Ignacio Correas will deliver his presentation entitled “Development of a business model based on eBox Platform” on the 8th of July. The presentation will highlight the role played by the eBox Platform community in the creation of the company and the motives for choosing the current, channel-centered business model. Besides, Correas will also explain the current market opportunity for a unified network server such as eBox Platform.

On the same day, 8th of July, Javier Uruen will give a three-hour workshop entitled “Introduction to the development of eBox Platform modules”. “eBox Platform has two main aims” explains Javier Uruen, and continues “first of all, we aim to provide an easy-to-use unified network server and secondly, we aim to provide a development framework to ease the development of new Unix based services”. “During this workshop we will show how to develop new eBox Platform modules and we will implement a module that manages an Unix-based service”.

If you are interested in participating in the GCDS, we encourage you to register at the GCDS web site. If you are interested in having a face-to-face meeting with the eBox crew, please do not hesitate to e-mail us at info@ebox-technologies.com We will be staying in the Canary Islands from the 3rd until the 11th of July.

The focus of the mission will be to meet with venture capitalists, private investors, U.S. entrepreneurs, potential partners and service providers who can further company’s growth. If you are interested in having a face-to-face meeting with eBox Technologies management, please do not hesitate to e-mail us at info@ebox-platform.com We’ll be staying in the San Francisco area from the 7th until 19th of June.

“I’m very satisfied with the course both because of the opportunities offered by eBox and because of the instructor” said Augustín Raluy, IT Consultant who attended the course. “Until now I was used to work on only some fields of the network and system administration and the course has provided me with a more global view. As eBox Platform unifies the management of all network services through one single, graphic and intuitive control panel, it’s much easier to manage more network services in less time. My aim is to use eBox Platform as a standard solution for the customers that entrust me their computer network and system management”.

The course was aimed at IT professionals with basic knowledge on computer network management, for example, Windows system administrators interested in managing computer networks with Linux based systems. At completion of this 48-hour course, students should understand the concepts behind computer network management and efficiently administer SMBs computer networks with eBox Platform.

“We have carried out a large set of practical excercises with eBox Platfrom, from the simpliest and most common cases to most complex scenarios including multiple machines” said Víctor Jiménez, Certified eBox Instructor, and continued “thanks to the easiness of eBox Platform, the students with no previous experience on Linux have become system administrators with eBox Platform”.

The “eBox for Network Administrators” course is part of the eBox Curriculum Path that currently consists of four different courses and is divided into two tracks, Administrators and Developers. The Administrators track is designed to provide system administrators and IT professionals with the knowledge and skills required to successfully manage SMBs computer networks and multiple eBox Platform installations. The Developer track is aimed at system developers, enterprise application developers and system integrators providing them with the knowledge and skills to develop new eBox Platform modules, prepare customized eBox Platform distributions and integrate eBox Platform with other applications.

We are glad to announce the availability of a new testing version: eBox platform 1.1.10. This is the second alpha for our next stable release 1.2.

This is a great opportunity to check and test the new features that eBox is shipping.

Please, click on here for further information about this release.

“We feel very privileged for having been selected to participate in Innovate!Europe 2009″ said Ignacio Correas, and continued “during the last three days we have been able to share opinions and to get advice from experts such as Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL; Dave Sifry, co-founder of Technorati and John Bautista, partner of Orrick. It has been truly awarding experience and has made us to feel ever more confident of our market orientation and value proposition.”

When asked Marten Mickos’ opinion on eBox Technologies, the former CEO of MySQL answered “I know eBox team and their open source project for quite a long time and I do believe eBox has the potential to disrupt the network server market in a similar way as MySQL disrupted the database market”.

During the spring 2009, over 100 Europe’s most promising startups applied to participate in this three-day program held by serial entrepreneurs, financiers and experts from Europe and United States in Zaragoza (Spain) from the 4th until the 6th of May. eBox Technologies was among the 35 companies selected. In June the Innovate! Europe program continues with an invite-only trade mission to Silicon Valley in which eBox Technologies will also participate to meet high-level audience of venture capitalists, private investors, bloggers and media, facilitating access to financiers, partners and service providers who can further company’s growth.

eBox Technologies is a startup that provides support and services based on eBox Platform, a unified network server that offers easy and efficient computer network administration for SMBs. eBox Platform can act as a Gateway, an Infrastructure Manager, a Unified Threat Manager, an Office Server, a Unified Communication Server or a combination of them. Tight integration of these functionalities allows high automationand important time savings for system administrators. Besides, eBox Platform allows management of different eBox deployments from a central point, making it a very attractive solution for managed service providers.

The acceptance in the CEEIARAGON’s business incubation program guarantees eBox Technologies an array of business support resources and services for the next years, including an already much needed larger office space. Starting from the 1st of April, eBox Technologies’ new visiting addres is C/ María de Luna 11, N 19, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain. The main phone number has changed to +34 976 73 35 06 and the fax number to +34 976 73 37 19.

“We are very pleased for being accepted in this program and being backed by CEEIARAGON” said Ignacio Correas, CEO of eBox Technologies. “The company is experiencing tremendous interest in services and products based on eBox Platform and the infrastructure and support provided by the Center is just the platform we need at this moment to respond to the market demand”.

Your favorite development team proudly announces the availability of eBox 1.0.

After years of development we have finished implementing the following feature set, which  we have deemed good enough to deserve the 1.0 badge:

• Networking
  • Firewall and routing
    • Network Configuration
      • DHCP server
      • NTP server
    • Filtering
    • NAT/Port redirections
    • Multi-gateway support and traffic load balancing
    • Traffic shaping (l7 filter support)
    • Traffic rate monitoring
  • Web proxy
    • Cache
    • Content filtering
  • Instant Messaging server (Jabber)
  • Domain Name Server
  • E-mail server
    • Spam and antivirus filter for mail
    • Support for greylisting
    • Transparent POP3 proxy filter
  • OpenVPN support
  • Certification Authority
  • Event notification via jabber, mail and RSS
  • Web server

• Workgroup
  • Windows user, file sharing
  • PDC support
  • Printing server
  • eGroupware: calendar sharing, address book, webmail…

• Reporting
  • Summarized reports
  • Full reports

• New dashboard to centralize service information
• Full and configuration backup

• Software updates

• Disk usage information
• RAID status

You can install the new packages using our stable repository. Note that the new packages are only available for Ubuntu Hardy at the moment. Packages for Intrepid and Jaunty are underway.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ebox/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

The 1.0 milestone, besides being a great achievement by itself, does not imply a slowdown in our development process, quite to the contrary, it provides a solid foundation for further and faster eBox development. The immediate eBox future is full of interesting new features that we are craving to see working in your production eBoxes. You can have a look at our roadmap to get an idea about what’s coming next in eBox. Some of the highlights are:

• Asterisk integration
• Hooks to allow service customization by the local administrator
• User corner for user-oriented features (i.e., password changing, …)
• Captive portal

Changelog

ebox

Bugfix: fix SQL statement to fetch last rows to consolidate
Bugfix: consolidate logs using the last date and not starting from scratch
Backport fix for EBox::Types::Union::isEqualTo
Bugfix: DomainName type make comparisons case insensitive
according to RFC 1035
• EBox::Module::writeConfFile and EBox::Service escape file’s path
• Bugfix. Configure logrotate to actually rotate eBox logs
• Fixed bug in ForcePurge logs model
• Fixed bug in DataTable: ModelManager was called with tableName instead of context Name
• Fixing an `img` tag closed now properly and adding alternative text to match W3C validation in head title
• Backup pages now includes the size of the archive
• Fixed bug in ForcePurge logs model
• Now the modules can have more than one tableInfo for logging information
• Improve model debugging
• Improve restart debugging
• Backups and bug reports can be made from the command line
• Bugfix: `isEqualTo` is working now for `Boolean` types
• Add support for reporting
• Refresh logs automatically
• Reverse log order
• Remove temp file after it is downloaded with FromTempDir controller

CA

• Set SSLv3 extensions correctly to user certificates
• Bugfix: Expire days cannot be zero anymore

firewall

• Bugfix: Add redirect migration script to Makefile.am
• Add support for reporting
• Add rules to allow DHCP requests from interfaces configured via DHCP
• Improve redirects

mail

• Backport from trunk: Added aliases for whole domains
• Bugfix: alias are deleted when user account is deleted
• Bugfix: when already exists the maildir, create a new account is
  not allowed
• Bugfix: Postgrey daemon is disabled by default
• Bugfix: MDSize attribute should not be restored in systems with MDSize feature disabled
• Bugfix in logs: mail relayed to external smarthost is now logged, external smarthost relay denied action also logged, relay field now only logs relay data and no unrelated data
• Summary changed to reflect the changes in mailfilter module
• Added greylist support
• Added authentication for external smarthost
• Added TLS support for external smarthost
• Add support for reporting

mailfilter

• Bugfix: validation of General model now works properly
• Added POP transparent proxy
• SMTP filter separated from main module
• Interface overhaul to reflect changes in SMTP filter and addition of POP proxy

openVPN

• Fix status reporting on dashboard
• Daemon names are restricted to alphanumerics and ‘-’. ‘_’, ‘.’ characters
• Bugfix: servers and clients cannot get any longer the same interface number
• Added log rotation using logrotate

samba

• Bugfix: restore machine accounts properly
• Bugfix: set force directory mode and force create mode to 0660 in shares
• Bugfix: `printers` method returns an empty list when `ebox-printers` package is not installed
• Add per-user disk quota

software

• Add depends on dpkg-dev to parse debian changelog entries
• Add missing backslash to display update form correctly
• Restart apache once and not for every package when upgrading or installing

squid

• Add support for reporting

trafficshaping

• Detect if there’s an l7 capable kernel using modinfo xt_layer7
• Add traffic shaping rules to POSTROUTING

usersandgroups

• Add “allow bind_v2″ to slapd.conf
• Increase maximum password length
• Make and restore backup more robust: removed slapd.conf parameters in both slapadd and slapcat, so we can use the module with sldap with configuration stored in the directory itself. Ignore missing users in a group

libebox

• Bugfix: Use ‘window’ as variable instead of ‘Window’ since it is more portable
• Bugfix: Remove bogus mason tags
• Remove bogus div end tag
• Fix items list for titles with single quotes
• Add new table view without actions
• Add javascript library to generate report charts
• Fixing redirect URL coming from proxy
• Added Chinese from Taiwan and Galician translations

The first eBox-USJ intern Alejandro Sanclemente, 4th year computer science student, centers on carrying out his undergraduate thesis project “Virtualized solution of Global VoIP in centralized WIFI setting, based on OSS” during the internship. This project, supervised by the USJ and the eBox Development Team, aims to migrate the services offered by the existing phone system of the USJ to Asterisk 1.6, as well as to allow the use of VoIP.

Within the project, eBox Platform is used to control the network traffic. Besides, the project aims to develop a part of the eBox Platform module that allows the control of certain parameters configured by Asterisk user and administrator profiles with no harm in the administrative configuration. Other features of the project include integration of eBox Platform and Asterisk in LDAP making the user profile sharing possible, carrying out the installation in virtual machine monitor (Xen) or implementation in centralized WIFI setting.

Vázquez joins eBox Technologies after eight years at Igalia, company that he co-founded in 2001 and where he served as Managing Director since its foundation. In this position Javi Vázquez was responsible for management, finance, general coordination, recruitment, communication and sales of the company. During this time, Igalia has become one of the largest OSS companies in Spain employing currently 40 people.

“Javi Vázquez is one of the most experienced and qualified professionals in the Spanish OSS business and we are extremely pleased that he has decided to join our team” said Ignacio Correas, CEO of eBox Technologies. “There are few people in the OSS business with the in-depth experience of Javi and we are certain that he is just the right person to help us to develop and scale our business globally”.

“I’m truly excited to join team eBox” said Javi Vázquez. “On the one hand, I think that eBox Technologies counts with an extraordinary team where I believe I can contribute with my experience in management and business development. On the other hand, eBox Platform has become one of the most efficient system administration tools with enormous growth potential”. Vázquez continues “I’m convinced that the combination of excellent team and product will permit us quick and sustained growth. Besides, the current financial situation puts our value offering -reductions in time, problems and costs in the administration of computer networks- in a privileged position.”

Javi Vázquez
Co-founder and Managing Director of Igalia from 2001 until 2009. President of the AGASOL (Galician Association of OSS Companies) from 2007 until 2009. Javi Vázquez received a MS degree in Computer Engineering from the University of A Coruña in 2001 and a master’s degree in IT Business Management from the Escuela de Negocios Caixanova in 2004. Besides he has carried out Marketing of Technology studies at the San Diego State University (SDSU) in 2005.