SysCP - Blog - Website

Sparkling new design and website at syscp.org launched

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:42:56 +0200

Hello SysCP-community,

within the last hours our homepage was updated to the new design create by Sven Skrabal aka RadiatioN. Big Thanks goes to EleRas who managed to integrate all of our tools (wiki, blog, bugtracker, websvn etc) into the new design. If you find any glitches or problems, don't hesitate to tell us.
The idea of a new web-2.0-ish homepage was born long before, but the actual building began last weekend on our development meeting in Contwig at EleRas' home. By the way, we got a nice meeting summary at https://wiki.syscp.org/meetings/2008-06-27 (german only, if you want to know more, join us in irc ;-).

Again thanks for all the fish,
Flo and the SysCP-team

Design of our Website

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:07:46 +0200

Hi,

I just went to most of our website - templates and fixed (hopefully) all headers and menus. You should have a unique experience on all our pages now and you are able to switch from (i.e.) the blog to the forum without searching for it ;)

So long,
Florian

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

Restructuring SysCP.asia - ehhh, SysCP.org

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:28:12 +0100

Hello out there,

Was a long time since my last own blogentry, but well, d00p wrote the important stuff and did an incredible work on (mostly) the installer, thank you d00p!

Now it's my turn again, we had an really internal meeting (well, I said "trac sucks" and flo agreed: "thought that a while ago...") so the following changes will be done in the next time:

Our website will become semi-static again (internal dynamic-website mirrored into static files). This allows us to distribute the website over different servers very easily.
Our new bugtracker will be a BugZilla - installation, all bugs in trac will be moved there.
The wiki will be a DokuWiki, the current wiki will of course be converted.
The trac - browser will be replaced by WebSVN

The main reason behin this is quite simple: trac always wants to use the complete 5 GB RAM of our server and everything else stops working. This is really really annoying. Either the OOM-killer starts to kill or I had to kill it (3 kills in a sentence (actually, with that 4) :D).

What else changed / will happen:

I started to work in Zweibrücken, the company I work for now is one of the global-players in the domain-buisness: Key-Systems GmbH. My part is software-engineering for DomainDiscount24. They now provide the power, traffic and rackspace for our main server, so thx to them (and just register your domains following the link I just gave you, they are in good hands there :) (The affiliate-link is just for counting the users coming from SysCP.org, I swear!))

Our website is now reachable via the following domains: syscp.org syscp.de syscp.com syscp.net syscp.info syscp.biz syscp.ch syscp.it syscp.asia
If anyone wants to sponsor a new "syscp.tld" domain, just speak with flo or me, we will be happy :)

Ah, and I don't want to forget atari, who did really much over the last weeks (according to our timeline). Thank you!
Sorry if there were more people working, I just wasn't around and I just recognized these two via the timeline, just tell me and you'll recieve your "thank you", I promise!

So long,
EleRas

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 1.2.18 released

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:30:00 +0100

Hello SysCP-community,

as the last release includes some nasty bugs we are releasing a new version of SysCP now. It contains the follwing bugfixes:

Safemode will be added again to vhosts at cron_tasks, formtoken is now correctly inserted into all admin_customer-scripts, so editing/adding a customer won't end with "The request seems to be compromised." and the installer now sets the mysql-access-hosts correctly.

These are all nasty bugs, so I'm sure all of you will update. But I also want to state, that with the safemode not being inserted in the vhosts your server might have a big problem, when safemode isn't activated globally. Therefore consider SysCP 1.2.17 insecure (1.2.16 isn't affected though) and update immediately if you're already using it!

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-1.2.18.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

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

Welcome our new mirrors

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:44:00 +0200

Hi,

As flo told you in his last announcement, we are currently moving stuff around our mirrors / servers. I just finished setting up the first bunch of download-mirrors. Our mirrors will be accessed by you automatically, since they are configured with DNS - round-robin. If you get an error, just refresh - it's very likely that you will use another mirror and it works ;)

Every mirror is updated automatically every night and directly after a new release. The integrity of the files will be verified regularly (once a day, random time) by us. If one file is corrupt or replaced by malware (we don't hope that it will happen, don't we?), we will put this mirror off immediately.

Currently there are three mirrors configured:

canada.debian.syscp.org | canada.files.syscp.org
This mirror is kindly provided by linuxgeneration.org
france.debian.syscp.org | france.files.syscp.org
This mirror is kindly provided by Orth-IT.de
nuernberg.debian.syscp.org | nuernberg.files.syscp.org
This mirror is kindly provided by Hetzner.de

You can access the mirrors directly with the given URLs, but the preferred way is to access debian.syscp.org | files.syscp.org and use a random mirror.

We will continue adding new mirrors during the next weeks, so stay tuned.

The next big step will be moving our main website from the old server @ hetzner.de to its new home, our own new hardware (Quad-Core Intel Xeon 1,83 GHz, 5 GB RAM, 2x 250 GB in RAID1, a DELL PowerEdge 1950) kindly hosted for free in the rack of INWX.de, thank you for that! Our old server simple was unable to handle the load in a stable way, people in the IRC know what I'm talking about ;)

^Willie^ gave us an updated Gentoo-ebuild, it's located here, but please note: it's completely without support and mayÂ even make your server burn down the data center, it's without any warranty ;)

So long,
Florian