SysCP - Blog

25c3 - First day almost over and some words to say

nospam@example.com (d00p) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:54:05 +0100

Hello SysCP-Community,

the SysCP-developer team decided to join the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin this year, short 25c3. After the first day, we've already met lots of interesting people. Some using SysCP - some don't. We even had a tiny group which said they hated SysCP. But all in all, we had lots of nice talks and discussions about SysCP with many different users here in Berlin. Most common topics that came up were our APS Installer by RadioatioN the updater-scripts and the template engine.

We got very good feedback which is very apreciated so we know what we can do better in the upcoming releases. We're looking forward to meet lots more SysCP-interested people tomorrow here in the 'berlin congress center' and hope to see some members of our own community at our table in the hackcenter (basement floor).

d00p wars

Update: SysCP 1.4.2 released

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:45:00 +0100

Dear SysCP-community,

we just finished the work on SysCP 1.4.2. This is mainly a bugfix release, which resolves the follwing problems:

Double menuentries for Billing was shown (bug #1003)

APS menu now shows up again (bug #1002)

PHPMyAdmin/WebMail/WebFTP links in menu now show up again (bug #1061)

PHP Configuration is again editable (bugs #1024, #1029, #1031)

Several language mistakes in english language file were corrected (bug #1070)

Protected areas with lighttpd work again (bug #1050)

Awstats configuration page show all configs (bug #1001)

Added missing line break to nss-mysql.cnf (bug #1026)

Database query error by searching for ticket on categories page (bug #1073)

Resellers weren't able to manage instances of their customers (bug #1088)

Autoresponder cron script didn't ran because of short tags (bug #1045)

Autoresponder didn't remove the cron lockfile if module was disabled (bug #1091)

Update: SysCP 1.4.1 released

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:45:00 +0100

Dear SysCP-community,

this is probably the shortest period between two releases, but a nasty bug in SysCP 1.4 was found which we are fixing hereby.
Please also pay attention to our announcement of SysCP 1.4.

The following problems were fixed in SysCP 1.4.1:

A problem in the updater from 1.2.19 to 1.4 broke redirections in the database (bug #1022)

Redirects with lighttpd are now working again (bug #1012)

As always you'll find the downloads at files.syscp.org or http://www.syscp.org/download.html.
The direct link to the archive is http://files.syscp.org/releases/tgz/syscp-1.4.1.tar.gz.

We are still investigating the problem with duplicate menue entries and will fix this problem in the upcoming days.

We apologize for any inconvenience,
Flo and the SysCP-team

Update: SysCP 1.4 released

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:45:00 +0100

Dear SysCP-community,

after a long time of adding a lot of new features, endless bugfixing and two developer meetings (sponsored by SyGroup and Key-Systems, see Sponsors), we are proud to announce the release of SysCP 1.4.

It's been over eight months since our last release but we guarantee you - the waiting was worth it. SysCP 1.4 had more than 800 revisions in SVN, which is a third of all commits SysCP ever had.

These are the top SysCP 1.4 features:

APS: The Application Packaging Standard found its way into this release. Let your customer install Blogs, Guestbooks, Boards with just one click. See RadiatioN's APS handbook for more information.

Billing-Module: Florian Lippert - founder of SysCP - wrote a complete billing-system for FORMER 03 (see Sponsors) which is now fully integrated into SysCP. The module let's you manage top-level-domain templates, exact settlements, invoices and much more. Thanks to FORMER 03 who donated the work on this feature.

Autoresponder: Out-of-office or vacation notifications are more and more important for business. Therefore this feature has now been implemented within SysCP to provide you and your customers the ability to easily create such autoreply messages.

Cronjob: The heart of SysCP has been completely rewritten and got lots of improvements and bugfixing including suexec-, fcgid- and lighttpd-support.

Dovecot-support: Thanks to jamiewolf, SysCP now also supports the dovecot mailserver as alternative to courier. Dovecot is an excellent choice for both small and large installations. It's fast, requires no special administration and it uses very little memory.

Email-Quota: Give each customer a specific mailbox-size with just a few settings in SysCP. Available for courier and dovecot.

FCGID: Run PHP-scripts in a safe environment - each customer has its own php-starter-file and php.ini.

IPv6 improvement: SysCP now can fully handle IPv6 addresses for nameserver and webserver. Ready for the future!

Lighttpd-support: Often requested and finally implemented - lighttpd support for SysCP. Lighttpd is a fast and easy to use webserver and a worth alternative for Apache2.

Logging-system: See what's going on - with this feature you can easily log actions of customers, resellers, admins, updates and the cronjob.

Security: To secure the data and values in the syscp-database, we now use the php-filter extension to check the validity of any given data to syscp.

Settings-Page: Our new improved settings-overview page has been categorized and provides quick On/Off-switches for extra features.

SSL: Use ssl-encryption for your webserver, mailserver and ftp-server - everything through SysCP.

Traffic-visualizer: Shows the customers a graphical overview of their traffic-usage. Thanks to toby and falzo, who originally posted this mod in our forums.

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron): SysCP now also features configuration-templates for Ubuntu 8.04 - thanks to monotek who submitted these to the bugtracker.

Usability: Many interface-improvements makes the usage of SysCP very easy and userfriendly.

Bugfixes: A lot of bugs have been reported by users and testers - thanks at this point for reporting - which lead to more than 390 codechanges (according to diff).

SysCP 1.4 can be downloaded from files.syscp.org. The direct link is: http://files.syscp.org/releases/tgz/syscp-1.4.tar.gz
We also provide packages for Debian and Gentoo on our downloads page: http://www.syscp.org/download.html

Please note that the Debian Repository now also supports secure apt. You'll find the public key on the downloads page.
As Debian Sarge isn't supperted anymore we also decided to drop support for it. We are currently investigating Debian Lenny and plan to support it in one of the next releases.

Some personal words from me: The last few months were extraordinary for me. I want to thank everybody in the current SysCP team, atari, d00p, EleRas, jamiewolf and RadiatioN for their great work. It was always a pleasure to work with you, and I hope we'll do many more releases together.
I also want to thank all of you who have contributed to SysCP by writing endless tickets and bugreports, sending patches and new ideas, testing the code and of course all of you who are using SysCP!
Last but not least I want to thank our sponsors (http://www.syscp.org/sponsors.html), who provide us with all the gear we need to keep up our work.
Thank you all, we hope you enjoy using SysCP 1.4.

We wish you a very nice 1st advent,
Flo and the SysCP-team

About a new version of SysCP

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:55:51 +0100

Hey out there,

a lot of people ask us: Hey, do you ever release a new version? When will the next version be released? Well, actually this isn't anymore only in our hands. We need much more testers! So don't be afraid, install latest SVN - version (currently while I write this, it's 1.2.19-svn35) and test it. I already installed it on my productive server and I'm very happy that I did this, since I could fix a bug and flo fixed a few notices which were found in this setup. So: the first SysCP 1.2.19-svn35 with quite stable suexec and fcgi-support is running on a productive system. I hope this may be a push into the direction of a fast new release. Please: help us and test our SVN!

There need to be mentioned the bugreporter who already reported a hell lot of bugs. Thanks to all of them, mostly they were very helpful!

With the hope getting many new testers:

So long,
EleRas

SysCP - Developermeeting 2008-10-03

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:24:21 +0200

Hi out there,

Whoever is interessted in the summary of our last developermeeting may find it here:

https://wiki.syscp.org/meetings/2008-10-03 (german only, sorry)

Thanks again, Key-Systems GmbH for sponsoring this productive meeting.

So long,
Florian

Mail-Infrastructure changed

nospam@example.com (EleRas) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:26:41 +0200

Hi all,

Sorry if someone was spammed with our bugtracker-mails. We are currently changing our mailing-infrastructure during the preperation of a new service. The mail-structure should now be quite stable. More stuff will be posted soon ;)

So long,
Florian

Project status and upcoming things

nospam@example.com (Flo) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:45:00 +0200

Hello everybody out there,

yes, SysCP is still alive. We did a lot of "maintenance coding" over the last time. While the panel (the frontend) was always held very clean our cronscript (the backend) grew from time to time to a huge monster we fought (and are still fighting) with. Especially implementing features like lighttpd or IPv6 made the cronscript look even worse so we decided to encapsulate the configfile-creation for certain daemons to replacable classes.

What's next? Well, we (the developers) are again meeting up for a coding weekend hoping to fix things. Currently our changes haven't been tested that much yet (as of the bind/dns-part even not finished yet), so it needs great testing. The changes are scattered over many branches (/branches/atari/cron, /branches/radiatioin/aps_syscp, etc) so we have to merge them first (which could lead to an odyssey, but we'll see).

RadiatioN has built a great One-Click-Application-Installer based on the APS-Standard. More details will follow as soon as everything is tested and works like intended.

So stay tuned,
Flo and the SysCP-team

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

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

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

nospam@example.com (d00p) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:23:43 +0200

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) — 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

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