Geek Software of the Week: Zentyal!
Don’t spend your hard earned money on the Evil Empire (Microsoft’s) Small Business Server! Get all those capabilities and more for FREE! This was recommended by one of our faithful viewers that just installed it, and loves it!
Zentyal – Linux-based FREE Small Business Server!
“Zentyal is a Linux small business server that can be configured as a Gateway, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Infrastructure Manager, Unified Communications Server or a combination of them. The development of Zentyal started in 2004 and currently it is the open source alternative to Microsoft network infrastructure products aimed at small and medium businesses (Windows Small Business Server, Windows Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Forefront…)
Highlights:
- New distribution base: Ubuntu 12.04, providing new versions of all the packages and services managed by Zentyal.
- Improved performance: there is now a global cache to speed up all the requests to the Redis configuration backend. Also, the MVC framework uses now a new model load system to save some CPU processing and to reduce memory usage.
- Improved reliability: new locking and transactions systems have been developed to avoid any risk of data incoherences or corruptions.
- Samba 4 integration: a full replacement of the Windows Server Active Directory, which allows Zentyal to join as additional controller of an existing AD Domain.
- Kerberos integration: single authentication for HTTP Proxy, Mail and Zarafa groupware, in addition to File Sharing which is already provided by Samba
- New look & feel for the Web interface along with usability improvements.
- New Master-Slave architecture: now it’s easier than ever to synchronize your users between several Zentyal servers.
- New UPS module:it helps to keep your server always up and running in case power outages.
- New Thin Clients module using the popular LTSP software.
- Reviewed HTTP Proxy with a simpler interface and improved filtering by time period.
- Zarafa 7.1: a new version of the groupware suite featuring a new web interface, multi-domain support and web chat integration.
- Support for advanced NAT rules in Firewall module”