Boteco 4Linux: KyaPanel

It’s curious how the chaos theory works in my world. Everything keeps happening in a way that only coincidences happens! It’s an unexpected meeting here, a lock there… And what happened in the pat two weeks was no different.

For many years I was following (even from far) the development of the former “JeguePanel”, a servers manager for e-mail (Postfix) and network sharing (Samba) created by Anahuac de Paula Gil, a friend. Some time later, I voted for the project’s name chage to KyaPanel (which in my opinion, is a much more professional name… A name for the “market”). Recently, with the redesign of my site, I decided to download KyaPanel to do a review and some tutorials about the software, which is something that I wanted to do for some time, but I didn’t have much motivation (in this, the site’s redesign helped a lot).

And then comes the coincidence… In the same week that I had this idea, I received an e-mail from 4Linux inviting me to participate on a lecture about KyaPanel! And with exactly Anahuac talking about the product. The event is the Boteco 4Linux (Boteco is an informal word for Bar here in Brazil), and in my opinion was a very good idea to unite interested people about some subject to learn something more.

About the presentation

I always thought Anahuac as a great speaker, with a relaxed and good tone that makes his presentations always good. This time was no different, it was great, and better as we had some beer available in the process (both at my side and the speaker’s side).

As I like short reports, what I learned in the presentation was the following:

• KyaPanel isn’t with KI, it’s with KY, as it’s better.
• I didn’t see much about Samba administration, but to tell the truth I wasn’t interested in it.
• I found out a very powerful tool for managing e-mails, which can work with the main data bases (LDAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL), can do controls and restrictions by domain and by specific user (by user is very good) by powerful filters, integrates with other groupwares (eGroupWare, Zimbra), and so on.
• It has a non-intrusive configuration methodology: the tool instead of changing the configuration files on-the-fly, it suggest to the administrator to do it. I really liked that, this way I keep track of exactly what the tool is doing without having to look at the code, and I can create a more concise documentation about the implementation process.

Anahuac did some demonstrations, showing how to create and edit users, some filters, restrictions and the integration with the Zimbra suite. I also agreed when he said that Zimbra and Tomcat (aka “Gato Antônio”) are very resource-expensive. Sadly the market likes so much this language!

The official report about the Boteco 4Linux can be seen on this URL:
http://www.4linux.com.br/noticias/2008/confira-como-foi-boteco-4linux-kyapanel.html

By the way, I was happy to see that so many people still remembers me. I hope that my work continues, as Anahuac’s work continues and grows to a much more degree of success. And speaking of that, I was very happy to know that after so much effort, Anahuac is now “enjoying” the results of the great tool that he develops. And I still think that this only tends to growing 😉