FAQ

How often does Zentyal release new versions and what is the support policy?

Just check our Release Policy

What username and password should I use to log into Zentyal?

Any system account belonging to the admin group is allowed to log into Zentyal web interface. If you installed using the Zentyal installer, the user and password you were asked during the first stage of the installation will work. If you need to add an other user to the admin group, just execute sudo adduser username admin. On Ubuntu admin members have sudo privileges by default.

Can I block https pages with Zentyal proxy? How to block https pages with Zentyal?

Short version: No, you can't block https pages with Zentyal proxy. You can use the Zentyal firewall module to block https pages.

Long version: Note that https pages use SSL communication between the server and the user browsing the website providing identification and encryption between them. Filtering https would break the trust chain between the server and the user as the content filtering agent needs to read the communication between both parties. This is the reason why Zentyal only filter http by default. If you need to block https pages you still can do it at connection level using the Firewall module by blocking the ranges of IP addresses of the pages you want to block access. For more information about  proxy and  firewall features, please check the Official Documentation.

I have trouble downloading Zentyal, what can I do?

Short version: Please be patient, try again or try another mirror.

Long version: Due to the high number of downloads, we have opted distributing Zentyal files through SourceForge?. Unfortunately sometimes the mirrors might crash right when you are downloading or downloads might be limited for your country of origin. When this happens, we can only ask you to be patient and either try again or try another mirror. To download from another mirror, simply go to  Zentyal files on SourceForge?, click on the file you want to download and in the next window you get a message "Problems with the download? Please use this direct link, or try another mirror." Click on the "mirror" and then choose the mirror you want to use (e.g. Cuban users, please use the mirrors in Brazil).

Will be possible to upgrade from eBox 1.4 to Zentyal 2.0?

eBox 1.4 was based on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 and Zentyal 2.0 is based on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. Although in the past we have provided upgrade paths between minor versions of eBox, this is a major revision with a major change in the underlaying Ubuntu system and we can't guarantee that a system upgrade will work. Our recommendation it's to make a backup of your data (including users and group on LDAP) and restore it on a new fresh Zentyal installation. If you find any problem during this process you can always ask for help in the  Community Forum or ask for  Zentyal Professional Support.

Why did you drop eGroupware? And why did you choose Zarafa as groupware replacement?

eGroupware was  removed from Debian and Ubuntu repositories some months before our release. We tried to maintain by ourselves eGroupware packages but we found  many issues and we realized that it was very difficult to maintain them in a good shape during the whole release life cycle. Despite  we asked our community for help maintaining a working eGroupware version nobody stepped forward.

In our commitment to integrate the best applications to make Zentyal the best Linux small business server, we wanted a groupware application with all the features you can expect from this kind of software: mail client, contacts, calendar, tasks and mobile synchronization. Dropping eGroupware wasn't an easy decision but we were not confident enough to maintain and support it during the next release life cycle. A lot of feedback was received on which options we could adopt to replace eGroupware, getting most comments two of them: Zimbra and Zarafa.

After analyzing both of them, finally we chose Zarafa because it can be fully integrated with other Zentyal components whereas Zimbra is more an appliance by itself and more difficult to work with existing mail and LDAP components. Also Zarafa is already packaged for Ubuntu and included in Canonical partner repository. Additionally, we already have a good experience with Zarafa as we made an experimental integration for a customer and they are very happy with the features and reliability that offers.

For those who like more Zimbra, we haven't forgot about Zimbra and with some community members collaboration we will publish a Zimbra integration with Zentyal HOWTO soon.

And for the ones who want to keep eGroupware, we are not deleting ebox-egroupware as a package, we are only dropping the official support for it. If you want to use it and you can live with it, go ahead, it's still in our  2.0-contrib repository and will be there at least until the next major release. See the Installation Guide for more info about how to install it.

Which Zarafa version does Zentyal include?

Zarafa version included in Zentyal is the Free Edition from  Canonical partners repository. This version includes up to 3 Outlook users support. Zentyal module should work with the Open Source Edition too which is available from  Zarafa Download page, this version doesn't support Outlook users but still you can access mailboxes using POP3/IMAP. See  Zarafa Editions page to compare the differences between all versions.

How to force a user to set a new password using Windows?

If you want to force a user to set a new password the first time he enters in the domain using a Windows client. Then you must run this command in the command line:

        $ sudo net sam set pwdmustchangenow <username> yes

How Zentyal Server Differs from webmin?

Zentyal tries to provide a higher abstraction layer for the System Administrator. It's meant to be easily used by users who have never administrated a Unix system before.

We have tried hard to integrate the different modules to make it work smoothly. It provides a uniform interface and a tight integration amongst the modules. For example, when you enable the HTTP proxy, the module will add the necessary firewall rules to make it work. Another example of integration is, for example, when you define a network object -an abstraction for an IP or group of IPs-, this object can be used across the different services. And if this object is modified, the framework will tell all the modules using it that it's has changed so that they can modify their configuration files.

It does not read the configuration back from the service configuration files, as the configuration is stored in an intermediate XML file. This means that if the administrator modifies the configuration file of a service directly, the changes will be overwritten by Zentyal. So if you ever need to log into the machine to modify something, report a bug to add a new feature :) This is the surest way to get that issue folded into the next version or the one after that.

From the developer's point of view, Zentyal is a complete framework to help minimize development effort.

It isolates the presentation layer from the module's logic, which makes easy to modify the user interface without touching the controller/model.

It extensively uses object oriented programming and some design patterns.