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.

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!

An exciting and interesting year has started for us at bytemine. There are many items on our agenda for this year, especially regarding our product development. Not only there is a list of products we will be releasing over the year, but also we’re going new ways on how we develope these. Bernd Ahlers will hopefully elaborate in another blogpost on how we introduce behaviour driven as well as test driven development. (BDD and TDD).

As a new years present to our customers, we’ve released the 1.4 version of our bytemine openbsd appliance software, bringing once again lots of new features. There is a Changelog available. Among the features, is also support for the uthum(4) USB temperature sensors, we’ve backported the driver from OpenBSD-current.

bytemine openbsd appliance - version: 1.4.5 [1209]

hanah $ sysctl | grep uthum
hw.sensors.uthum1.temp0=28.36 degC (temp)
hw.sensors.uthum1.percent0=11.50% (humidity)

Right after releasing 1.4 we’ve had some other things to keep us busy. Since the year also started with moving into new rooms. In order to have more space we’ve moved into the new building of the technology center, where we have our office since 2005.

Here are a couple of pictures of two of the new rooms. The developers office, with one of our mascots already up (while the rest is still pretty rough :)

For the first time, we have a meeting room on our own. Well, it is not supposed to be a solemnly meeting room, but furthermore space where one can relax, read and code in a relaxed environment.

Pictures of the other office will follow, once everything is in place.

The conference schedule is about to start with the 4. Linux-Informationstag which will happen in Oldenburg on the 13th of February. Next item on the conference schedule is then our first appearance at the world’s largest IT fair, CeBIT 2010. For CeBIT we have some nice new product announcements up our sleeve, so you should definitly stop by our booth there (Hall 6). Right after CeBIT, there will be the Chemnitzer Linuxtage, where we will have a booth, just like last year.

Of course a new year has also started in regards to the services and hosted solutions we provide. We’ve started to provide the groupware Zarafa as a hosted solution. Each setup gets a Xen (and possibly KVM) instance with the zarafa version best suited for their needs. We’re also looking into adding more types of databases to our hosting environment, considering at least CouchDB.

This only being a subset of what is planned for 2010, you can see this will be an interesting year!

Die Aussenwette der Fernsehsendung “Wetten dass?” fand letzte Woche bei einem unserer Kunden, dem Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg statt. Aufgrund der hohen Einschaltquote bei dieser Sendung wurden im Vorfeld vom Miniatur Wunderland diverse Vorbereitungen für den erwarteten Besucheransturm auf die Webseite getroffen.

Die Webseite vom Miniatur Wunderland basiert auf dem Content-Management System typo3 und läuft auf einem Cluster von Webservern mit vorgeschaltetem Loadbalancer und separaten Datenbankservern. Das ganze wird bei n@work in Hamburg gehostet. Im Rahmen unser Zusammenarbeit mit dem Miniatur Wunderland beraten wir von bytemine (in Bezug auf die Webpräsenz) unter anderem wenn es um Details der Realisierung, Skalierung und Sicherheit des Setups, sowie um weiterführende Maßnahmen geht.

Im Vorfeld der Aussenwette wurde von n@work ein Reverse-Proxy, varnish, vor das Setup geschaltet. Zusätzlich wurde der Datenbank-basierte Counter (unten links auf der Einstiegsseite) auf eine XEN-Instanz bei bytemine ausgelagert. Bisher war immer die maximale Anzahl an möglichen Verbindungen zu den Backend-Datenbankservern der Flaschenhals. Um möglichst viele aktive Verbindungen haben zu können, haben wir zusätzlich an verschiedenen Parametern im MySQL Server gedreht um inaktive Verbindungen schneller zu trennen.

wait_timeout            = 60
connect_timeout         = 10
interactive_timeout     = 100

Thorsten Veith, massgeblich an der Typo3-Umsetzung der Webseite beteiligt, hat auf seinem Blog auch eine Nachlese zur Aussenwette

While waiting for the second car to arrive here at the North Sea, I want to give a short elaboration on what’s going on the next five days at bytemine.

Back in january we were on a visit at the North Sea for a kick-off-2009 bytemine weekend. Today two cars are heading again towards the North Sea.

This time, not for conceptional and strategic meeting, but for spending five days of hacking and development in a nice atmosphere. We’ve rented a house in St. Peter-Ording, where we will be with, at peak-times six people, working on features for the bytemine openbsd appliance, bytemine manager as well as on a product we will be announcing early next year.

Of course, there are going to be many more smaller and larger things going to happen in these days, which can be summarized in – what I would call – “developing a development culture”. We already have one at bytemine, but as we grow, these aspects do need some constant attention.

If you want to follow the things happening , lookout on twitter, we use the hashtag #btm-hackathon09.

Well, clock is ticking and in a few hours OpenRheinRuhr in Bottrop opens the gates. bytemine will be present as sponsor and exhibitor, so you can visit us at our booth and have a glance at our products or simply get in touch with us. See you there.

The next step in the history of our online shops has been taken! We’re proud to announce that we just put our new bytemine shop online.

This is the third generation of bytemine shop applications. We started with a simple html form and some javascript on our home page which served us well for some years. The problem was that it didn’t scale well with our growing range of products so that we started to look for a lightweight shop system.

Since we like Ruby and Ruby On Rails, we had a look at some shop applications written in Ruby and Rails. After some tests we decided to go with Spree which is a nice e-commerce application project developed by a small team. We wrote our own layout template and created some small extensions to handle some of our needs. (like special shipping decisions) The shop was running fine for about 10 months. Over the time we discovered two big issues with our Spree setup. The lack of features and the fast development speed of Spree. The lack of features problem could have been solved by ourselves with dedicating time to write some extensions. But we think it’s better to spend that time on our own products and business. The rapid speed of development in the Spree project is related to that. Since we didn’t touch the shop for some months it would have taken lots of time to update it to a more recent release and adjust our extensions. Again, time we don’t have or time that we don’t want to spend on building a shop system. That’s where Magento entered the game.

Magento is a feature-rich open source e-commerce platform which one of our partners is using to build internet shops for their customers. That’s why we gave it a try. The default installation almost satisfied our (current) requirements and it also has a huge collection of extensions available. Our first tests went pretty well so that we decided to switch to Magento as soon as possible.

After installing some needed extensions, adjusting the desing templates and doing lots of tests, our new shop is now ready to be used.

We think the move to Magento is a big step in the right direction. It will improve the shopping experience of our customers and it will ease maintenance for us.

Maybe now is a good time for you to surf over to our shop and place some of our products in your shopping cart! :)

Have fun!

It is time to announce a new version of the bytemine manager. Version 1.1 has just been released and is ready to be downloaded for evaluation:

Throughout the development towards 1.1 we added quite a few new features and, for good measure, fixed some small and even smaller bugs ;) .

Highlights: an update mechanism which enables the manager to auto-update, a much simpler x509 configuration dialog, and the option to switch to an external database. This implies the option to store the database at an external location – in a crypted container, for example, or at a place you have included in your backup strategy. Furthermore, after downloading a new version you simply specify the location of your database on startup of the new application, and it is automatically updated and used as default at every startup.

The interaction with the OpenVPN servers over ssh (via our Socket-Wrapper) has become much more robust as well.

We rounded out the bytemine manager by improving handling and stability. You should definitely give it a try!

Last but not least, we’ve opened up our portal to the public. After a self-registration you can access the eval version of the manager as well as the issue-tracker and help us with your feedback to further improve the bytemine manager.

We’re back from FrOSCon 2009 and had a fabulous time. Previously we have heard, that FrOSCon is a very well organized conference and we can definitely confirm that. Already prior to the event, the communication with the FrOSCon team went well.

We arrived Friday evening around half past eight and the whole FrOSCon team was in action to build up the event. This gave us the chance to have our booth set up by friday evening already. With each iteration of ‘bytemine on tour’ we worked on improving the presentation concept for our booth and yes, we came pretty far. The outcome of this can be seen in the picture. Wow!

We’ve presented the newest of our products, with software versions we’re releasing this and the next week. The visitors had a chance to take a peak at the upcoming bytemine openbsd appliance software version 1.2 as well as the beta version fo the bytemine manager 1.1. These will be covered here, once we released the software this and next week. Stay tuned for that!

Holger had the idea to use a table-top rack, usually used for music equipment. The rack is tilted by 15 degree, which gives the visitor the chance to take a look at the display and the appliance without having to bend down.

Both days were filled with lots of interesting conversations. The social event on saturday evening was nicely done and gave the chance to relax a bit.

One of side-effects of FrOSCon is that we will be exhibiting at OpenRheinRuhr this november. I will be talking with their organizers this week.

See you at FrOSCon 2010!

In the course of releasing version 1.1 of our bytemine openbsd appliance, we’d like to tell you about some details.

The bytemine openbsd appliance ships with a nice written manual which covers lots of configuration topics. Following OpenBSD’s good practices to write documentation for every file, we wrote man pages for every program and file we added on top of the OpenBSD default installation.

Let’s move on to the first boot of our new appliance.

The bytemine openbsd appliance comes with a pre-installed operating system, however there are certain details, we cannot decide for our users and customers during the installation. That’s where ba-firstboot(8) enters the stage.

The ba-firstboot(8) program will run during the very first boot and will ask you questions like the machine hostname, network interface configuration, nameserver configuration, smarthost for the MTA, timezone and some more stuff. After answering the questions and another reboot, your machine should be ready to be used.

Don’t panic. You can configure the bytemine openbsd appliance just like a regular OpenBSD system if you want. We just added some convenience to get the system up and running.

Learn about the bytemine openbsd appliance system.

A good starting point for learning about our additions to a regular OpenBSD system is the bytemine-appliance(8) manpage. It will explain the first boot configuration, the system startup options and will provide links to other man pages.

So far for the first steps. Following articles will highlight some more details and components.

Have fun!