Open Source Enterprise Management
The team at Zivios wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
We hope to bring you a much improved version of Zivios in the near future (planning a 0.8.0 release by January 31st). Stayed tuned!
Zivios has gone through a number of updates to it’s architecture since conception. With Zend Framework officially announcing support for the javascript library “Dojo“, Zivios is moving away from prototype and scriptaculous as it’s js layer [of choice].
Dojo integration as well as automatic generation of forms and support for dynamic error checking on user supplied data allows us to provide a structured and consistent look to the front-end. The integration of ZF 1.7 also sees us adopt layouts in the application, with module developers having the option of customizing the layout as required. (As of the last update to the Zivios framework, layouts were handled internally by the application.)
Zivios version 0.5.1 (and 0.5.0) included an installation process where the following software was compiled from source:
Compiling the software took a significant amount of time and was a sore point for quite a few people who attempted to install the software. Zivios 0.6.0 introduces packages for Debian Etch, Ubuntu Hardy, CentOS 5.2 and Fedore Core 10. Packages will be provided for the following software:
A new installation process is currently being finalized which makes use of the new framework functionality, with updates to current modules also in progress.
Though we are certain that the updates to Zivios core as well as the provision of providing packages will greatly ease installation and usability for Zivios, our expected launch date has been pushed back to the middle of December, or, more realistically, the end of December.
Final note: The entire build process for all aforementioned software will be made available for people wishing to customize their installation. As always, your comments and questions are welcome!
Recently, we have been subjected to constant maintenance and “ISP upgrades” at our current data-center, with minor outages (and sometimes unscheduled reboots) hitting the Zivios server. This obviously is a point of great frustration for not only the community, but the developers as well.
Though our code is safe in geographically dispersed locations (including the primary repository being at launchpad), our web site, blog, wiki and mailing lists don’t enjoy the same level of redundancy. It hence became clear to us to move Zivios to a new home as soon as possible.
Over this weekend, we plan to migrate the Zivios web site, blog, wiki and mailing lists to a far more robust infrastructure at Linode VPS Hosting.
One of the rather nifty things about Linode, which we see great value in, are the tools they provide to easily cluster virtual servers. At some point, we plan to ensure that all Zivios web related services are highly available as well as load balanced. We are also planning on getting a few accounts from Linode in the near future to put online Zivios demos for the community to enjoy, though that may have to wait till Zivios 0.6.0 has been released.
Much to do… much more to come.
We’re happy and excited to announce the release of Zivios EMS v0.5.1. This version of Zivios introduces a number of bug fixes as well as the introduction of transactional rollbacks. Many enhancements have also been made to the Zivios Mail, DNS and Asterisk plugin, as well as fixes in the Zivios CA module.
As always, we are available on our mailing lists to assist with any query, or via our IRC channel if you would like to chat with us.
You can grab Zivios version 0.5.1 from our web site’s download section.
The Zivios team has been spending a lot of time ensuring that all available features that we have tested during module development are in good working order. Issues however are not always easily identified and sometimes take a while to track down.
The problem can be as simple as the mail module developer not realizing that the (new) computer add process generates a client krb5.conf file for remote systems. The file is generated via a template, however, the template had a hardcoded krb realm in one spot which went unnoticed. This meant that cyrus authentication fails with all other realms; as do all mail service related actions.
Display templates after some css updates were not given the required attention, and most modules remain tested only only on Debian Etch. Many fixes for issues I mention have already been pushed to our software repository, with all bugs reported (barring a slightly complicated one) fixed.
Our final testing is concentrated primarily on module testing, specifically the mail and asterisk modules on Ubuntu Hardy. A developer package is also being made ready for people wanting to run Zivios releases directly from trunk.
A final note: we want to thank Tarmo Hyvarinen for helping us identify bugs and also make some very sensible recommendations regarding Zivios’ UI. Tarmo is looking into Zivios module development, with the first module being one for Webdav. Faraz will be writing a demo module with accompanying documentation over the weekend so everyone is up to speed (though I doubt he’ll find time before our release).
We should have Zivios-0.5.1 available by Tuesday, October 1st. Stay tuned folks.
It has been an exciting week! Thanks to some patient OSS community members who joined our mailing list, we managed to get rid of a few installer issues which had escaped us in testing. We are also working on a new release which addresses some feature requests and builds on making the installation process even smoother.
The good news of course is that the Zivios installation and configuration, barring minor hiccups, worked out quite well.
One source of much confusion during the installation process was the use of a sub-domain as the virtual host for Zivios. The control panel installation fails if the virtual host is not of the format: sub-domain.domainname. We’ll ensure this requirement goes away in a future release — for now however, please ensure your apache virtual host is of the format: sub-domain.domain-name.
A small point worth mentioning is that your Kerberos realm or OpenLDAP base-dn configuration is not affected by the aforementioned requirement. The Zivios installer will prompt the user for this information, with suggestions based on initial input.
Much work is also being done on the Zivios wiki to ensure that post-installation guides are available for expanding your Zivios network. The mail, asterisk, squid and samba plugin are all quite operational, however, lack of documentation will obviously lead to frustration for Zivios administrators.
Expect a 0.5.1 release within the coming week, with many updates coming to the wiki as well. I’ll end this post by saying thanks to all who joined our mailing list and are helping test Zivios. Thank you guys!
We are pleased to announce the first release of Zivios 0.5.0 (beta). Please visit the downloads section of our web site to grab it.
For the official annoucement, please see:
http://lists.zivios.org/pipermail/zivios-announce/2008-September/000001.html
Also: if you do download Zivios, please consider joining us on our user discussion mailing list.
Thank you!
After many sleepless nights the new Zivios website is finally ready. Please join up on the mailing lists. Your feedback is always welcome!
We are currently cleaning up the Zivios source tree and preparing for code release which should hopefully happen no later than the 1st of September (so we hope!)
Welcome to the Zivios blog. Information regarding the development, release and current project status will be published here by our management and developers from time to time.