I need an alternative to zentyal

[jopeme]

Hello.
It was valued for its services zentyal as proxy, captive portal, samba and because it is easy to start. Now I am very disappointed that the captive portal, l7 module, etc, modules has been discontinued.

I'm looking for a similar solution.

What is your oppinion?

[robb]

If you need an SBS replacement then the new version of Zentyal (version 4.0 and on) will not give you the features you might want to see. Personally I am kind of in the same boat. I would like to have a fully featured SBS server, including Gateway, Comunications and local networking services.

I will stick with Zentyal 3.2 as long as possible. Maybe there will be some smart solution using KVM or XEN so a complete solution can still reside on the same hardware.

Maybe we can have some modules maintained by the community, but for that we will need skilled perl developers in the community. As far as I know, there are not any active developers in the community.

[StuartNaylor]

Clearos
IPcop
http://www.nethserver.org/ looks interesting.
Kolab is just great groupware.
even pfsense will run a lot of modules.

Anyone else going to add to a list?

[EddieA]

Maybe we can have some modules maintained by the community, but for that we will need skilled perl developers in the community. As far as I know, there are not any active developers in the community.

Knowledge of perl is less than half the battle.  I have, albeit briefly, looked at what is needed to maintain a couple of the modules, as they do not do quite what I want "out of the box".

The biggest hurdle is understanding the structure of Zentyal, how it works internally and the inter-relationship between many of the modules.  I know that all of the source is available, but in some respects, Zentyal is more like closed-source code as without that internal knowledge, what appears to be a simple change could have major ramifications elsewhere.

My belief is that this is the major stumbling block to the community taking up the reigns on providing more user-driven updates and features and why the call for the community to keep existing, soon to be dropped, features in 4.0 will fail.

Cheers,
Eddie

[robb]

Eddie, your comments _should_ trigger the devs to respond. For years Zentyal claimed there is support for the community like opening repo's and, when asked, help to write or maintain modules.
The comments were always: noone in the community is interested because noone asked.

I think it is a bit more complicated and there is a need of active stimulation from Zentyal to establish a community developers group.

[it_admin]

ClearOS looks interesting, and they tell you upfront what pricing is.  They are even based in the USA.  That should help with support for US users.

http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html

[StuartNaylor]

Eddie, your comments _should_ trigger the devs to respond. For years Zentyal claimed there is support for the community like opening repo's and, when asked, help to write or maintain modules.
The comments were always: noone in the community is interested because noone asked.

I think it is a bit more complicated and there is a need of active stimulation from Zentyal to establish a community developers group.

Robb even before fall outs I was requesting info and help. If you look back zbuildtools where either missing or when you tried them they didn't work. Its only recently they have been available.
Then resurrecting LTSP yeah myself and another got on the LTSP trail and apart from LTSP the required objects from DHCP had been removed.
We will get back to you, we will provide help.

Its been the same for 5 years, yeah, yeah, yeah we do this and we will help. You can build modules and we welcome it.

That ain't the reality irrespective of motives and to be honest I am highly dubious of motives.

As EddieA says it has nothing to do with perl there is absolutely no documentation on the Zentyal object module and the first job is to reverse enginneer Zentyal.
I have had a go and failed and again its Exactly like EddieA says you just don't know what effects things will have.
Then when it comes to small scripts and such like the object model keeps changing.

The developers guide has an import users script as an example, its only just been fixed.

I have submitted some import user scripts that allow much more in settings. I used bash and samba-tool with ldb-edit because those are stable and stayed well away from anything Zentyal.
I could of used perl and yes probably more hacks than anything skilled but its the zentyal code that is VooDoo.

Its been 5 years since I started requesting !

Also to be honest the whole idea of repackaging packages and calling them zentyal whilst merely we are creating a configuration template and interface is a bit foobar.

The application packages are already in packages and if there are any changes or updates that effect them the only problem is because you have repackaged them those changes force you to do another package.

99% of zentyal are pure vanilla unbuntu packages with a templated configuration its only samba and openchange where they differ.
For the last two years I have not had a clue what they where doing with Samba apart from making it not work. I have had the samba sernet binaries working for well over two years.
So out of all what Zentyal was this leaves us with only Openchange that needs application package development.

Again for several years I have been calling for a scripting module that allows the easy addition of 3rd party module.
The hooks from users dissapeared with the new user module.

So the up shot of this is actually I view what is being said as being very dubious and have repeatedly questioned the whole opensource philosophy of zentyal.

I have just made another repeat for my calls for some really easy methods once again even though I believe its futile.

https://forum.zentyal.org/index.php/topic,22952.0.html

But hey.