EBox is the jack-of-all-trades among open source servers. The box integrates numerous useful services that should help small to medium businesses in their network needs. It is based on Ubuntu, is under GPL and is now downloadable as version 1.0.

The eBox project sanctioned the product in their announcement as being "deemed good enough to deserve the 1.0 badge" based on the number of integrated components. Among them are DHCP and NTP servers, traffic shaping and load balancing, DNS and email servers and many more. The changelog points to bugs developers fixed so that modules can seamlessly interact.

Also among the new eBox features are a dashboard to centralize service data and the possibility to make and secure full configuration backups. Along with them are disk usage information and RAID status. A reporting function keeps admins continually informed and generates detailed summaries.

The project meanwhile doesn't want to rest on its laurels and presents a roadmap for future development and releases. Soon to come should be integration of the Asterisk telephony engine and a captive portal. Captive portals are familiar at airports and other locations as authentication devices: after wireless access, users land at a website and need to register (usually at a cost) to gain Internet access.

Ebox is available as Ubuntu packages, but you can also download as ISO and install it on Live CD for testing. A comprehensive user's guide describes the important configuration steps. Developers can also take a look at the developer's guide.