Univention Corporate Server was originally designed to be a Linux distro with Microsoft Active Directory capabilities.
The Germany-based enterprise-focused open-source software company Univention today announced the release of Univention Corporate Server 5.0-6, which the company classifies as a “patch-level release.” UCS is an enterprise Linux distribution based on Debian, and today’s release contains bug fixes and security updates released since version 5.0-5, including for PostgreSQL, Samba, as well as some native Univention packages.
“In the last three months we have released 47 security updates, most of them from the Debian base distribution,” Dirk Wiesenthal, an open-source software engineer with the company wrote in a blog on Uninvention’s website. “However, we have also fixed security-relevant errors in the Univention packages, e.g. password leaks via the process list.”
The server operating system originally began development in 2002 with the purpose of building a Linux server that could serve as an alternative to Microsoft’s domain concept and it’s proprietary directory service Active Directory. A key component of UCS is Active Directory Connection, which allows for bidirectional synchronization between Microsoft’s Active Directory and the open-source directory service, OpenLDAP.
According to Wiesenthal, the company issues a new patch-level release every three months.
“You can install UCS 5.0-6 now, although we will continue to provide security updates for UCS 5.0-5 for another 12 weeks,” he said. “However, administrators of UCS 5.0-4 should update now at the latest, as we have discontinued maintenance for this release.”
The next “minor” release of the distro, UCS 5.2, is in the works, with an alpha version of the software having been released “a few days ago.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
