Special thanks goes out to our friends at 1000mbps.com who have just lit up a mirror for ClearOS in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This mirror is very fast and will be especially fast for ClearOS users in Europe. We appreciate their support and encourage users of ClearOS to support them. They provide virtual hosting at great prices. So if you are looking to light up a ClearOS server in the cloud, consider them please.

Dank je wel 1000mbps en baseip.com. 

This is a heads up for those of you who keep the updates-testing repository enabled.   The ClearOS 6.5.0 Beta 1 release will be pushed to the updates-testing repository on August 27. 

The ClearCenter development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new paid app - Mail Archive.  This app is intended for businesses and organizations who need to meet regulatory compliance or enforce internal policies for e-mail use in the workplace.  Mail Archive stores an exact duplicate of all incoming and outgoing mail when configured in either mail filter gateway mode or final destination MTA.

Mail Archive is a $US 95/yr subscription service (up to 50 mailboxes) with discounts offered via ClearCenter Partners and to educational and non-profit organizations.  The app can be purchased and installed on both ClearOS Community or Professional editions.  For environments over 50 mailboxes, please contact ClearCenter Sales.

Feedback (via email or the forums) is always welcome.

Thanks,

ClearCenter Development Team

We haven't being doing a great job at communicating the roadmap for ClearOS, so here's a quick update on what is in store for next three months!  A follow-up blog post will detail some of the medium and long term roadmap goals (more/better reports, IPv6, etc.).

The following apps are in public beta right now -- head on over to the developer forums for details:

- Software RAID Manager
- UPnP
- VLAN support
- Amazon EC2 Support

In addition, a few apps are nearing completion or waiting on the ClearOS 6.5 testing phase (which will begin in August):

- Mail Archive (paid app)
- Administrators
- QoS
- OwnCloud (Tim app)

Under the hood, a new engine for supporting web applications (WordPress, Joomla, SugarCRM, etc.) is also in development.  There's also work with "reports, reports, reports" going on.

Over the next coming days, ClearFoundation will be moving off of the slow server which is now on to a newer environment to be provided by ClearCenter. We know things have been slow and this should speed things up nicely. We will continue to look for more improvements and optimization but things may be choppy. We hope to make the cut-overs as speedy as possible (i.e. under a couple of minutes.) So if you can't get to us, come back in a few minutes and hopefully all will be well.

The ClearFoundation development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of a new FREE app - Software RAID Manager.  This app provides an integrated Webconfig UI to the ubiquitous mdadm software RAID management tool.

The app will be available for install via the Marketplace next week.  For now, if you have software RAID on your ClearOS server and want to give it a whirl, from the command line, run:

yum --enablerepo=clearos-test install app-raid

Feedback (via email or the forums) is always welcome.

Thanks,

CF Development Team

Over the next few months, we will be migrating ClearOS source code to GitHub.  This week, the code to all the internal packages (i.e. not upstream) used in ClearOS was migrated to https://github.com/clearos-packages.  The real GitHub fun will start when the apps are migrated... but that's for another day.

We have updated the ClearOS development tools and documentation.  If you are interested in building apps, you may want to check out the new Hello World Tutorial. The tutorial - which includes video demonstrations - can guide you through the process of getting an app up and running in no time!

The ClearOS Community 6.4.0 ISOs were updated.  The default partitioning scheme was not configured to use all available disk space -- not a great default of course. Only the ISOs were updated, the virtual machine and Amazon EC2 images were not changed.

For a few months now, ClearFoundation has been using Amazon EC2 for bits of infrastructure and we really like it. We eat our own dog food when we can, and Amazon EC2 is a great place to implement a master node in a master/slave architecture.

For ClearFoundation, all the users and groups are managed on the ClearOS master node running in EC2. Across the Internet, two ClearOS slave nodes are used for hosting source code (SVN running on good old hardware) and hosting the beta translation server (running in a virtual machine on-premise). The accounts on the master node are automatically replicated to these two slave nodes and the slaves can run quite happily without a connection to the master node. In other words, we can shutdown the master node on Amazon and the two slave nodes will hum along just fine.

Enough blabbing about clearfoundation.com infrastructure.  If you are looking for a hybrid cloud / on-premise solution, Amazon EC2 can certainly be part of the puzzle.  To install ClearOS in Amazon, please review the documentation here:

- ClearOS Amazon EC2 Install Guide

If you run into any issues, please post a message in the forums or send an e-mail to developer@clearfoundation.com. We like squashing bugs, so send those reports our way!

The Storage Manager is currently available in the (beta) Amazon EC2 ClearOS Professional builds, but the app can be installed and implemented on any ClearOS system. If you want to start using the Storage Manager on an existing ClearOS system, the following technical guide walks through the details:

Storage Manager Technical Guide

If you have any questions or run into any problems, please feel free to post a message in the forums or contact technical support if you have a ClearCenter support subscription.

If you are outside the United States, you know the frustration of getting locked out from content providers like Hulu, Netflix, Pandora and others. With ClearOS and the new ibVPN app, you can now invisibly and securely access these services.

Using the ClearOS Marketplace, install the ibVPN app on your ClearOS gateway and start routing devices on your local network via your favorite country: US, Canada, UK, and many more. For example, an Apple TV system can be routed through the US while leaving other systems on the network as is. Here's how it works.

- Install the app from the ClearOS Marketplace
- Sign up for an account from ibVPN (link includes an affiliate ID... beer money)
- Configure your ibVPN settings in the ClearOS app
- Select the country VPN server (US, UK, Canada, etc)
- Specify the devices on your network that should go through ibVPN

Enjoy!

The folks over at terasaur (by ibiblio) have provided a nice spot for grabbing ClearOS Community 6.4.0 via BitTorrent.  We are adding a couple of seed nodes right now, so feel free to torrent away!

ClearOS Community 6.4.0 is now available! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, this release introduces a new reports engine, a storage manager, an antimalware file scanner, RADIUS, a basic POP/IMAP server, and mail retrieval.

- Release Notes
- Downloads

What's next? After a bumpy start with ClearOS 6, we are now happy with the stability and maturity of the version. Version 6 required a major overhaul under the hood, but it provided ClearOS with a modern and secure web application platform.  So what's currently in the pipeline?

- A beta release of the new QoS engine
- Samba 4 / Samba Directory preview
- The ibVPN app (coming next week!)
- A new Administrators app
- Additional network support: VLAN and static routes
- The Network Map tool, which will enable IP-based content filter filter policies (Professional Edition)

OwnCloud, Captive Portal are other potential developments are also floating around in various stages of development.  Stay tuned!

ClearOS Community 6.4.0 Beta 2 has arrived! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, this release introduces a new reports engine, a storage manager, an antimalware file scanner, RADIUS, a basic POP/IMAP server, mail retrieval (fetchmail) as well as upstream proxy support.

Over the last few weeks, there was a lot of focus on squashing bugs and improving little usability issues. From the modernized installer to the easy to use Marketplace, ClearOS 6 has matured to be our best offering.  It's not only the core platform that has had a facelift, but also the individual apps and solutions.  For example, Zarafa's solution with two great webmail interfaces, Outlook support, and out-of-the-box mobile synchronization brings enterprise-level mail to small organizations. 

- ClearOS Community 6.4.0 Beta 2 - Release Notes and Download

The build of ClearOS Core 6.4 packages from upstream sources is completed and rolling out to the mirrors. All in all it took about 32 hours from the time the packages showed up to having them fully built. We are busy adding Core to the current ClearOS Community and Professional trees and should have some great new features and hardware support. 6.4 Core is useful for techies and hobbyists but we shall all be able to set our sights on the future release of ClearOS 6.4 Community and ClearOS 6.4 Professional.

Cant wait to get started with ClearOS? Then don't wait. 6.3 will upgrade to 6.4 when the time comes and the licensing is all the same. Stay tuned for more updates on the features of 6.4.

We are happy to announce the availability of the Static IPsec VPN app from Tim Burgess!  This app makes it possible to create IPsec VPN connections between your ClearOS system and third party systems including Cisco, Sonicwall, Linksys, pfSense, Watchguard and others.  Static IPsec VPN also supports road warriors, dynamic tunnel management, dead peer detection, advanced settings for IKE, ESP, etc, and more.  The app is available in ClearOS Marketplace for a one-time price of $50 and includes forum support -- a place to find help with interoperability, security and fine tuning.  

A basic version is also available for free.  If you need to connect your ClearOS system to other ClearOS systems, the free version will get you up and running.  Though there's no support for dynamic IPs and the software is provided as-is, it is certainly a great solution for non-mission critical scenarios.  For those of you looking for support for dynamic IPs and need mission critical reliability for ClearOS-to-ClearOS connections, check out Dynamic VPN -- a free app included in ClearOS Professional Basic/Standard/Premium.

For the hackers out there, the new ClearOS QoS engine is ready for testing! 

A few years ago, the old Bandwidth Manager was introduced as a way to manage Internet bandwidth usage for a local network. The tool allowed administrators to reserve enough bandwidth for high priority traffic, and shuffle low priority traffic into a small slice of the pipe. It works, but it only solves half the problem and arguably the less important half. The other half is QoS (quality of service) – a way to prioritize network traffic that needs to move quickly. VoIP is probably the most important service that benefits from QoS, but terminal services and other traffic can benefit from QoS as well.

If Netflix, Youtube, and (pick your audio streaming service) are causing hiccups with your VoIP system, then ClearOS QoS will be your new best friend.

(curses at blog software... continues in the wiki)

Here comes another app from Tim -- Transmission BitTorrent for ClearOS!  With the Transmission app, you get a web-based BitTorrent client with powerful features: encryption, peer exchange, magnet links, and more. It's open source, free, easy to use and lean. You can install the app through Marketplace (see screenshot).

When you couple Transmission with a mobile client, you have a great way to manage your torrents while out and about town.

Transmission in ClearOS

ClearOS Community 6.4.0 Beta 1 is now available!  Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, the 6.4.0 release introduces a framework for Samba 4 integration, an improved reports engine, a storage manager, an antimalware file scanner, a basic POP/IMAP server as well as upstream proxy support. Here are the app details:

- Storage Manager
- Basic IMAP/POP Server
- Upstream Proxy Support
- Antimalware File Scan

The DNS and Resolver infrastructure in ClearOS has been updated to support the introduction of Samba 4. If you are used to configuring your DNS servers from the command line, please take a look at the following technical document for important details.

You can find important release and download information in the Release Notes. For those of you interested in the ClearOS Professional 6.4.0 release, expect to see Amazon EC2 Images, Network Mapping, Samba Directory / Samba 4 Beta, and more!