Zentyal is based on Ubuntu server, being able to manage services in a computer network like advanced routing, firewall and traffic shaping, DHCP, DNS, RADIUS, VPN, proxy, IDS, mail, file and printer sharing, VoIP, IM and more.

The main challenge of the project has been going further than simple configuration providing integration between the managed services. Modules like firewall, DNS, CA, webserver or mail offer their services to other modules which can be configured to work together. It offers a layer of abstraction and management, with concepts like services, network objects, events or master-slave LDAP architecture between others. To archive these goals a specific service management and integration MVC framework was developed and improved during the 6 years project life. This framework has proved how easy it's to configure a new service or improve an existing module, experience we shared with the Perl community on last year YAPC::EU.

This talk will present the project, its framework, how it integrates with Ubuntu and the plans to upload to Debian too. Also the difficulties that exist dealing with packaging policies and security profiles and how the project attempts to resolve them: configuration file updates: fstab, nsswitch, pam, etc.