[BlueOnyx:12372] Re: Solarspeed / Compass / BlueOnyx stores

[Steven Howes]

On 5 Mar 2013, at 10:05, Jeff Rhys-Jones wrote:
> Particular highlights of Interworx for us are:
> 
> 1) The ability to install it, fully supported on top of Redhat / Oracle Linux with a single command via YUM.
> 2) Very good GUI - well maintained, worked on mobile devices also.
> 3) Ability to provide customers with jailed SFTP access without giving them a shell login (eliminating all that FTP firewall nonsense)
> 4) PHPMyadmin 3.5 included
> 5) Single click install of many popular web applications (Wordpress, VTiger CRM, Magento, etc) via SimpleScripts - included
> 6) Visual easy to configure firewall management - log in via HTTPS and enable ssh when you need it if you are worried about leaving it open all the time.
> 7) Plugin for Litespeed webserver integration - enabling easy compile of latest PHP 5.4.xx
> 
> The support system is ticketed, and replies typically come back within a few hours.

It's always hard to compare a free product with a commercial one. The support system bit in particular. There are people on this list who would provide that sort of commercial support if you were after it. To address the points in order (please note these are my opinions, Michael may disagree):

1) There is always a risk with operating a system like this. BlueOnyx is very much designed as an appliance (historically it *was* the Cobalt RaQ appliance). Breaking away from that is not easy. A GUI that integrates so tightly with the rest of the OS, has to make some assumptions about the configuration of the underlying system. Dropping it on top of an existing system lands it with a lot of unknown questions, so it'd be hard to not make it break. I'm sure Interworx have managed this - it's just a matter of resources.

2) BlueOnyx has a new UI in development, wait and see ;)

3) This has been talked about in the past, if I'm honest I've no idea what the outcome of the discussion was.

4) I've rather lost track of versions / dependancies so I'm not best placed to answer this one. If the PHP version is up to it then it'd probably work if you put it on there. I'm guessing there is a reason we use the version we do though.

5) This is probably possible for BlueOnyx, but it's likely to be resources and licensing that complicate it. There are some 'off the shelf' packages for popular apps though (from the usual suppliers).

6) This would be nice to see. The Cobalt range was never very good at this (who here remembers the Phoenix Adaptive Firewall?..) I'd like to see this myself in future, but it's going to be pretty low down the list. Anyone who's running an web server should be able to cobble together iptables config. It would be nice to have this easier to manage though. The SSH suggestion you made is already do-able, you can turn it off and on in the GUI under network services.

7) Cant say I've looked at litespeed before, but it sounds interesting.

I hope my ramblings are of use!

Steve