Smartbox is a completely open source easy-to-install, easy-to-manage, resilient, minimal hardware specification network server, with an emphasis on ease of use by non-technical staff of an organisation.

This project, which is based on the highly stable and well supported ubuntu linux distribution, is aimed at voluntary and non-profit organisations that could do better than to pay a lot of money for the purchase and maintenance of conventional network servers, over which they have little direct control (e.g. to add new users to the network themselves, recover files from the backup system, etc.).

The design of this system is entirely based upon research into the voluntary and community organisation (VCO) sector by team members of Illuminate ICT, and by the wider findings of other ICT Hub projects in the UK.

Current smartbox features

• Windows domain controller

• Automatic auto-mounting of relevant shares on a Windows client.

• Historical backup system for easy recovery of lost files from last few hours/days/weeks/months in a backup server share.

• RAID-1 Monitoring
  

• Web interface for simple configuration.

• Remote, efficient optionally-encrypted smartbox-to-smartbox backup.

• New: wikidbase (development version): go to port 8888 of the smartbox (e.g. http://smartbox:8888) and enter user/password: admin/wikidbase . WIkidbase is a generic data management system that I am developing and which will eventually be incorporated with Smartbox.
  

Planned features

• Full mail server (SMTP/POP and IMAP)

• Print server
  

• Asterisk software PBX (for office phone systems)

• Groupware (e.g. LDAP, shared cals, forums, wikidbase, contacts, open-xchange, opengroupware ???)

• VPN server - to aid remote workers
  

Notes on Smartbox Backup

Easy and effective data backup is fundamental to the smartbox's design, so it supports data backup at three levels:

• RAID-1 disk mirroring: should a hard drive fail, another will maintain data until the failed drive is replaced.
• Peer-to-peer remote backup: a smartbox can automatically, efficiently and securly store its data on a remote smartbox over a network - the data can be encrypted if the destination is not fully trusted. This is designed to work in, say, nightly sessions over a broadband connection, such that after a few days/weeks the smartboxes will become fully synchronised, without saturating the network bandwidth during the day.
• Historical file snapshots: smartbox will take periodic, storage-efficient snapshots of user data every hour, so files can easily be restored from the past few hours, days, weeks, or months through a special Backup network share.

Installation & Upgrade

Go here for instructions on installation and upgrade.

Freshmeat Project Page

Visit the freshmeat project page here.

References