MediaWiki – a Culture of Sharing Your Knowledge

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Enterprise wikis are about technology and features – but also about the main principle of sharing.

Wikis were a small cultural revolution. The idea behind it: Different people join online to collaboratively write texts, review them, discuss changes, improve, supplement, link and categorize them. And through this work and combined knowledge of many people a powerful central knowledge base is created in which you almost always find what you need to know.

Wikipedia has consistently thought through the model of openly exchanging knowledge and made it popular. For 17 years Wikipedia has been the place to go for knowledge on the Web while the use of wikis has been spreading in companies, too. The open source software TWiki (1998) or the proprietary Confluence (2004) paved the way for the triumphant march of wiki technology in companies. Of course, the Wikipedia software MediaWiki (2002) also plays a part in the story about wikis in companies. But more on that in a moment.

Advantages of Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection to Boost Network Performance + Data Availability

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Would you like some valuable tips on how to increase network performance and user data availability when using Windows clients together with UCS?

Thinking about user data, many of us admins immediately understand that questions about the issues of backups, privacy, and availability, no matter whether across different machines or outside the office, can create us a considerable headache. But fortunately there are solutions in place and in this article I want to cover two of them: Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection, arguably the most popular solution to the problem.

Short Introduction: How to Upgrade Your E-mail Server to a Bullet-Proof Fortress

E-mails have become an integral part in our everyday lives. In business anyway, but they have also found their way into our schools. However, schools face the same problems that have long been known by organizations: School authorities with thousands of students, hundreds of teachers and many administrative employees offer hackers a target at least as worthwhile as other large enterprises.

In this article, I’ll show you some simple yet highly effective measures that you as the administrator of a corporate IT or school IT can take to effectively protect your users and mail servers from hacker attacks. As massive spams are not only annoying or even dangerous to us all, they can also cause other mail servers to mistrust your email servers so that your users will no longer be able to send regular mails.

Central Domain Management with Samba and Active Directory

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The release of UCS 4.3 also provides you with the Samba version 4.7 . Compared to older versions, it clearly improves the performance in the area of LDAP queries and replications of group memberships in particular. This offers great benefits, particularly for large organizations with several thousands or even ten thousands of authentication accounts.

But what is Samba in general? How can it be compared to Microsoft‘s Active Directory? Where is it involved in UCS‘s identity management and how can you benefit from it?

In this article I want to present you two solutions for the central detection and authorization of the members of a domain. Both of them enable you to centrally administrate a domain network. They also help to achieve more data protection and significantly increase failure security for your IT systems.

Besides, I want to show you how UCS is able to bridge the gap between the Linux world and the Windows world. By this you can reap the benefits of both systems, instead of having to decide for one and thus restrict yourself.

Critical Security Update for Samba Published

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The Samba team discovered a critical vulnerablity in the access control of Samba/AD domain controllers. Any authenticated user can change other users’ passwords over LDAP including the passwords of the administrators.

We strongly advise to install the updated Samba packages for all UCS versions currently supported (from UCS 4.1-5 and UCS 4.2-3) which we have distributed today via the usual errata update channels.

Review of the 10th Univention Summit: Focus on digital identities for data sovereignty and innovation in the age of AI

Under the motto “Reclaim your Identities”, more than 320 guests discussed the secure management of digital identities and digitization in the education sector at the Univention Summit. Users from the education sector, companies and institutes also reported on the successful use of open source software in their IT organizations. Due to the high number of visitors, we even had to rent additional rooms at short notice and close the registration for the event.

Central IdM of Cloud to Minimize Risks with Users and Structures

When administrators think about user management (IdM), they often only keep an eye on traditional IT systems. But even in the cloud, where you can buy new services with just a few clicks, it’s extremely important for companies to keep control over their users if they do not want to lose control over who has rights and access in the organization. Otherwise, a dissatisfied or dismissed employee can quickly become a real threat to the entire corporate IT. Or the failure of subsystems can mean that the entire IT can no longer be accessed and all processes in the company are stopped.

Errata Updates for Spectre and Meltdown Problems

Developers at Google have discovered a problem with processors of several different CPU vendors, which can be exploited by software. Due to these security vulnerabilities, unauthorized users may gain access to supposedly protected memory areas.

These problems, known as “Spectre” and “Meltdown”, are specified by the CVE (Common Vulnerability and Exposures) numbers: CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5754. Apparently some of these problems affect most CPUs made by Intel, but also by AMD and ARM, regardless of the operating system in use.

We are currently working hard to provide errata updates for UCS to fix the problem. The current status and links to the errata can be found in the Univention Forum.