BlueOnyx 5211R: New GUI: Beta Test available!

The new GUI for BlueOnyx 5211R is now available for testing!

BlueOnyx 5211R: New GUI available

We are happy to announce that the development of the new GUI for BlueOnyx 5211R is now finished and has been published for Beta-Testing.

The whole endeavor took 95 days (minus two weeks of holidays over Christmas) and as feared: It was an exhausting all out effort with many long days and nights.

So far the feedback from the testers who had a chance to test drive the preview has been overwhelmingly positive. It also contained productive suggestions which have been promptly implemented whenever feasible and useful. Therefore I sincerely hope that you'll love the result as much as we did.

Now you can take a look yourself.

Preparation: BlueOnyx Shop Packages

All BlueOnyx 5211R GUI pages now have changes and are no longer entirely compatible with the older 5211R GUI.

If older BlueOnyx 5211R Shop packages are run on a BlueOnyx 5211R with the new GUI? Then some GUI elements (mostly buttons) will not be visible. Not all buttons, but typically buttons such as those to modify/delete Users, Vsites, DNS Records and such. Category buttons or those for "Save" or "Cancel" would still work.

These "invisible" buttons would even happen if the GUI were switched back from "Elmer" to the older "Adminica". Because even "Adminica" got overhauled during this update to be more in line with "Elmer" as far as instantiating and using GUI features go.

We have published updated Shop PKGs for all PKGs that have affected GUI elements:

• NewLinQ
• WebApp Installer
• AV-SPAM
• Easy-Backup
• Fail2ban
• Firewall
• OpenVPN

All these PKGs now have GUI pages that work with old style (pre-Update) "Adminica", new style "Adminica" and new style "Elmer".

If you have any of these Shop PKGs installed on your BlueOnyx 5211R, then it is a good idea to go to "Third Party Software" and install all available Updates to those PKGs first.

How to install the updated GUI

Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/BlueOnyx.repo on your BlueOnyx 5211R and find this section at the bottom:

[BlueOnyx-5211R-Testing]

One of the lines below that section has this:

enabled=0

Change it to this:

enabled=1

Save the changes and then run:

yum clean all
yum update -y

That will perform the upgrade of BlueOnyx to the new GUI. In the course of this around 500 RPMs get updated, several new dependencies get installed and the deprecated module base-istat will get removed.

Once the YUM update is done you may login to the GUI at the usual URL.

The theme will have automatically switched to the new "Elmer" and 2FA access for GUI is not yet enabled until you turn it on yourself.

Debugging

If you run into any "Server Errors", please activate debugging mode.

Then visit the GUI page again that gave you an error and see what the debugging screen reports and let us know about that.

Additional debugging can be activated by running:

touch /etc/DEBUG

This creates the empty file /etc/DEBUG and when that file is present, the logfile /var/log/gui-debug.log will contain way more information that just who visited what GUI page. This can also be helpful for debugging.

How and where to report issues

Any way is fine. Shoot us an email, post to the list or use the built in "Bug Report" form under "Software Updates" / "Support" / "Bugreport".

Is this ready for production?

So far we haven't found any real show stoppers once we got past the first three minor post-release glitches. And fixes for them are already in the YUM repository.

But it is too early to tell for sure. The new GUI sure needs some more testing on more diverse servers than we have at hand ourself.

If you're feeling lucky and assume the risk? Then you can install this on a production server. Like said: There still MAY be issues (there probably are), but we will fix them as fast as we are finding them or are made aware of them.

Anyway: Let us know what you think and have fun exploring and using the new BlueOnyx 5211R GUI!