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, 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.

Last Friday and Saturday we spent exhibiting at the Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage 2009. For the ones who remember, a year ago this was the first event, we attended with bytemine as an exhibitor. For years Bernd and I have been doing events and staffed a lot of OpenBSD booths, but in the context of this company last year’s Kiel Event was the first. This made this year’s edition even much more interesting for us, since we could see how much the booth-showcases improved (and changed) and how much better the booth looks overall now. It also showed very clearly our shift towards our new product line. Last year we presented the bytemine openbsd thinclient, a product that we pretty much shifted focus away from in favor of the bytemine openbsd appliance and the bytemine manager. Products that (in my personal opinion) fit way better into our portfolio and experience than a thinclient.

Aside that, Kiel was once again lots of fun. Even though the overall amount of visitors for the event was much less than the year before. The organizers did a lot of publicity for the event, so it is not clear why so little visitors showed up. Maybe because saturday was a german national holiday?

There were quite a few interesting talks, because I had to guard the bytemine booth, I was sadly not able to attend Bernd his talk about OpenBSD and the Web 2.x. The slides of his talk are available as a pdf.

I’ve attended an overview of SSL-based VPN Solutions, which featured software like OpenVPN, CloudVPN, n2n and such. From my personal view, OpenVPN is the only one from the list that should be used in a professional environment, the rest is more meant as an aid to quickly share contents among a group of people and crypt it on the way. The talk was missing some informations regarding OpenVPN, among others a proper reference to the OpenVPN Association (of which bytemine and myself are members).

Once again, we were located right next to Zarafa, which gave us the chance to have lots of chats with Andreas from Zarafa Germany.

Last but not least, we had the chance to meet one of our long-term webhosting customers from Kiel, always a nice experience to directly meet and exchange ideas and be able to answer questions quickly.

Am looking forward to next year’s Kiel event!

Like last year, bytemine sponsors the Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage and we will again exhibit some of our products. The Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage will happen at the KITZ on the 2nd and 3rd of october. On the 2nd Bernd will give a talk about OpenBSD and the Web 2.x, since Bernd is very active in the Ruby and Rails on OpenBSD scene, he surely will deliver a very exciting talk!

As usual, we will show the current development versions of our products at our booth as well as welcome you to stop by and have a chat about our upcoming products with us.

Directions on how to get to the KITZ can be found here.

See ‘ya at the Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage 2009!