14 DAY TRIAL // The developers behind the IPFire project have announced earlier today, December 11, that a new update is available for download for the IPFire 2.17 series of firewall operating systems based on the Linux kernel.
According to the release notes, IPFire 2.17 Core Update 95 is quite an important offering as it updates the Linux kernel packages to the long-term supported Linux 3.14.57 LTS release, bringing improvements to various hardware components, as well as several device drivers for Intel network controllers.
Furthermore, the IPsec VPN stack has been updated with feature enhancements and bugfixes, including the strongSwan open source IPsec-based VPN solution, which has been updated to version 5.3.3. Also, it is now possible to add multiple subnets per tunnel, which makes it easier to configure complex networks.
Moreover, IPFire can now reject rules when a tunnel connection fails to establish. "This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.17 - Core Update 95 which is a bigger release with a new kernel and various smaller feature enhancements and bug fixes," says Michael Tremer of IPFire in today's announcement.
DHCP Server improvements, more goodies
IPFire 2.17 Core Update 95 also adds various improvements to the DHCP Server component, which is now capable of submitting DNS (Domain Name System) updates to an upstream name server immediately after outputting a DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) lease.
Among other enhancements, we can mention a couple of OpenVPN improvements, hotpluggable VPN devices support, Snort 2.9.7.6, background download of the GeoIP database, Network Time Protocol (NTP) 4.2.8p4, dma 0.10, the addition of the ipset and pgrep binaries, Dynamic DNS (DDNS or DynDNS) 009, and lzo 2.09.
Last but not least, several add-ons have been updated in IPFire 2.17 Core Update 95, such as Asterisk, which is now at version 11.20.0, and Monit, which has been updated to version 5.14. Flag icons are now displayed again for TOR. Download IPFire 2.17 Core Update 95 right now from Softpedia.