If you are outside the United States, you know the frustration of getting locked out from content providers like Hulu, Netflix, Pandora and others. With ClearOS and the new ibVPN app, you can now invisibly and securely access these services.

Using the ClearOS Marketplace, install the ibVPN app on your ClearOS gateway and start routing devices on your local network via your favorite country: US, Canada, UK, and many more. For example, an Apple TV system can be routed through the US while leaving other systems on the network as is. Here's how it works.

- Install the app from the ClearOS Marketplace
- Sign up for an account from ibVPN (link includes an affiliate ID... beer money)
- Configure your ibVPN settings in the ClearOS app
- Select the country VPN server (US, UK, Canada, etc)
- Specify the devices on your network that should go through ibVPN

Enjoy!

We are happy to announce a cool new toy for developers - an Android app to get you started with mobile development! Please keep in mind, this is a developer demonstration with open source code to get started.

Installation

On your ClearOS system, install the server-side app for the Android app:

yum --enablerepo=clearos-updates-testing install app-mobile-demo

Once installed, you can find the demo under System > Developer > Mobile Demo. From that page you can click on Download & Install to get the app from Google play.

ClearOS Mobile Demo - Android

Tips

- After you have added a new system to the application, you may have to wait up to 10 minutes before you start to see data synchronizing. This all depends on how many other sync accounts you have (GMail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, etc). This is apparently "normal" behavior.

- The app will install on Android 2.1 and up, but older API versions do not support periodic data sync, this has to be done in some manual way. Periodic sync works from API level 8 (2.2.x FROYO) and up.

- The password you use to authenticate with is never stored on the phone. It is used once to obtain a session cookie. These cookies will expire after 2 hours. You will be notified with a sign-in error when the session expired. I will be updating the ClearOS framework to extend sessions time-outs dynamically so this won't be an issue for future real world apps.

l7-filter -- the Application Layer Packet Classifier for Linux -- Finds a New Home with ClearFoundation

The L7-filter software is a vibrant open source project.  The software is an application layer packet classifier that can differentiate types of network traffic by protocol; for example it can identify bittorrent, IRC, SIP and many other types of traffic.   In turn, these classifiers can be used to block or shape traffic according to a defined network policy. L7-filter is a very reputable project that has been integrated with ClearOS for some time.

ClearFoundation has been handed the reins and will take on maintenance for the project!  That means the capable ClearFoundation development team will be maintaining the code base, improving features, co-ordinating with other developers and updating software as needed. Documentation, bug tracking, testing, protocol filter definitions, and user feedback round out other maintenance tasks.  With the already thousands strong community and an open source not-for-profit foundation supporting the initiative, maintaining l7-filter is a good fit.