Univention Corporate Server 5.2-5 lands with a restore option for deleted user accounts and more

Mostly used in German-speaking areas by companies and public organizations, including the regional government authority of the federal state of Brandenburg, Univention Corporate Server (UCS) has been around for over two decades. Its development was prompted by the lack of a standardized Linux server operating system to offer an alternative to Microsoft's domain concept with the proprietary Active Directory service. Today, UCS is a solid product based on Debian, and thanks to Samba 4 integration, it can also manage Microsoft Windows-operated hardware.

Released earlier this week, UCS 5.2-5 is the first patch-level release of the year. The new installation media incorporates all the minor updates from the past three months, along with new features. The highlights of this update include the following:

• Automatic restoration of accidentally deleted users in Active Directory and Samba 4.
• The new Provisioning Service from Univention Nubus for UCS has been available as a preview for UCS for several months. It initially arrived in Nubus for Kubernetes.
• Faster changes to group memberships via the Univention Directory Manager.
• Installing or updating UDM extensions no longer needs a restart of the UDM REST API.
• User information is updated from LDAP at every login thanks to the new keycloak configuration.

The full release notes can be found on this page. 

In addition to the ISO image, those interested in grabbing UCS can also get one of the five virtual images available. These images have been prepared for VirtualBox, VMware, VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, and KVM. Although UCS is a corporate product that doesn't come for free when used in certain environments (here can be found more details about the subscription plans), the Core Edition is a good way to take it for a spin, although it doesn't come with support and lacks some features, such as advanced security options and scalability tools that are available in the paid versions.