5210R: Development Diary #3

Some more updates about the progress of the BlueOnyx 5210R development.

It's been a while since I posted about the progress of the BlueOnyx 5210R development. So it's time for another update:

It works? Yay, it works!

I'm happy to report that - for the first time - the GUI of 5210R is no longer throwing any errors when you click through all pages as "admin", "siteAdmin" or regular user. All functionaliy such as configuring services, creating Vsites, Users, mailing lists or managing them? They work as well.

That's no small feat considering where this started seven months ago. It also doesn't mean that there are no further errors. There just might be some glitches lurking here and there in rarely used pages or usage cases that I haven't yet run into. Until release I'll try to find as many of them as I can - of course.

What's left to do?

The way I now integrate ProFTPd into BlueOnyx 5210R is a bit different from before: It no longer runs via "xinetd", but "standalone". It also no longer uses to different proftpd config files for non-SSL and SSL. Instead there is just one proftpd.conf that deals with both. And ProFTPd provides non-SSL *and* SSL over port 21. Which means: We're doing away with port 990 for SSL.

But beyond that I'm also now looking at providing a chrooted "scp-only" shell to optionally allow true SFTP without giving siteAdmins true shell access. If that works I'll look at providing chrooted and feature limited true shell access for users as a further option. For that we might use Jailkit, as it seems to make that a bit easier from the administrative point of view.

Once that's sorted out the next big items lie in wait: "EasyMigrate", which will allow to easily migrate from older BlueOnyx to BlueOnyx 5210R. And of course the integration of a somewhat more modern theme. But to be brutally honest: If the new theme isn't ready when CentOS 8 is released, then we'll launch without it and release the new theme in a later update. Eye candy is good, but I won't let it slow the release down.

If you're wondering when CentOS 8 will come out, then your guess is as good as mine. They do post some updates on this page that shows the ongoing work.