Sometimes services with the gap of two versions might have a settings change or the service is not ported to this distro
This leads to fix by yourself and mostly what you are suggesting is to fork NS7 to get another product
Well it is a huge work that is needed to get it achieved
Probably a backup and reinstall on a new host could be viable if you are ready to work 1 or 2 years free in your life for the community…probably full time beside your real work
Very wishful thinking. Maybe enough for a cloud based VPS for webhosting…
Red Hat / Centos NEVER included a full AD. NethServer built more or less their own AD in NS7.
How will any off the shelf instruction help you in this?
My 2 cents
Andy
I really understand you and agree with you on some points. But does it really make sense to delay the change, which in my opinion is inevitable?
Regards…
Uwe
Edit:
And I openly admit that the changeover is causing me difficulties. Not because I can’t get used to and deal with the new design and the changes under the hood. But I feel a bit like jumping in at the deep end.
https://pkgs.org/download/shorewall-core
One example no shorewall for el9…it is the fw of ns7
I see. Rocky Linux 9 uses FirewallD. It looks like FirewallD uses nftables. Shorewall uses iptables.
understand.
Ok, I didn’t realize this. I thought that most of it was through SAMBA. I figured maybe some gui and some behind the scene commands to allow things to happen. 
AFAIK, In the past, the AD part used the Heimdahl kerberos library, not the MIT one (did not work). This does work now, but RHEL never included an AD for the above reasons (also). They included MIT Kerberos.
See also:
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Running_a_Samba_AD_DC_with_MIT_Kerberos_KDC
Simply, Yes. I believe the devs took time to think on many different things for both NS7 and NS8 when moving forward. Maybe they even found something like these links and talk about it as well. Of course things can be overlooked as well. As well as these links are mostly from 2022 to 2024. At then end of the day, you never know until you ask. So I thought I would.
AFAIK, The devs are actually planning an in-place upgrade, but most likely for 7.9 → 8.1 or later.
I believe RHEL has RHDS and SSSD and there is 389 Directory Server. Which I believe can work with windows and Active Directory. I am sure there is probably a reason they didn’t use these tho. At least that is my guess.
Thanks for you words, I feel you man.
I have appreciated all the feedback received so far, trying to answer all questions that came up
We’re not closing anything, we know that such changes need time.
as @danb35 pointed out CentOS EOL forced devs to be fast…
People are free to stay with NethServer 7 for the all the time they like, taking in account that we can’t add new feature or fix things that RH won’t fix.
I try to remind you that we didn’t choose another distro like rocky and alma for technical reasons and we chose years ago not to repeat the same mistake as CentOS, tying ourselves hands and feet to a distribution that could potentially change direction in the future.
That’s why we abandoned the concept of NethServer as a distro and instead embraced NethServer as an application platform.
We’re not rushing things… at the contrary we’re a bit late, considering the reasons mentioned above.
The stable is not stable enough? Ok let’s let’s roll up our sleeves so we can fix what misses.
I think that still looking at the past won’t resolve any problem.
@alefattorini I get that, and I think that makes really sense. However I would have opted to take the existing NS7 functionality and convert that functionality in modules onto NS8, especially the core functionality like the basic firewall capabilities. Now one has chosen to create a complete new baby, and leaving virtually nothing behind, thus forcing possibly many into an impossible situation.
Debian will always be there and LIBRE.
A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
John C. Maxwell
This stable was not even an RC, a Beta maybe…
I hope it won’t be the case for the next stable.
Michel-André
i beg to differ and disagree with those sentiments.
Building software is hard, building a platform is even harder.
We need to admit that nethserver is not only a software, but also a platform.
As a software, most of the underlying features to get it working i beleiver had been achived, however we must admit a significant feature set had not been implemented, which for the simpler setup could work without.
I beleive i have a geeky setup for using nethserver 7, and will have even geekier setup for nethserver 8 because it adds some functions i need for some clients i support.
a huge number of users used nextcloud for ldap/AD, nextcloud and maybe mattermost. the rest have other things deployed in it.
Now we need to consider and agree that, being a new product, system architecture, and considering different use cases, developers would never have considered all the use cases, users have to actually use the product, experience it to unlock teething challenges.
I would agree, at the moment nS8 is more stable and better than it was during launch, and with release 8.1 some of the feature gaps would be closed.
lets be abit supportive and not constraint ourselves to what was and focus with what is.
there might have been issues at initial launch, are those issues still there?
I also have needs not yet met by ns8, especially for me vpn features and disk management.
overall, there is alot to be done, and alot can be done. should we maintain what was, or can we focus on what can be
@alefattorini I appreciate all your feed back.
@capote have you looked at Control Web Panel (used to be called Centos Web Panel): https://control-webpanel.com/
Not sure if it is simpler than ispconfig as I haven’t looked at that in some years. I actually moved to CWP from ispconfig because of the simplified handling and addition of different PHP versions. I think for that feature you need a Pro license of about $10 per year - worth it.
Exactly my sentiment I guess. From a complete manageable solution to a ‘patchwork’ jungle of tools where you are on your own to manage, maintain and learn them.
Feels like the 80-ies again.
what are we talking about again?
As I indicated, this.
whats the patchwork jungle of tools?