NethServer project milestone 8.8

davidep · March 27, 2026, 9:15am

We’re happy to announce milestone 8.8, marking another step forward for NethServer 8. This development cycle focused on :

improving backup and restore workflows
expanding platform compatibility
refining UI behavior
continuing the transition toward a more flexible and modern storage stack
core applications updates

Enhancements

Here are the highlights introduced since milestone 8.7.

The full list is available in the release notes for milestone 8.8.

Additional volume selection for applications

When installing, restoring, or cloning applications, the UI may now prompt to select the target volume for application data.

This allows administrators to take advantage of additional storage volumes and better distribute data across available disks. The feature is available on nodes with configured extra volumes and for applications that support it.

UI refinements: low-contrast style, manage favorites and update into Applications, Backup/Restore reorganized

The cluster-admin interface received several refinements:

Notifications now use a low-contrast style, aligned with Carbon Design System guidelines.
New actions have been added to the Applications page context menu: manage favorites and update to a testing version.
The Backup and restore page has been reorganized with clearer sections and labels, improving navigation and usability.

Improved backup and restore experience

Backup management has been enhanced with improved usability and control.

Backup destinations can now be imported directly from a cluster backup file, simplifying disaster recovery setup. The new Import destinations action allows administrators to quickly restore backup configurations by providing the backup encryption password.

In addition, backup runs started from the cluster-admin UI can now be canceled, giving more control over long-running operations.

Debian 13 (Trixie) support

NS8 can now be installed on Debian 13 (Trixie)!

This marks an important step in keeping the platform aligned with upstream distributions. Debian 12 (Bookworm) will be phased out starting from the next milestone. Administrators are encouraged to plan upgrades accordingly, as documented in the release notes and in the community Howto Upgrade Debian 12 to 13 .

Samba TLS certificates integration

Samba LDAP is now integrated with the TLS certificates management page.

Certificates uploaded or obtained through the system that match the Samba FQDN are automatically used to secure LDAP connections, improving security and simplifying configuration.

RustFS replaces MinIO

A new S3-compatible storage application, RustFS, is now available in the Software Center and replaces MinIO.

Administrators running existing MinIO installations are encouraged to migrate to RustFS to benefit from ongoing development and future improvements.

Application updates

Core applications have been updated, including:

Mattermost 10.11 ESR
Ejabberd 26.02

Bug fixes

Several issues have been addressed across core components and applications to improve stability and reliability. Here is a brief list:

The full list is available on our GitHub issue tracker.

Roadmap

Work is already underway for the next milestone. The current main goal is refreshing the Mail containers, which need to be rebased on an up-to-date Alpine or Debian image. Two highly anticipated features are also planned: the LDAP mail attribute integration and improvements to mail forwards.

Additionally, two important goals originally planned for milestone 8.7 are still in progress and will be delivered in the upcoming release:

Implement an improved Rclone-gateway service to enhance security and allow access to private backup destinations from any cluster node.
Design a multi-step restore process with quick service recovery and background data restoration.

Here’s a sneak peek of the generic Rclone-compatible configuration workflow, currently under development:

Beyond these goals, there are also plans for:

a multi-step clone/move procedure, similar to the NS7 migration tool, allowing re-sync operations multiple times before a final “Finish” action,
improved resource visibility in the cluster-admin UI, such as available disk space and usage, to better support application management decisions

Follow the roadmap on our project page.

Project milestone meaning

In NS8, milestones act as checkpoints in the project’s development journey.

A milestone number like 8.8 does not represent a software version, but a snapshot of completed goals and ongoing work.

Join the NS8 community

Your participation helps shape the direction of the project:

Join the forum discussions using the tag ns8
Share feedback, report bugs, and propose improvements
Contribute translations on Weblate

Thanks for being part of the journey — together we’re building the next generation of NethServer.

The NethServer Team

dan · March 27, 2026, 3:59pm

You’d said, before NS8 was released, that you planned to integrate SSO. Where is that on the roadmap?

oneitonitram · March 29, 2026, 10:23am

one key imrpoevement for mail i think needs considerations is.

different directory, per mail domain.

ad

ldap.doman1.tld for domain1
and
ldap2.domain.tld for domain2

davidep · March 30, 2026, 8:21am

Considering the low adoption of community apps like Keycloak, Authentik, and LemonLDAP-NG, SSO is still seen as a nice-to-have feature. However, even if it’s not currently planned^[1], I expect it to be introduced in the future, as real-world demand is growing and will likely accelerate its prioritization.

Regarding Mail multi-tenancy, we have not pursued it due to its complexity and limited demand. We also evaluated a multi-instance approach for Mail on a single NS8 node, which appears simpler than full multi-tenancy. However, for the same market considerations, we decided not to proceed in that direction either.

NethServer · GitHub ↩︎

jaywalker · March 30, 2026, 9:16am

This is a great feature and I am happy to see it on the roadmap. Please consider adding mail aliases via an additional ldap multi-value field as well. This would enable full support of nextcloud mail auto provisioning, setting up the email accounts for the users within nextcloud automatically based on the ldap data.

dan · March 30, 2026, 12:17pm

That’s unfortunate, especially when earlier communications from you said (or at least appeared to say) otherwise. The closest thing you have to a competitor, Univention Corporate Server, includes it and integrates it quite well. It seems a bit silly that I can install Authentik on my NS8 system, integrate it with the users there, and use it to authenticate to pretty much everything but the apps running on my NS8 server.

And I suspect that (along with fragmentation) has a lot to do with the low adoption rate–I can’t use Authentik to log into any of the webmail systems. I could bang on Nextcloud a bit to be able to log in there, but I wouldn’t have access to any of my data, because the account IDs are different for some reason. If I can’t use a community SSO solution to authenticate to the other apps that run on the NS8 server itself, that solution is going to be a lot less valuable. All respect to the work that’s been done on these apps, but this is something that really has to come from you.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, in addition to SSO itself, such a system also abstracts away MFA, hardware tokens, passkeys, Face ID, and all these other authentication technologies that are constantly increasing in popularity. A well-integrated IdP lets you offer these for all your apps, without having to code any of it yourself.

oneitonitram · March 30, 2026, 12:54pm

Unless 18k Download’s, is not correct metric to look into. then i dont know what other metric we need to use.

We have planned to track how many installs and uninstalls our apps have, though its been shelved for now…