This is just a quick heads up that we’ll exhibit at FroSCon 2010 this weekend.

We’re looking forward to two days of nice chatting with friends, customers and new people. The FroSCon schedule has lots of interesting talks again and lots of nice open source projects and companies which are running a booth.

Our main product this year will be bytemine cryptorage. We will show how it works and what you can do with it. Oh, we will also give away voucher codes to interested people for testing cryptorage.

So drop by at our booth! :)

(there is a german variant of this article available here)

Behälter KG, a company from Bremen, Germany, is among the leaders in sales of used special steel containers in Europe. Their storage contains roughly 1500 containers on 15.000 square meters.

The successful collaboration between bytemine and Behälter KG began in 2008 as the container databases were redesigned. This was done as part of the website relaunch with the aim of easing the task of finding suitable containers online. In order to meet the customer requirements at their best and being able to easily handle any changing requirements in the future, the web framework Ruby on Rails was chosen.

Ruby on Rails supports the developers to achieve high-quality results even in face of changing requirements in the development process. Later requirements and changes of functionality can be easily integrated.

By now the rails application has been deeply integrated into the daily workflow of Behälter KG and has become one of the company’s central applications.

“The new container database enables us to assist our customers even better”, says Peter Schüler, “and shortens the time to find a suitable container, while delivering all the necessary details, such as technical specs, images and drawings”.

For Peter Schüler the collaboration with bytemine means to work with an innovative service provider who values future-oriented thinking highly and regards customer satisfaction as his prime concern.

“Since the launch of the new online container database our customers find containers much easier”, observes Peter Schüler, CEO of Behälter KG.

bytemine has been a Zarafa Partner since late 2008. Since 2009 we’re a certified partner and have done quite a few Zarafa projects so far.

What is Zarafa?

Zarafa is an Open Source Collaboration, providing:

• Integration with your existing Linux mailserver
• Native mobile phone support
• Outlook “Look & Feel” webaccess
• Stable Outlook sharing (100% MAPI)

A lot more details about Zarafa can be found on their official website.

We’re not only offering various services such as conceptual work, deployment and integration, maintenance as well as 24/7 standby for Zarafa, but also offer Zarafa hosting on our Xen-Cluster located at our rack in Frankfurt connected to Kleyrex Internet Exchange.

Among the customers we’ve successfully migrated to Zarafa are:

• PSA Automation GmbH
• Banking Concepts AG
• Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg GmbH

While Miniatur Wunderland as well as Banking Concepts AG are running on their own infrastructure, taken care of by us, PSA Automation GmbH is taking advantage of our hosted Zarafa.

As I tweeted this morning, news.bytemine.net is shutting down. This is kind of the end of an era, I’ve been providing free usenet access for the last eleven years. The first six years through the usenet node news.hazardous.org, the last five years bytemine hosted the service on news.bytemine.net.

Admiddently news.bytemine.net was never a huge site. We had the Big8, most of the german-language hierarchies plus a few selected others. However non-binary traffic has decreased over the last years and – to be honest – the significance of usenet has decreased much as well. Added to that, news.bytemine.net has been running in auto-pilot mode for the last couple of years, so obviously my interest in usenet has decreased as well. These were a few arguments in the debate on whether to shutdown the service or not. The most significant issue was, that the machine that news.bytemine.net ran on simply uses too much power for the small benefit it brings to a few users (who can easily use one of the bigger sites for usenet), and because interest in usenet has decreased more and more, I did not want to invest the time in moving the service to a different maschine. Because news.bytemine.net ran on a Sun Ultra-10 workstation moving the service to a machine with different endianess, would’ve meant lots of work if the news spool was meant to be kept.

On a side note: Usenet is responsible for me getting into this whole Unix / Linux thing. Back in ‘97 I became interested in usenet and quickly noticed that if I wanted to run a usenet site, I would have to do it on Unix, since I did not want to run such a service on a Windows machine.

[11:43] fkr(news):~ %> sudo shutdown -hp now
Shutdown NOW!
shutdown: [pid 2700]
[11:44] fkr(news):~ %>                                                                                
*** FINAL System shutdown message from fkr@news.bytemine.net ***             
System going down IMMEDIATELY                                                  

System shutdown time has arrived
Connection to news closed by remote host.
Connection to news closed.

Farewell news.bytemine.net.

Some time has passed since we published news of the bytemine manager, but we try hard to invest more time in this project. To prove this we recently added some features and improvements to the bytemine manager:

• Update bouncycastle library from 1.4.4 to 1.4.5.
• On SSH connections after 3 false login attempts the connection gets aborted.
• Windows executable file is delivered for easier startup on Windows systems.
• The panel widths in the server/user overview can be changed by the user. This setting is saved and restored on every startup of the application.
• For new users and servers an individual expiration period can be specified.
• Users are no longer imported from the passwd file on synchronisation. Only users existing in the manager connected to the server are exported into the passwd file. Use the global import function to import users from a passwd file.
• Revoked users are better visible on first sight.
• Client certificates are no longer copied to the concentrators.
• New function to renew existing, non-revoked certificates.

Since we open sourced the bytemine manager a while ago you can checkout the latest stable version from github: bytemine manager on github.

Please feel free to report bugs and errors, ask for new features, or simply give us feedback on how you like that software.

We proudly present our newest kid: the new bytemine appliance 6a16!

The facts: 6 Gigabit ethernet ports, 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1 GB SO-DIMM RAM (can be upgraded to 2 GB) and of course it runs off a CompactFlash! Furthermore it features two USB 2.0 ports, a CompactFlash, a MiniPCI connector and two SATA ports.

Best news to that is: It is passively cooled and as all our products very low in power consumption (about 15 Watts idling, about 20 Watts on load).

The model is available as a barebone as well as with our bytemine openbsd appliance software. The 6a16 will become the new SOHO variant of our OpenBSD appliance line-up.

For included parts, more information and (of course) ordering visit our shop.

The direct links are:

With our software: bytemine openbsd appliance 6a16.

As a barebone: bytemine appliance 6a16.

Because we apparently did not communicate this straight up: We offer two years warranty on Alix and Soekris products. Nothing new, you might think, this is already defined in EU directive 1999/44/EG. But what makes this special is that we also offer this warranty to companies, not only to private customers.

We also clarified this in our shop descriptions.

After a very successful week in Hannover at CeBIT 2010, we’re getting ready to depart for the Chemnitz Linux Days 2010.

At the Chemnitz Linux Days 2010 we will show the new version (and community edition) of the bytemine manager, a preview of the upcoming version 1.5 of our software for the bytemine openbsd appliance and last, but certainly not least: there will be a preview of our new product cryptorage.

On Saturday I will give a talk on OpenVPN. The complete schedule is to be found here.

Looking forward to see you in Chemnitz!

Now that CeBIT 2010 has started, we finally can announce the things we have planned for quite a while. The first big news (and there is more to come!) is:

bytemine-manager is now open-source!

bytemine-manager is the only cross-platform OpenVPN-administration software and we’ve completly released it under the BSD license.

You can get the source from here on github! Along with the bytemine-manager we also open-sourced a piece of software for multiplexing uni-/bidirectional streams onto stdin/stdout (called ut). Typically used via the secure shell protocol, it provides a means to, e.g., simultaneously control multiple OpenVPN servers via their management interface using one secure channel. You can find the source code to ut here on github as well.

Binary packages for the bytemine manager are linked from our download page. Packages for ut are going to be released within the next days.

You can find us at the CeBIT 2010 in Hall 6, Stand A36. We are looking forward to meet you there!

Well, we finally realized what has been long overdue: Our website is available in english!

With english being the primary language in your browser, you should automatically be redirected to the english version, if not there is a language switcher.

There is not really much to say except: Sorry it took us so long. After providing our software in english along with english manuals, blog posts, and a growing number of international customers and partners it was necessary to set this important step towards lowering the barrier for English-speaking people to get in touch with bytemine.

If you enjoy our english website, you likely are looking forward to our shop being available in english soon as well. We’re working on this and as soon as CeBIT has passed by can devote more time to it.