2019-09-01

UBOS update available on all release channels (2019-09-01)

/blog/2019/09/01/update/

Lots of new functionality in this UBOS update, which is now available on all release channels and on all platforms.

As usual, the details are in the release notes, so here are the highlights:

More and improved administration tools

  • Every wondered whether your UBOS device is working as it should, or whether you are overlooking something? ubos-admin status has lots of new functionality to help you out.

    For example ubos-admin status --problems will tell you which problems UBOS is aware of, such as a daemon that failed, or a disk that is getting too full. And it keeps its answer short and sweet if everything seems fine. (You are get the full details with various other command-line options; see documentation.)

    This makes ongoing systems administration much simpler for professionals and novices alike.

  • Extensions to ubos-admin showsite make some common tasks much simpler, such as determining what the Site administrator account is. While we were at it, we also removed from clutter from the output that isn’t usually needed.

  • ubos-admin createsite can now use a template Site JSON, and will only ask you for values not already provided. This has some intriguing possibilities for shipping templates for complex Sites with multiple Apps. We’ll have more to say about that in the future.

Speed improvements

  • Backups have become faster, as UBOS now applies a heuristic on which files to compress and which not.

  • Also, UBOS now lets you invoke certain ubos-admin subcommands concurrently with each other, which makes it easier to, say, look at the configuration on a site already running on your device, while creating another.

LetsEncrypt integration rewrite

Our LetsEncrypt integration wasn’t as flexible (and had more issues) than we wanted, so we basically did a rewrite. Here are some tricks UBOS as learned:

  • Backing up a LetsEncrypt-protected Site and restoring it to a different hostname, or on a different device is now supported. UBOS will transparently get new certificates if it needs to.

  • UBOS will smartly reuse LetsEncrypt certificates it has already and avoid getting new ones if possible.

  • When we tested a LetsEncrypt-protected site running this new version of UBOS with the tools provided by SSL Labs, we obtained an “A” rating. Your LetsEncrypt-protected sites running on UBOS should, too, after this upgrade.

Lots of little usability improvements

  • ubos-install will refuse to install to a mounted disk.

  • The UBOS Staff now lists the devices first that were most recently updated.

  • Logging in via ssh now presents the UBOS banner.

  • The VirtualBox image is now larger.

  • Improved progress messages.

  • Various documentation improvements and bug fixes.

New and improved functionality for developers:

  • Apps can now require TLS by saying so in the UBOS Manifest. This makes it impossible to deploy the App to a Site not protected by (official, or self-signed) TLS.

  • A defined conflict resolution strategy has been implemented for when two apps deployed to the same Site request the same entries in the Site’s .well-known directory; depending on the entry, one takes preference over another, or the entries are merged.

Need help?

More details are in the release notes.