[BlueOnyx:07833] Re: BlueOnyx vs BlueQuartz

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Alex,

> What I was after please was a list of differences in the UI between
> BlueQuartz and BlueOnyx.

Let me put it this way: Sadly the development of BlueQuartz stagnated sometime 
around 2007. When CentOS5 came out, it became apparent that there would be no 
BlueQuartz version for CentOS5 in the forseeable future either. Those facts 
eventually prodded us to create BlueOnyx as a fork off the BlueQuartz 
codebase.

One of the first things we did was to incorporate all the updates and fixes 
into Blueonyx that we had submitted to the BlueQuartz SVN, but which hadn't 
yet been released. Those were plenty of fixes to sometimes longstanding 
problems - big and small. 

Next we then started to port the existing code from CentOS4 to CentOS5, which 
required us to make the GUI PHP-5.1 ready, which so far had been working only 
on PHP-4.3.9. 

When BlueOnyx was released in January 2009, it was basically "BlueQuartz on 
CentOS5" with some extras sprinkled in and since then it has continuously 
evolved further.

The more visible aspects of the differences between BlueQuartz and BlueOnyx 
are of course the extra features such as:

- built in phpMyAdmin 
- built in webmail
- Brute Force Login detection and prevention mechanisms (pam_abl)
- GUI to automatically create and remove MySQL users and databases for sites.
- Subdomain management
- Better PHP security management on a per site basis.
- Optional suPHP support.
- New skins for the GUI.
- Working vacation messages.
- Updated Dovecot and ProFTPd.
- Ability to view logfiles, processes and logins through the GUI.
- JSP support already built in with an improved GUI.
- YUM updates are delivered through various mirrors right from the start.
- Comes with PHP5 and MySQL5 preinstalled.
- Zend Optimizer and IonCube support included.
- GUI to modify SSHd settings (root access, port, protocols)
- Mailman support instead of Majordomo.
- "Site Prefix" that allows to prefix usernames with a 5 character string.
- Better and more flexible "Web Alias" handling.

The less visible things are a legion of small fixes all over the place. Such 
as to rip out and to throw away the old authentication mechanisms and to 
thoroughly switch BlueOnyx to shadow auth, a step which BlueQuartz had only 
done half the way.

The next thing was to fix some long standing issues with CMU Migrations, which 
always had been a pain in the *** (excuse my French), where email aliases for 
sites got lost and mailboxes never migrated properly. Then the old 
dnsImport.pl was replaced with a set of scripts contained in "dns-toolbox", 
which greatly help with DNS migrations and modifications.

So anything migration related (a common task for anyone who runs a BQ or BX 
server) now finally worked like it since long should have worked with a lot 
less hassles.

Other less visible changes to the code made the GUI able to run seamlessly in 
an OpenVZ container to allow for that kind of virtualization, which can also 
make BlueOnyx ready to run in a clustered environment for those that need the 
extra relieability and resilence. Which was something that was often asked 
for, but had been impossible with a "stock" BlueQuartz due to the intricracies 
of the GUI and the architecture itself. All that helped to turn a hobbyist 
platform into something that was again ready for use in an enterprise 
environment.

Recently BlueOnyx made another leap forward when we made it ready for CentOS6, 
Scientific Linux 6 and RHEL6. That required making the GUI PHP-5.3 ready, 
which in turn prompted us to incorporate a whole set of small improvements 
throughout the GUI and the backend.

BlueOnyx also frequently releases updated ISO images and OS templates for easy 
installs, while the last inofficial BlueQuartz ISO created by NuOnce is now 
four years old and the only (more or less) supported method of installing 
BlueQuartz has ever been the TAR-ball install.

CentOS4 will be EOL'ed sometime early 2012, which is not that far away. The 
BlueQuartz SVN shows that in the last two years some steps were made to make 
it CentOS5 and even CentOS6 ready, so there is some hope that it eventually 
may catch up again and that would be nice. But it has still a long way to go.

Lastly: What makes BlueOnyx shine is the thriving community of users and 
developers. If you have an issue or find a problem, report it and it'll 
eventually get fixed and help is never that far away. 

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber