SysCP - Blog

Sparkling new design and website at syscp.org launched

nospam@example.com (Flo) — 2008-07-04T20:42:56Z

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

End of Developer - Meeting

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — 2008-07-01T09:37:26Z

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

Status-report dev-meeting: we're getting closer

nospam@example.com (d00p) — 2008-06-28T14:23:43Z

Hello out there,

after a bit of dead animal, we're all set up for the next big step for our next release. What exactly will not be published yet - but it's gonna kick ass big time.

Besides checking all the tickets we closed the last few months, we're also going to re-check service-configuration files and add some minor enhancements to the Interface ;-)

Till then,

d00p

Design of our Website

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — 2008-06-28T14:07:46Z

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

Some more people arrived

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — 2008-06-27T19:01:34Z

Hi,

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

So long,
Florian

Coding marathon

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — 2008-06-27T18:04:57Z

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) — 2008-06-15T19:30:00Z

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) — 2008-03-25T17:28:12Z

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

The new shell-installer - These are the features

nospam@example.com (d00p) — 2008-03-04T10:42:52Z

Hello SysCP-Community,

as I told you in my last post, I'm currently working on a shell-installer for syscp which will setup and configure all services needed.
This works surprisingly good at the moment so I thought: Hey, let's break some barriers and do some more.

The shell-installer now handles

- full apache/apache2 configuration plus FCGI and SSL (for syscp-vhost and customers)
- full lighttpd configuration with fastcgi and also SSL (syscp-vhost completely, customers are missing some options)
- configuration of all needed services like postfix, courier, proftpd, bind and cron
- save installer-process for quick setup on another server with same settings

I hope we'll finish it this month but it would be awsome if some of you guys could test it on different distributions
so we know everything works out-of-the-box on many systems.

Just visit us in our irc-channel!

C ya,

michael / d00p

Installing SysCP - like stealing candy from a baby

nospam@example.com (d00p) — 2008-02-14T06:17:14Z

Hello SysCP-Community,

yesterday I started working on a little PHP SysCP Shell-Installer. This will make the syscp installation as easy as stealing candy from a baby for almost EVERYBODY. It will automatically create all necessary directories and files, run all the commands that you would have to run manually from the configuration-page and sets up SysCP so everything works out-of-the-box.

I hope I can do that as distribution independent as possible (configfiles differ sometimes) and I hope we can get even more users to use SysCP with offering this install-script.

Of course the standard install.php - routine still will be present and usable. Using the shell-installer is optional and not necessary to set up SysCP.

See ya folks,

Michael

Update: SysCP 1.2.19 released

nospam@example.com (Flo) — 2008-02-03T17:30:00Z

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

More domain-comfort for admins and customers

nospam@example.com (d00p) — 2008-01-27T16:12:28Z

Hello SysCP-community,

what is more comfortable than easily adding domains? Exactly, easily adding a lot of domains ;-)

This is what we'll add to future versions of SysCP - a nice and easy way of importing domains using delimiter-seperated files.
But that's not all - what do you think - we're also adding the opposite: Exporting your domain-lists to a goodlooking sorted overview of your current domains on your system.

This is just a little bit of candy but i think it's pretty useful for some of you guys :) Hope you'll like it ;-)

Well guys, that's it for today, c ya

Michael

// Small add by EleRas: This will most likely be merged to be released in 1.2.20 (not 1.2.19)

Introducing log-feature for SysCP

nospam@example.com (d00p) — 2008-01-25T16:49:58Z

Hello SysCP-community,

today I want to introduce the new logging feature for SysCP 1.2.x (not (yet) in trunk)

I thought about how I was looking through logfiles hours and hours these days because I couldn't detect what was wrong and why some services weren't working properly. End of story: a colleague changed some settings without informing me and all the log-reading has been done for nothing.

Such thing shouldn't happen, cause for some of us, time is money. The new logging feature logs setting-changes and keeps you informed of what's going on in your SysCP and who did what and where (depending on the log-level). Logs can be saved to the system-log, a specific file, or to the syscp-database. Even cronjob-actions can be logged (to prevent huge logs we allow this only for one run - you then have to enable cron-logging again). You can even specify more than one log-type and e.g. log to the system-log and the database.

It might also be possible - in later version - to define in which cases the main-admin will be informed via e-mail (e.g. IP/Port changed). Maybe some of you have great ideas to improve this new feature for the upcoming releases.

hf,

Michael

SysCP needs YOU for translation

nospam@example.com (d00p) — 2008-01-24T09:19:33Z

Hello SysCP-community,

as you can propably guess by the topic, we have lots of new language-file entries that need to be translated as the newer versions of SysCP brought you some nice features :)

It would be awsome if the ones who can would help translating because we apparently do not speak all used languages. It's pretty easy, just grab the language files from the current svn-trunk, use english.lng.php as base and easily add and translate the missing parts.

A more detailed manual on howto do the translation can be found here. If you have any questions, just visit us on IRC or post in the forum.

Thanks in advance for helping us make SysCP available for a wider audience.

Greetings,

Michael

I came - I saw - I coded: This is what happend :)

nospam@example.com (d00p) — 2008-01-22T18:09:21Z

Hello SysCP-community,

my name is Michael, I'm using SysCP for at least two years now and finally decided to join the community three weeks ago.

After a few days on the forum - and of course trying to help as good as i could - EleRas decided to give me a nice custom-title: HelpDesk.
Well, pretty cool eh?

EleRas and I were talking on IRC and I thought: Hey, why not do something you really know about and code, find bugs, etc. And so I did. I started my own svn-branch and tried to contribute as good as i could. I now also have the rights to change tickets and because I was very bored at work, I decided to clean up the ticket-system so the devs have less work and can concentrate on the real bugs ;-)

I then started a new enhancement for SysCP - you might know about it from the forum - the SysCP Support Ticket Mod. I think this is a very nice enhancement for such a great system-controlpanel and I hope it's going to make its way into 1.2.19.

Whatelse happened? Well, let's just say a lot. I contributed some bugfixes and of course some tiny enhancements

e.g.
• make webalizer quiet
• have more than one "files" or "commands" section in the configfiles-area
• have more than one ip/port combination for a domain
• etc.

I hope you - and of course the main developers - like them :-)

C ya,

Michael

(Small add by EleRas: I'll soon merge all his changes to trunk ;) )