tools and self-service? Or does that seem impossible to you? This article describes how we did just that by using UCS, Cloudron and BigBlueButton.

It is well-known among IT staff members: the administration tasks (for multiple applications and depending access rights) which apply even with a small amount of users can prove to be very time-consuming. With possible changes of responsibilities or the joining of new staff members, chances are high that uncontrolled growth arises quickly within the IT […]

With user templates, Univention Corporate Server (UCS) offers a proven instrument to minimize the effort of IT admins. Who doesn’t know these slight doubts: Does the e-mail address of the new intern have the correct syntax? Has the new colleague been added to the right user group? The user templates help to dispel these and […]

In relatively many UCS environments, system administrators have not yet developed consistent processes for detecting, deactivating or deleting inactive user accounts. Over the years, accounts that have not been used for a long time accumulate in the LDAP directory. At Univention, we have developed a new UCS extension on behalf of a customer, which helps […]

Establishing a trust relationship means giving users of a domain access to the resources of another domain. In some situations this can extend the options for identity management. In the following example, I will refer to the interaction between Samba in UCS and Microsoft Windows. I will explain in detail how a so-called trust relationship […]

If a UCS user has forgotten his password or simply wants to change his profile picture, for example, he no longer needs to ask an administrator. Since UCS 4.1, he can easily do this himself. Requirement: the UCS Self Service app is already installed. Our film tutorial will show you how to set up and […]

Many services and processes running in a domain document their activities fully automatically in the background. The log files contain information about users’ logins to the system, installation and uninstallation of software, access to web pages, error messages and other information. Univention Corporate Server (UCS) also creates such reports – either behind the scenes in […]

Since the beginning of spring, school authorities and other educational institutions have been faced with the challenge of continuing their teaching with no or only limited face-to-face interaction. This article introduces the web conferencing system BigBlueButton, which may be a possible solution to this problem. In the first part of the article I would like […]

SURF is the cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions. One of the goals of our organization is to facilitate research with HPC (High Performance Computing). We run national super computer clusters and provide computing power, data transport, data management and analysis for the Dutch academic community, i.e. to universities, universities of applied science, […]