The IPFire open-source firewall operating system based on the Linux kernel has been updated on January 20, 2016, to version 2.17 Core Update 96, a release that adds several improvements, fixes many security issues, and updates various components.
According to the release notes, the IPFire 2.17 Core Update 96 release introduces some important Ramdisk usage changes, such as the use of persistent storage for storing the databases on which the system data is collected and those beautiful graphs are generated.
However, the new persistent storage will only apply to fresh installations of the IPFire firewall, as well as upgraded systems that have less than 512MB RAM. The old, round-robin-based behaviour for databases will be kept for the existing systems with more than 512MB of RAM.
"To give an example, many of the ALIX boards use very slow compact flash storage and do only have 256 or even 128 MB of memory. So neither is really an option. Systems you will purchase today usually come with fast SSD storage and a few gigabytes of memory. So both is a viable option to store these databases," reads today's announcement.
Most of the core components have been updated
Also new in IPFire 2.17 Core Update 96 is the addition of the latest package updates, fixing most of the security issues that you might have read about lately. Therefore, the new IPFire 2.17 release updates OpenSSL to version 1.0.2e, StrongSwan to version 5.3.5, mdadm to version 3.3.4, arping to version 2.15, rrdtool to version 1.5.5, and libnet to version 1.1.6.
Among other improvements, we can mention that cryptodev is no longer supported, the GRUB bootloader has been patched against the authentication bypass issue related to pressing the backspace key 28 times, Dnsmasq was improved as well, the dma mail agent now offers better authentication against remote mail servers, and SNAT rules supports has been added to the firewall engine.
Lastly, several add-ons have been updated. Among these, we can mention nano 2.5.0, Midnight Commander 4.8.15, ClamAV (Clam AntiVirus) 0.99, and Open-VM-Tools (OVT) 10.0.5. Also, the squid-accounting tool was updated too, the Tripwire software has been removed, and the Turkish language translation received an update. Download IPFire 2.17 Core Update 96 right now from Softpedia.
