Right on schedule, opsi unveils a fresh design in celebration of its 20th anniversary. The previous logo has been a companion for two decades: on our website, on mugs, pens, notepads, and gracing the laptops of our dedicated developers and users as stickers. This is the perfect moment for a contemporary makeover with a modern look, fresh colors and a brand-new logo.
Pünktlich zum runden Geburtstag bekommt opsi ein neues Design. 20 Jahre lang hat uns das alte Logo begleitet: auf der Website, auf Tassen, Stiften, Notizblöcken und als Sticker auf etlichen Laptops von Entwickler*innen und Anwender*innen. Jetzt ist es Zeit für einen modernen Look, frische Farben und ein neues Logo.
The 18th edition of FrOSCon took place on August, 5 and 6, at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. Organized annually by the computer science department, FrOSCon (Free and Open Source Software Conference) offers an extensive program featuring talks and workshops for visitors of all ages interested in Free Software—whether they use it, wish to learn about it, or aim to develop it. This year, a team from uib travelled to Sankt Augustin to present opsi and provide support to the Open Source community.
On the 22nd and 23rd of April, T-DOSE 2023 took place at its new location, the Weeffabriek in Geldrop, near Eindhoven. T-DOSE (Technical Dutch Open Source Event) is an annual open source technology conference bringing together experts and enthusiasts from the Open Source community. Together with my colleague Terry Strooband, I was happy to present opsi.
Are you tired of manually setting dozens of action requests for your clients? Or are you looking for a way to automate weekly updates? This blog post demonstrates how to make these things easier with opsi-cli and its command client-action. You can use it to set action requests for specific products or product groups on certain clients or client groups.
Good news for everyone out there using opsi extensions: With our new Basic license you can install (almost) all our paid extension free of charge on up to 30 clients. This article gives a brief introduction to the new opsi license.
Are you looking for a more efficient way to access your opsi server remotely? This blog post explores the benefits of JSON-RPC, a stateless and lightweight protocol which simplifies the transmission of data between a server and a client. Discover the opsi-cli command jsonrpc, a user-friendly way to execute JSON-RPC methods on an opsi server. Available on Windows, Linux, and macOS, you no longer need to rely on SSH clients to manage your opsi environment.
As announced in our previous blog post, we have released a new command line tool to work with opsi environments. opsi-cli is implemented in Python and available as part of opsi-utils >= 4.2.0.187 as well as opsi package in our public repositories at download.uib.de.
opsi-cli offers a really cool autocompletion feature which I would like to introduce in this blog post. The goal is to make working with opsi-cli more smoothly—like on the shell, the autocompletion works for commands, subcommands, options, etc.
At the opsiconf opsiconf 2022, we announced a new command line tool to work with opsi environments. We also offered a quick preview of the new tool. opsi-cli is now available as part of opsi-utils >= 4.2.0.187 and as opsi package in our public repositories at download.uib.de. It can be used to access backend functions of an opsi config server via RPC and is highly customizable.
In this blog post, I shall give a short introduction to the new opsi-cli. I will also write about the motivation, the design concept, and our implementation. At the end of the article, you can find installation instructions.
Over the last months we have worked intensively on a new generation of opsi-client-agents. With the release on 05.08.2021 we have published them under "testing". This blogpost is intended to highlight their new features, as well as changes in their structure and handling.
The opsi-client-agents 4.2.x are compatible with opsi 4.1, but some of the new features, like providing the installer, only work with a current opsi 4.2 config server.
All Windows versions starting from NT6.0 are supported by opsi-client-agent 4.2.x, older Windows versions are no longer supported.
The installation procedures of the different modes (OS installation / service_setup / opsi-deploy-client-agent/ update via service) have been unified and simplified. Installations of the opsi-client-agent now always take place in service context. For OS installation, opsi-deploy-client-agent and service_setup, a connection to the opsi service is now established first, so that all configurations, product properties, etc. can be retrieved directly from the opsi service. This eliminates the need to use config files (e.g. config.ini) and duplicate installation as part of the OS installation.
Additionally there is now a comfortable installer to install the opsi-client-agent without the need to connect to the opsi depot share first. This installer is provided by the opsi config server and can be downloaded from https://<config-server>:4447/public/opsi-client-agent without authentication.
The installer and the service_setup now use an installation helper. This finds available opsi 4.2 config servers in the LAN via Zeroconf automatically.
The installation and update of the opsi-client-agents usually do not need a reboot anymore.
The action processor opsi-script (successor of opsi-winst) is now included (also for windows). To enable updates of the action processor, the opsi package "opsi-script" should be installed on all depots.
The opsiclientd included in the opsi-client-agent now uses a server certificate issued by the configserver via the "opsi CA". Clients that trust the "opsi CA" also trust the certificate of the opsiclient (client port 4441).
File permissions under windows are set via icacls, which makes the process now much more performant.
opsi-client-agent, opsi-linux-client-agent and opsi-mac-client-agent have been aligned so that their structure is now (largely) consistent. For windows and linux an extensible postinst mechanism is available to install the respective opsi-client-agent after netboot installation and to make adjustments if necessary.
The structure of the client-agents is now so that under CLIENT_DATA directly the setup.opsiscript is located, which regulates the installation procedure. In addition opsi-deploy-client-agent (and opsi-deploy-client-agent41 for compatibility with very old server operating systems under opsi4.1) and the oca-installation-helper are located there. The latter is used by service_setup (, silent_setup) and the installer and assists in setting the configuration for a new client. custom files, which should overwrite the defaults, can be stored under CLIENT_DATA/files/custom.
On Linux, opsi-script and opsi-client-systray are now compactly located under /opt so that they can be updated efficiently - the update_action_processor thus also extends to the opsi-script libraries, default skin and locales.
The opsiclientdguard which previously existed to restart the opsiclientd service in case of a crash is no longer necessary and has been removed from the opsi-client-agent (on windows).
These changes were made with the goal of making the client-agents simpler, more efficient and easier to maintain. We hope that you like the new features and we always appreciate your feedback and suggestions.