Posts Tagged ‘openpanel’

Launch OpenApp NAP firewall and loadbalancer

In August last year we introduced the OpenApp images. OpenApp is a collection of useful, OpenPanel based, virtual server images, providing support for a single website and application, such as WordPress, Joomla or MySQL.

For single instances of an application OpenApp is the perfect solution but we also saw demand for a fully functional load balancer and firewall that can be controlled via a simple interface.

This is why we have developed OpenApp Networking App (OpenApp NAP): An Open Source loadbalancer / firewall supporting High Availabilty setups and offering a friendly and elegant user interface. You can find it on our site and Wiki. We will release a handy VMware image soon.

OpenApp NAP consists of the following:

  • Loadbalancing via Keepalived
  • Firewalling and NAT’ing through IPtables
  • A High Availability master-slave setup is possible (also using Keepalived)
  • VPN possibility via PPtP
  • Backups, updates and alert mails can be automated.
  • All functionality manageable via an easy to use interface.

OpenApp NAP is currently based on Ubunty 10.04 LTS, offering all benefits of the Ubuntu LTS support. Support for IPv6 loadbalancing is underway and will be offered once we upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

With OpenApp NAP we hope to have created yet another useful OpenPanel implementation. We would like to invite system administrators to try it out and use it. All feedback is welcome.

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Posted in gui, OpenApp | 5 Comments »

Distribution-specific builds

For quite some time now, we’ve attempted to distribute OpenPanel as a single set of packages. In theory this works fine, as ABI changes should be reflected in Debian’s package names. However, more and more problems came up lately where older versions of libraries vanished from newer distributions and Ubuntu has shown more ABI-divergence from Debian than we anticipated.

To solve this problem, we’ve decided to create separate builds for each of our supported platforms: Debian Lenny and  Squeeze, Ubuntu Lucid and Natty. For now, Ubuntu Oneiric and Precise point to Natty’s packages, and Ubuntu Maveric points to Lucid’s packages. Note that these platforms are not supported (yet).

To switch your OpenPanel installation to the new packages, you’ll need to change your /etc/apt/source.list. The basic syntax is:

deb http://download.openpanel.com/deb <distribution> main 
deb-src http://download.openpanel.com/deb <distribution> main

where distribution should be replaced by the code name for your distribution; either lenny, squeeze, wheezy, lucid, maverick, natty, oneiric or precise.

For OpenApp, append openapp to the deb line:

deb http://download.openpanel.com/deb <distribution> main openapp
deb-src http://download.openpanel.com/deb <distribution> main openapp

Keep in mind that Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid is presently the only supported distribution for OpenApp; other distributions might just work, but we’ve never tested it.

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Posted in core, misc | 10 Comments »

OpenApp: 1.1 Version and New Images

On the 31st of August the OpenPanel team released OpenApp, a series of Ubuntu 10.01 LTS based packes that are optimised for a single application or website. OpenApp runs a stripped down version of OpenPanel with some extra functionality specific to the relevant software. OpenApp turns out to be quite popular because users can quickly deploy optimised servers allowing them to focus on their business instead of becoming installation experts.

OpenApp is available as a package and also as VMware image. Since the launch we have added 3 applications and we currently offer the following versions:

The complete OpenApp wiki can be found here.

Today we launched the 1.1 version adding the following functionality:
* You can activate FTP uploading from the control panel.
* Backups can be made or removed from the interface.
* Control automatic updates of system software from the interface.
* Packages are signed using our GPG key

Besides the above points we fixed bugs and made various small improvements. The next steps will be to add more backup and update management and a bugtracking image. Please let uw know if you have any ideas about how to make OpenApp more useful to you.

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

OpenApp images launched

Because OpenPanel is an elegant and light solution a large number of OpenPanel users are using it to host a single site or web application.

These users did get a lot of unused multi-site OpenPanel functionality however, while at the same time missing some functionality. Think about the possibility to change access setting in the application or to arrange backups. After the environment was configured it is sometimes difficult to keep the software up to date.

OpenApp is a series of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS based packages. Each package offers one popular application and runs a single-site version of OpenPanel that is optimised for the relevant application. These configurations are alos available as VMware images on our download page. OpenApp is ideal for owners of serious websites and developers. It could be used by cloud providers to enhance their offering of configuration alternatives.

Deploy – You can easily deploy an openapp image by taking an Ubuntu 10.04 install and execute “apt-get install openapp-[joomla / rails / wordpress etc.]“. Alternatively you can download and deploy the relevant image.

Update – We will keep the packages up to date so the system software will be easy to update using “apt-get (dist-)upgrade”. The application can be updated using its own interface.

Backup – You can create tarball based backups to rebuild your server or to create a clone of your environment.

Tuning – openapp Tuning automatically tunes the database and web server to optimise performance on the WordPress, Joomla, MySQL and Ruby images.

We currently offer the following configurations:

The 4 images we currently offer will soon be expanded with Drupal, Apache Tomcat and Symphony appliances. After that we will add more popular applications. We will also make it easier to manage backups and updates via the interface.

Even though these packages carry a 1.0 label, they’re pretty fresh. We expect that they are mostly bug free, but any feedback is welcome. We would especially like to hear it if you get stuck anywhere and do not know what to do.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Some Notes on the OpenPanel Architecture

I’m a strong believer in systems that are easily discoverable, where the structure of the files that make up the system communicate something about the application’s internal structure to the outside world. I tried to do much of the same thing with OpenPanel, but at the end of the day there’s still a lot to go around, so perhaps now’s a good time to write up a bit about the thinking and architecture behind OpenPanel and its components.

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Posted in core | 1 Comment »

Browser, What Ails Thee?

The problem with developing front-end applications for web browsers from a back-end developer’s point of view.

In our search for quick (and equally dirty) Javascript solutions for problems like form creation and control, we’ve run across a lot of frameworks. “Let’s use the framework which makes our lives easiest” was the chant, to implement anything third party loosely and, if it breaks, rip it out and either find something better or write something from scratch.

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Posted in misc | 1 Comment »

Choosing a database for your project

When you are designing a project with complex storage requirements and some demands on reliability and performance, a few options come to mind.

Even though at OpenPanel we have strong feelings about NIH, we didn’t think writing our own database store was the way to go. Many smart people have already written many different database backends, which means that in both quantity and quality the database area is well-covered. So, writing our own was right out.

The second option that comes to mind is to use the most basic kind of database available: a key/value store like Berkeley DB or GDBM. Combining a few key/value stores together yields a lot of flexibility, but there’s a lot of glue you need to write, then. In programming language terms, the key/value API is not powerful.
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Posted in core, misc | 4 Comments »

The OpenPanel CLI, opencli, in Action

People requested a screencast of our command line interface, opencli, in action as well, so here it is:

We’ll be adding a dedicated screenshots section to our website soon.

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Posted in misc | 3 Comments »

Birthing a Product

It all started as an enormous itch that needed serious scratching. We’ve been dealing, in our various capacities at hosting providers, with many incarnations of commercial server control panels like Ensim, Plesk and cPanel. Not only were these, in our view, haphazardly constructed kludges of magic that actively worked against the operating systems they were installed on; we kept coming back to the fact that people were actually paying for such software. Through the nose, no less. This felt wrong and paved the way for the OpenPanel project.

We spent over a year creating something with the capacity to change the landscape, by combining the proper amount of openness and flexibility with a state of the art user interface and a license that should make trumpets sound from the heavens. People we’ve shown it to have been raving. But, now that we’re at the point to hit the submit button for all this on sites like freshmeat, all those little doubts start setting in. It’s scary as hell.

I’m convinced we’ve taken the right step by not fully adopting the ‘release early’ mantra — it has given us the chance to quickly reshape the design where needed (Heck, we’re on the second incarnation of the GUI). But this is the downside. If you release early, expectations are lower and you never get this neckhair-raising fear of throwing your work into the world. Alas.

We’ve opened up the 0.9 (beta) branch of OpenPanel as of today. There’s no longer a requirement to email us to get access, just follow the download instructions from the main site. Messages have also gone out to the usual places. The future is now.

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Posted in core | 1 Comment »

See OpenPanel Run. Run OpenPanel, Run.

Here’s a preview of the upcoming Beta release of our life’s work. Now that we’re over that “oh no, we’re all going to die and we’ll never finish it” point, things are starting to look well. Or perhaps the other way around:

We’ll pick up the last bugs we found monday and then seed a release candidate to our alpha team. If no show stoppers emerge, that will be followed up shortly by a full public release of the OpenPanel beta.

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Posted in misc | 2 Comments »
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