Impressed – eBox Platform
1710 days agoYes, finally I am impressed with something. And yes, it’s the eBox Platform which I have been raving yesterday. I have finally downloaded it and had installed it on my spare PC. Well, I had some installation problems, it seems that eBox is very particular about the network card it uses, I tried 2 different types of NIC and both cannot be detected. I think the problem lies with Debian rather than the developers at eBox. Anyway, NICs are cheap nowadays, you can find a list of supported NICs from the Debian website and see whether you can find one that works in your local store. However, after I found one NIC which works, everything went fine for me. No other installation problems.
The web based interface is great as well. Very well organized and you can easily find what you need on their main page. If you have some experience with routers and administrating servers, this should be a breeze for you to handle. However, one thing about eBox, the user interface is a bit sluggish. I am using the interface through the local network and it feels rather sluggish. Even saving any configuration is slow. Not sure why that happens.
The best part about eBox is that it allows you to configure and add as many network interfaces as you want, through their web based interface. No longer is there a need to figure out how to edit whatever file to do that (like SME Server). You can even add virtual interfaces as well. So one NIC can have different IP addresses. But I don’t think it is recommended. And as I said, NICs are very cheap nowadays, you can add more network cards if you need. And setting up these new devices are a breeze, just go to the activate the interface (eth0, eth1 and so on). Of course, make sure that the NIC is supported first.
I am using the eBox Platform mainly for the mails function. Setup is pretty easy. Goto Mails, and enable the mail server. And if you need, activate the POP3 (and IMAP) as well. Then you will need to add users. eBox supports virtual domains, which allows you to have different domains on the same server. If you need to send mails from the eBox sever, you need to create something called objects which is actually an IP Address or IP Address range and then allow it to relay mails. So, this will be a problem for those roaming users. I am not sure how to set “allow all” to send/relay mails. You can of course go and find out all the IP Address ranges and allow that, but it’s very tedious and tme consuming.
eBox doesn’t have a webmail either. And there is no interface for users to access the eBox for changing of settings and configurations. This is kind of disapointing. Users cannot change their passwords themselves. Only the administrator has the ability to do that. If eBox adds a web-based email service, it would be perfect!
For it’s antivirus and antispam portion, it looks adequate enough. They have a variety of options for filtering spam and to configure spam assassin. You can add white or blacklist to your spam filter, pretty standard for an spam filter system. It looks like the version of freshclam installed by eBox (they use ClamAV) is old but it doesn’t seem to affect the antivirus system. Updates are downloaded as per normal. It’s too bad they don’t have any option to configure how often the virus definitions are updated.
For those who are not interested in the mail functions, I think one of the things that will interest you is that it supported Load Balancing. So if you have two Internet connections, you can use this to “load” balance your WAN connection. I believe that it even supports more than 2 WAN interfaces! I have not tried it before, so I am not sure how effective it can be. All you need to do is to configure two of your network cards to external and setup the gateways and then configure the rules. Note that this doesn’t acually increase the speed of your Internet connection (it’s not like twice as fast or something), it provides a sort of QoS for your Internet needs.
eBox has pretty good documentation, but a lot of terms and jargon are used without much explanation. I am sure beginners will find it very difficult to understand. I think eBox would do a lot better if it improves on it’s documentation, and cater their documentation to beginners as I am sure a lot of eBox users will be beginners.
Comments by Javier Uruen Val (from eBox Platform):
Sluggish interface: we are already working to replace the whole interface with Ajax, to improve speed and user experience.
You have perfectly pointed out one feature we lack: the ability for the user to change his password. We already have that on our radar. It’s called the “user’s corner” and it will be meant to be used by the users to tweak some per-user settings such as the spam threshold , change their password and so on.