SysCP - Blog - Global

End of Developer - Meeting

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:37:26 +0200

Hi,

Now our dev-meeting is over. It was a lot of fun and we decided a lot of steps for the future of SysCP. A summary of our meeting can be found here: https://wiki.syscp.org/meetings/2008-06-27. This summary is in german, sorry.

Thank you SyGroup for sponsoring this meeting!

So long,
EleRas

Some more people arrived

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:01:34 +0200

Hi,

Now flo, RadiatioN and HammerFall arrived. The room is getting full :D

So long,
Florian

Coding marathon

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:04:57 +0200

Hi out there,

Starting today, we - the SysCP team - start a coding marathon until saturday evening. atari, d00p, flo and RadiatioN took the long way and drove (and are driving) the long way to Contwig for meeting me. We will debug and code the most time, hoping to give you a mostly bugless SysCP 1.2.20.

So stay tuned for a series of blogentries this weekend!

So long,
Florian (EleRas)

Happy Birthday SysCP!

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:30:00 +0200

Hello SysCP-community,

it's now 4 years since the day we released the first version of SysCP. Again I want to thank everyone who supported us over the years. Thanks go to you who sent in comments, wishes, ideas, suggestions, patches, positive and negative feedback or just have downloaded and used SysCP. I especially want to thank our sponsors who donate all that glue which helps us work together and improve SysCP.

Some words about the current stage of development: Thanks to atari, d00p, EleRas, JamieWolf, Radiation (alphabetically) and all other which I might have forgotten (shame on me) SysCP made huge steps towards 1.2.20 which will contain many new features, bug fixes and improvements.
We now have support for lighttpd, powerdns, domain keys, exim4, pure ftpd, awstats and many more. SysCP now features native SSL support, a sparkling new logging facility and even a password-reminder. Needless to say that we fixed dozens of bugs and revised many parts of the code.

But we need your help: Due to the heavy changes we made we kindly ask you to test the current development trunk. We expect it to be pretty much stable at this time, but there might be some small glitches so don't test it on your production system.
Since 24c3 we have a snapshot service available at http://snapshots.syscp.org where you'll also find debian packages containing the current trunk.
Please report anything you stumble across at our forums. Thanks, your help is much appreciated!

Again, no cake this year, but stay tuned,

Flo and the SysCP-team

Update: SysCP 1.2.19 released

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:30:00 +0100

Hello SysCP-community,

today we are releasing the next version of SysCP. SysCP 1.2.19 contains several Bugfixes and some new features.

Especially the nasty bugs regarding the hardcoded Listen and the incomplete Zonefiles are now fixed. I'm really sorry about this, it's not clear how we could have overseen them.
The fix of the Listen-Bug requires some attention when you are updating your installation, because the Listen statement is now switched off by default. You have two options: Switch on the Listen statements again for the affected IP/Port combinations before cron_tasks.php is executed or restore your /etc/apache2/ports.conf.

Thanks to Michael Kaufmann (aka d00p) SysCP now features a complete Ticket System. Your customers could easily create support tickets which can be answered directly at the admin panel. It's quite self-explanatory, so just try to use it, it's great fun ;-) Please also have a look at the settings where you can change the behaviour according to your needs.

One little thing regarding PHP4: Because the php dev team has quit supporting PHP4, we decided not to go for PHP4 compatibility anymore. Therefore SysCP will only work with PHP5.

All changes included in this release are listed at https://www.syscp.org/milestone/1.2.19. As always you'll find the packages at http://files.syscp.org. Direct link to the tarball is: http://files.syscp.org/releases/tgz/syscp-1.2.19.tar.gz. Debian users will get it with their next apt-get upgrade.

Flo and the SysCP-team

Update: SysCP 1.2.17 released

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0100

Hello SysCP-community,

today we are releasing the next version of SysCP. EleRas and I attended 24c3 over the last four days and we got quite productive, so here's the result:

This release features many bugfixes and new features. The biggest features we're introducing are: mod_fcgid, mod_log_sql, the support of dovecot, building real zonefiles, ips/ports with own vhost containers, reorganized and enhanced settings, wizard-style configuration, and much more. You can find the complete overview on http://www.syscp.org/milestone/1.2.17. At this place I also want to hint to our blog (http://blog.syscp.org) where we noted everything we did the last days.

Due to changes in the style the cronscript works you have to take care when updating: There isn't one big cronscript anymore. Instead you have to call scripts/cron_tasks.php and scripts/cron_traffic.php whenever you want to process tasks or calculate the traffic. This enables you to configure your system in a more flexible manner, e.g, you could calculate the traffic more than once a day if you want. Please change your /etc/cron.d/syscp accordingly. The complete file can be found in your panel, just click on "Configuration".

You'll find the packages at http://files.syscp.org. Direct link to the tarball is: http://files.syscp.org/releases/tgz/syscp-1.2.17.tar.gz. Debian users will get it with their next apt-get upgrade.

I also want to hint to our new snapshot service, which provides you with checkouts of the svn trunk. You'll find them at http://snapshot.syscp.org. Use the debian repository like the stable one, upgrading from stable to testing is just as simple as replacing the line in your sources.list with http://debian.snapshot.syscp.org/.

We wish you a happy new year,
Flo and the SysCP-team

Greetings from 24C3

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 13:11:56 +0100

Hey folks,

It was a long, long time since the last entry in this blog. There was simply to much to do in our reallives (studies,
military, job,....).
Now flo and I are on 24C3 and have the time to do some serious working on SysCP.

The first thing we want to introduce you is our new buildservice. We automatically create debianpackages and tarballs out of the svn, labeld with version and revision. This should enable you to test SVN-versions without breaking apt or messing around with svn ;)

Upgrading from stable to testing and (after release of the next stable version) back to stable should work smoothless, since the upgrading is done inside SysCP itself. Sorry people, but downgrading the database is not (yet?) possible automatically, you need to figure this out on our own.

You may find the packages on http://snapshots.syscp.org, if you want to insert these into your apt.sources you could use http://debian.snapshots.syscp.org. We build the packages for sarge and etch currently, but we are changing the buildscript whenever we test a system and see how it works.
Please note: These packages are testing and should be stable, but they can crash your whole system, too ;)

flo and I are sitting most time in the hackcenter nearby the coffeepott, you are welcome to join us for a chat or two.

So long,
EleRas

SysCP Mailinglists closed - SysCP Forums reorganized

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 22:50:00 +0200

Hello SysCP community,

today I want to drop a short notice about the current state of our mailinglists and forums.

First: The mailinglists
Because we had more technical problems than posts on our mailinglists we are closing them today. Traffic on our lists just was to low, so we think that the time the maintenance of the list consumed can be used better. An archive of old postings is still accessible through lists.syscp.org.

Second: The forums
We saw, that most members of the SysCP-community use our forums. Therefore we decided to make it again an official part of SysCP and moved it back to a subdomain of SysCP, forum.syscp.org. Although SysCP is getting more international from day to day we don't want to disclaim our german roots. To make things easier for you, we now just have one board per language where you can post everything releated to SysCP. No more deciding whether your question is a configation issue or general issue etc ;)

Third: The announcements
We are again using the forums to make announcements. For the ease of use, we created a shortcut for the newsfeed of the announcements board at https://www.syscp.org/announce-en.xml. Announcements will also be "mirrored" on our main site and on our blog.

Have fun with our new forums,
Flo and the SysCP-team

Monitoring and more

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:45:17 +0200

Yippie-Ay-Yeah,

I just wanted to give you some small updates what's going on currently regarding SysCP.

First of all we smashed a few very nasty bugs in the current SVN - version of SysCP 1.2.x. The sorting of customers is now working correct, the display of last-run-values is now correct (we broke during dividing the cronscript), dovecot-configs were added and much more. JamieWolf is working on mailquotas in his branch. Someone seems to have packed SysCP 1.2.16 for openSUSE 10.2, as you can see here, thanks to the one who did this! You can follow the complete stuff in our timeline.

Another important thing behind the scenes: SysCP.org is now monitored by the INWX - monitoring-system, which checks regular if all our services are up, if one fails, it will be restarted automatically ;) This looks like this in our webinterface (Don't worry about the red dot, that's only a wrong configured check ;) ):

The server will soon be included in the INWX-backup-system, too. I will report about that in another post once it is up and running well. Thanks to my boss for allowing SysCP to use the company's infrastructure!

So long,
Florian (EleRas)

Dovecot, stats and more

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:02:37 +0200

Hi out there,

The last few days the coding went on a bit on SysCP (1.2.x) and the world around it.

Some people reported to us, that the configuration - page was getting larger and larger and wasn't very user-friendly. flo sat down a few minutes thinking and implemented a wizard-like interface. Now you choose your distribution, the type of service you want to configure and then you get the exact daemons. This looks way cleaner than before and is one of the first pages which uses javascript inside SysCP (don't worry, you have the complete functionality also without JS!). If you don't like the wizard: one click and you get the old overview. Both use the same data internally to show you the data, so both will always be at cutting edge (well, at least if the team looks over the configs from time to time ;) ). You may test it in our demo, just log in as admin ;)

There is a new daemon supported now, too: Dovecot as a replacement for courier. There were config in our wiki since some time, it is in production use on some team-members servers (even on syscp.org ;) ) and is very easy to install. So be happy, you may choose :D

Since I had a few minutes time today, I built a small script, which outputs the growing size of SysCP tarfiles *g It's generated dynamically and so it is always up-to-date.

Before I forget it, flo saw, that we forgot to put the .debfiles for SysCP 1.2.16 on our download-page, after Ron created them. The files were online everywhere, on the server and our mirrors, they were simply not entered on the download-page. Thx to flo they are now listed.

That's it for the moment.

So long,
Florian (EleRas)

Happy Birthday SysCP!

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:30:00 +0200

Hello SysCP-community,

this is kinda special day, because exactly 3 years ago the very first version of SysCP was released to the public. Since that moment the SysCP projekt developed quite well. We are surrounded by a huge community, from which we receive many comments, suggestions, patches, compliments, positive and even negative (yes, sometimes ugly but definitely necessary ;) feedback.

I want to thank everyone who has helped us so far, everyone from those, who downloaded and just use SysCP up to them who actively contribute to the projekt. Of course special thanks go to our sponsors for donating servers, mirrors, money for domains etc. :)

Currently SysCP development has slowed down a bit, but there's light at the end of the tunnel and we are working on some good things for you. More details will follow soon ;)

So let's celebrate the end of this birthday (btw: where's the cake? :-P)
and stay tuned,

Flo and the SysCP-team

"You are using this site without SSL!" or: What does SSL have to do with red boxes?

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Thu, 03 May 2007 23:00:00 +0200

Hello community,

today I had an idea about SSL at our site. Because I think we do need more safety while browsing the web I wondered how to make you visitors use our SSL-encrypted pages. Writing it into the blog is a good idea (otherwise you won't read this now ;) but how would non-frequent visitors know about it? As I'm not the one who enforces someone to do anything the idea was to just pop in a big red box noticing the visitor that he's not using ssl and also providing a link. Following it, the encrypted page won't bother you anymore.
If anything is wrong or if you have any thoughts about this just let me know :) We are curious about what you are thinking about it :P

Flo

Servermigration: 70% done

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:38:22 +0200

Hi,

I just wanted to inform you (just in case you didn't notice yet ;) ): syscp.org is now powered by a new, a bit more powerful server. Except the mailing (Mailinglists, team-email-addresses, ...) everything runs fine. The mailing still runs on the old server, which will serv as a backup-mx in the future. Some tests showed a great performance-boost in general. If you get connection - errors, please check that you are connecting to the IP 217.13.205.183 ;)

At the same time while moving to the new server, I migrated our trac from SQLite to MySQL. This seems to work quite stable now, although converting the dump was a real pain (SQLite - dumps are not MySQL - compatible). And since the dump has more than 100000 queries inside, it took a while to manage it. In the end I used a tool called "sqlitebrowser", opened the sqlite-dump, exported it as SQL (this SQL seems to be MySQL-compatible in most cases). After this I had to edit a few dozend queries by hand (escaping - errors). But now everything is working, I'm happy and can go on coding 1.3 :D

If you encounter any errors on our website, please report them to me (eleras@syscp.org) :)

So long,
Florian

Status - Report: April

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:25:21 +0200

Hi out there,

I just wanted to give you a short summary, what is happening @ SysCP currently.

The installer for SysCP 1.3 (the upcoming 1.4) is being rewritten by me from scratch at the moment. It's a phing-based CLI-application which allows you to:

Install / update the Panel
Alter the daemons - configurationfiles of supported distributions (yeah, no more manual editing ;) )
Install / delete modules while managing the dependencies on-the-fly
Grab modules directly from our (yet to be written) website
Update modules

CHTEKK is writing the most basic module of all our modules: the users - module. It will allow adding/editing/removing customers / resellers / admins, move customers between admins, give very detailed permissions and do all the important users - handling. For more informations: ask CHTEKK himself *g*

So long, stay tuned,
Florian

Security warning: Possible remote code injection when using Debian Sarge/Etch

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:30:00 +0200

Hello SysCP-community,

this security warning concerns all SysCP users who use Debian Sarge or Etch together with our default configuration files.

As the Debian-package of proftpd adds a user "ftp" with password "!" (drop quotes) and the appropriate homedir at "/home/ftp", anyone can login as this user. Together with an enabled mod_userdir in apache, one could create a directory "public_html" in the homedir of user "ftp" and access everything (also bad scripts) through "http://your-servername/~ftp/" without openbasedir and safemode restrictions.

We recommend to add the following line to your /etc/proftpd.conf:
AuthOrder mod_sql.c

We also recommend to disable mod_userdir by issuing the following command:
apache-modconf apache disable mod_userdir

Big thanks go to Harald Kapper who informed me about this security problem and also provided appropriate solutions!

Just a short notice regarding Debian Etch: Yes, we are aware that Debian Etch became stable last weekend, but we just need some time to adjust the configfiles. New ones, which will also reflect the recommendations of this security warning, will be included in our next release.

Stay tuned,
Flo and the SysCP-team