BM Network Consulting

Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition puts the user at the heart of its new design

bmathis — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:16:29 +0000

Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition puts the user at the
heart of its new design

Integrates dozens of new features and improvements to take
user experience to next level

LONDON, October
26, 2009: Canonical announced today the upcoming release of
Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, the latest version of the popular Linux
desktop distribution. Ubuntu 9.10 will be available for free download
on Thursday 29 October. Ubuntu 9.10 brings changes small and large
that all have a common purpose - to make Ubuntu the most
user-friendly operating system available. Ubuntu 9.10 features a
redesigned, faster boot and login experience, a revamped audio
framework, and improved 3G broadband connectivity, all of which
contribute to a first-class user experience.

Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition: cloud computing made real

bmathis — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:16:24 +0000

Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition: cloud computing made
real

Latest version of popular operating system allows businesses
to build on proven Ubuntu server technology

LONDON, October
26, 2009: Canonical today announced the general availability
of Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition for free download on Thursday 29
October. Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition introduces Ubuntu Enterprise
Cloud (UEC) as a fully supported technology. This is an open source
cloud computing environment, based on the same Application
Programming Interfaces (APIs) as Amazon EC2, that will allow
businesses to start taking advantage of the possibilities of private
clouds. Private clouds allow businesses to reap the benefits of
flexible compute environments while avoiding the security, regulatory
or policy restrictions inherent in pushing data onto a public cloud.

eBox testing environment ANSTE one of O’Reilly’s Beautiful Testing essays

bmathis — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:16:05 +0000

We’re proud to announce that an essay regarding the Advanced Network Service Testing Environment (ANSTE) that was developed in order to carry out eBox Platform testing has been included in O’Reilly’s Beautiful Testing book that is to be published on the 30th of October. Beautiful Testing, edited by Tim Riley and Adam Goucher, offers 23 essays from 27 leading testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art.

“eBox Platform is a complex tool that integrates a number of independent network services, released as a set of independent modules that need to be thoroughly tested to prevent regressions and to verify the correct functioning of each feature” said Isaac Clerencia, author of the “Testing Network Services in Multimachine Scenarios” essay and developer at eBox Technologies. “After a year or so since we started developing eBox Platform, getting a new release out had become a struggle due to the lengthy testing and quality assurance process. What is more, these tasks had quickly become the most dreaded ones among eBox developers and we figured out that something had to be done.”

“As we couldn’t find an existing testing tool that would suit our needs, we ended developing our own open source testing suite” said José Antonio Calvo, ANSTE developer and developer at eBox Technologies, and continued “the result was ANSTE that allows you to easily define complex network scenarios with multiple virtual machines, to run or to remotely schedule the tests according to pre-defined test suites that include command-based and Selenium-based tests and finally obtain a full report that is made available through a web interface.”

“We think ANSTE is a beautiful network service testing solution that can help in the testing process of any software that involves several machines connected to a network” said Isaac Clerencia. “ANSTE has already been successfully used to test MySQL clusters and we think it could also be useful for other projects, such as XMMP or Squid, for example. We are extremely glad for being included in the Beautiful Testing to give more visibility to the project for a good cause.”

More about Beautiful Testing
Beautiful Testing, edited by Tim Riley and Adam Goucher. Copyright 2010 O’Reilly Media, Inc., ISBN 978-0-596-15981-8. Available at: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159818/ All royalties from this book will be donated to the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign.

More about ANSTE
ANSTE is a testing environment for advanced network services, mainly intended to automatize the integration tests of eBox Platform, furthermore it could be used to other similar purposes. ANSTE is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the project’s trac and source code are available at: http://public.warp.es/anste

New screencast on how to set up a VPN with eBox Platform

bmathis — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:53:56 +0000

We’re glad to announce that we’ve put together a screencast on how to set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) with eBox Platform. The screencast shows step-by-step how to create and configure a Certification Authority (CA), user certificates, a VPN server and the clients with eBox.

Together with the official documentation regarding VPN set up you should be able to allow secure access to the corporate network to remote users and secure interconnection of geographically distant networks.

You can also find interesting the screencast on Basic Network Configuration or if you are a professional eBox user, the screencast on eBox Control Center.

You can view the screencasts also at YouTube:
Setting up a VPN with eBox Platform
Basic Network Configuration with eBox Platform
eBox Control Center