QuickBox Pro v2.3.6

This version has been released on Saturday, October 3, 2020.

Heads Up!

As we have updated the main update binary, please run the following to grab the latest and to perform the update to the latest v2.3.6 release. This is especially beneficial if coming off of older installs.

cd /tmp
git clone --quiet --branch "master" https://lab.quickbox.io/QuickBox/Pro.git >/dev/null
chmod -R +x Pro/
\cp -rf Pro/bin/qbUpdate /etc/QuickBox/system/updater/qbUpdate
sleep 3
/tmp/Pro/bin/qbUpdate

This version is considered a maintenance/enhancement release. There has been some major retooling to the underlying libraries and and delivery used by QuickBox. I’m talking about Bootstrap, MariaDB, jQuery, and more! After a lot of consideration and testing and even more coding, we’re proud to announce a new System Dashboard that is no longer powered by Grafana, that’s right, we’re now rolling with Netdata! This is exciting for a lot of reasons, the most note worthy would be the increase in responsiveness to the dashboard to reduce the loading times that some users have seen. As with every word/concern/suggestion brought my way I decided it was a good a time as any to take a leap and work on doing even more to improve and enhance the QuickBox Dashboard experience!

Under the hood improvements explained

1. No more Grafana means you can now uninstall this to save those precious system resources. To uninstall Grafana after the update, simply do sudo su - to elevate your bash, then type qb remove grafana. That’s it! As Grafana saves more and more historical data over time it tends to become a bit heavy and this is noticeably truer for those with less than beefy systems. As a result the System Dashboards could become rather cumbersome and as additional service required by Grafana load and work to present the data, this could be a painful loading process. With Netdata, there are no additional databases or services that need to be installed. It’s lean, it’s mean, and it’s generously accurate.
2. Bootstrap and jQuery libraries updated means that we stay on latest and best practices of keeping things current. This ensures that we’re on point with next releases and adjustments will not be as painful (from a development standpoint) in the future. These libraries are additionally a means to remove excess and slim down file size on the css and js we include for a functional Dashboard environment.
3. MariaDB updated to 10.5.5! What does this mean for you? How about a 20% speed increase on database connections between applications such as NextCloud and QuickBox. That’s speedier connections on the database as well as a lighter demand on system resources. An extension of the update has also renamed the binaries from mysql to finally be the relevant mariadb
4. All javascript on the QuickBox Dashboard environment are now deferred.. as in they are set to load last to avoid conflicts… and if you guessed more speed? You’d be a winner! This also adds to faster loading times of the QuickBox Dashboard.

So as you can see, there have been some very capable and worthy updates that we have decided to port into the next release that will make the use of the QuickBox Dashboard a much more enjoyable experience. Since we’re now using Netdata to deliver the System Dashboard I decided to do more adjustments to increase the speeds of Dashboard. A new and updated Navigation system that is more responsive and faster to load. Just check out the short demo video below to see the difference!

Finally some working SMTP configs for those “Forgotten Password” moments and user registrations!

That’s right, you can now enter in your SMTP credentials and get system mail for user registrations as well as issue a password reset should you ever forget your password. The credentials are all entered on the new Email Settings page.

With the Email Settings page live there are plans to have this extended even further! Of these plans you’ll expect to see the ability to edit email templates to your liking (and language) as well as sending out Admin notices to additional friends/family/users on your system.

User Avatars!?

I know it’s not the most important thing ever, but it’s the ability to add a bit of a unique touch to your account and some identity to your users. For now we are showing avatar by way of Gravatar, but this is to be extended after this release to include the ability to upload custom avatars, as well as custom logos! Make sure that to use this feature you update your email on your profile page and be sure to have an account on Gravatar.com. It’s free and signup only takes seconds!

Of course, there is more to this release so check out the changelog below for all the goods.

See the below changelog for all the adjustments and fixes that are included within this release. As usual, up until release be on the lookout for additional updates on your changelog as we work to make some final adjustments and testing.

Most importantly… stay human! 💓