Barging into the Enterprise.

Canonical, vendors of Ubuntu, have unveiled their second stab at the server market. Ubuntu server 8.04 features improved stability, performance and security. Equally pleasing is the announcement that the software is now certified on a number of Sun X64 servers. Yes, I do like Sun.

Sweety jar.

The inclusion of FreeRadius, monitoring tool Munin, OpenVPN and backup tool Bacula means that this release has even more infrastructure apps than 6.06 LTS. This gives Ubuntu huge potential in terms of deployment; from bastion host to centralised backup management.

Security in the kernel has beefed through modifications and the integration of AppArmor policies. To compliment this, he server integrates host firewalling functionality.

iSCSI and DRDB are now part of the stock install, good to see in my eyes as I can’t remember how many times I’ve had issues with iSCSI in the past. Chuck in more than 500 maintained and supported server packages and this looks to be a very impressive beast.

The addition of KVM virtualisation and kernel enhancements should mean the server is more resource efficient when using virtualisation.

But it won’t work with Active Directory.

Yes, it will. Through the addition of Likewise Open. This piece of software allows users to interactively login to Linux using AD credentials. In addition, services using the kerberos authentication mechanism on the host will be available to logged in users.

There’s more that could go on about. But I won’t. I’m very impressed. I had an idea of some the enhancements that I read in the roadmap but this is truly a product worthy of high accolade.

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