Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Review: SME Server 10.0

Filed under
Reviews

In hindsight it's difficult for me to imagine how my trial with SME Server could have gone worse. One might point out that at least the system installer worked, but even then the installer is unusually slow and a bit awkward to navigate compared to other dedicated server and NAS solutions currently available.

Things got off to a poor start with anti-virus processes consuming all available CPU and memory resources and got worse when it became apparent that the systemctl command would timeout while trying to shutdown the runaway services while systemd would restart the processes I terminated by other means.

The user account manager rejected passwords I tried to apply to new accounts and incorrectly reported accounts were locked, even after I had unlocked them from the command line. The web interface does not show feedback or show confirmation when action buttons are clicked. Most services cannot be managed through the web portal and new software could not be added to the system without turning to the command line.

To make matters worse, updating the system and taking the Reconfigure option the system keeps insisting is necessary corrupts the system and prevents it from booting.

Looking through the web interface prior to the system becoming unusable, there do not appear to be many tools for managing services or setting up tasks. It looks like most significant options need to be managed from the command line and there are very few tasks we can perform through the web portal that are not easier and faster from the console.

One aspect of SME Server that puzzles me a bit is its short support cycle. SME Server 10.0 is new (it came out earlier this year), but it's based on CentOS 7 which is about seven years into its ten year support cycle. Which means SME Server 10.0 only receives three years of support. As a result we are stuck running seven year old software packages, but will only benefit from three years of updates. It seems we'd be better off running a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 clone with something like Webmin installed.

I encountered a lot of frustration from trying to use SME Server with virtually nothing to show from my efforts, but a lot of bugs. I think most other members of the Fedora/CentOS family would provide a smoother experience.

Read more

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.