Zentyal Infrastructure¶

This section develops the set of services used by Zentyal to manage the infrastructure of your local network and to optimise internal traffic.

We will study Zentyal’s high-level abstractions, the objects and services that will be used in most of the modules, name domain management, time synchronisation, automatic network configuration, the management of a certification authority and the different types of virtual private networks you can deploy.

Defining abstractions will help you manage the entities that will be used by the other modules, creating a coherent, easy to remember and robust context.

Domain Name System or DNS provides access to hosts and services using names instead of IP addresses.

The Network Time Protocol or NTP, keeps the system time synchronised on the different computers within a network.

The DHCP service is widely used to automatically configure different network parameters on computers such as; IP address, DNS servers or the gateway which is used to access to the Internet.

The growing importance of ensuring the authenticity, integrity and privacy of communications has increased the interest on the deployment of certification authorities. This mechanism facilitates access to various services in a safe and verifiable way. Certificates allow configuration of SSL or TLS to securely access most services and provided certificates for user authentication.

By using VPN (Virtual Private Network), it is possible to interconnect different private subnets via the Internet in a completely secure way. A typical example of this feature is the communication between two or more offices of the same company or organisation. You can also use VPN to allow users to connect remotely and securely to the corporate network.

In addition to the openvpn protocol, Zentyal offers you the IPSec/L2TP protocol to ensure compatibility with third party devices and windows boxes where you do not want to install additional software.