[BlueOnyx:22995] Upcoming BlueOnyx 5210R additions

[Michael Stauber]

Hi all,

The BlueOnyx 5210R development is commencing nicely and it's now mostly
ready and awaiting the release of CentOS 8.

As is the development of 5210R was done on RHEL8 (beta) and should be
easy to port once CentOS 8 is out. At the most the RPMs simply need a
recompile and the ISO building and installer need to be adjusted.

One of the more radical changes is that we now support Chrooted jails
and we realize them via Jailkit, which provides easy management tools
for just that purpose and the GUI makes use of them.

To see some screenshots and more detailed explanations please see the
following URL:

https://www.blueonyx.it/jailkit/

Another noteworthy change is that our FTP integration switched to
'explicit FTP' and that means that FTP now only listens on port 21, from
which it serves both FTP and FTPS (via TLS). A FTP-client that supports
TLS will therefore automatically use TLS, while older FTP clients
without TLS support still are able to talk to FTP in an unencrypted fashion.

If Vsites that have their Shell Access switched to use Chrooted jails
then siteAdmin's and users with the "Shell Access" set to at least
"Chrooted SFTP, SCP and RSYNC" can also use true SFTP, SCP or RSYNC to
access their files. The connection is then jailed via Jalkit into one of
two Chrooted jails:

A siteAdmin is chrooted in a fashion that he can see the entire Vsite
(but nothing outside of that) and a regular User with Chrooted access is
jailed below that into a separate jail that restricts his access to only
his own files.

But the page linked above explains this in greater detail and has some
images to illustrate that in a better fashion.

What's left to do?
===================

Easy Migrate:
==============

I'm now starting to work on "Easy Migrate", which will provide GUI and
CLI based tools to easily migrate from older BlueOnyx to 5210R without
using CMU.

"Easy Migrate" allows you to configure where you want to pull the Vsites
from and then provides you with a list of Vsites on the remote server.
You can select all of them or just the Vsite you want to move and it'll
then take it from there and will move it (and all it's content) to the
5210R. This includes the webpage, certificate, all Users, the MySQL data
and configured WebApplications, provided the PKGs are also already
installed on the 5210R.

Beyond that there are a couple of upcoming additions that might not be
ready at launch of 5210R, but will be added as well. These include:

- Cronjobs:

A GUI to manually add and edit cronjobs and the ability to grant that
power to siteAdmin's of Vsites as well.

- Multi-Vsite:

Ability of a Vsite to serve pages out of different DocumentRoots. Say
you have a Vsite with several domain names assigned as "Web Server
Alias". As is all of them are served out of /web.

The new feature will allow you to optionally specify different
DocumentRoot's for each "Web Server Alias", so that the same Vsite can
effectively serve different webpages without having to use Subdomains.

Of course this will be an optional feature and you can specify if a
Vsite is allowed to use it or not.

- New GUI Theme:

The GUI is slated to get a new additional theme that gives it a more
modern look. But choosing between actual features and "eye candy" I
rather put it at the end of the list until there is nothing else that
may be more important.

- CCEd replacement:

The last year I've been mulling the idea of a CCEd replacement and I now
have some more or less solid ideas about how to tackle that in a two
step approach. The first step involves creating a new daemon that uses
the existing CODB database backend and provides some added functionality
and a larger set of commands to consolidate certain CODB requests that
the GUI frequently uses. The second step would transition CCEd from
using a flat file database structure to using an SQL driven backend that
requires less IO traffic and provides faster access.


Donations:
==========

So far the development of BlueOnyx 5210R has taken six months of an all
out effort to port the existing functionality to a more modern OS, more
modern PHP and newer CodeIgniter backend. As always I'd be humbled and
more than happy if you could support that endeavor with a donation - no
matter how big or small. You can do so easily at the URL below.

https://www.blueonyx.it/index.php?page=donations

Many thanks!

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber