On October 27th, Christian Graffer from the Endian team proudly announced the immediate availability of the Endian Firewall Community 2.3 Linux-based operating system. The new version includes a lot of bug fixes, improvements and many new and breathtaking features. We, at the Softpedia Labs, took the 2.3 release for a test drive and, among the new features, we noticed the support for backups, a dashbord, the VPN support, the SNMP support, e-mail notifications, policy routing, QoS, intrusion prevention, and many more.

Highlights of Endian Firewall 2.3:

· USB backups;
· Encrypted backups via email;
· Scheduled backups;
· Dashboard (with live graphs and system/services statistics);
· E-mail notifications for upcoming events;
· Time-based access control lists for HTTP proxy;
· New HTTP proxy web interface (with user-based and group-based content filtering);
· Intrusion prevention (with configurable Snort rules);
· Policy routing rules;
· Better port forwarding;
· QoS (Quality of Service) – replaces the Traffic Shaping feature;
· Added support for SNMP;
· A better and easy-to-use SMTP proxy web interface;
· Support for VLAN (IEEE 802.1Q trunking).

What is Endian Firewall?

Endian Firewall Community is a "turn-key" GNU/Linux distribution that turns every system into a full-featured security appliance. Endian Firewall is very easy to install, flexible, easy to manage and use.

Its features include:

· A stateful packet inspection firewall;
· Application-level proxies for various protocols (HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP) with antivirus support;
· Virus and spam filtering for email traffic (POP and SMTP);
· Content filtering of Web traffic and a "hassle free" VPN solution (based on OpenVPN).

Endian Firewall's main advantage is that it is a pure open source solution sponsored by Endian. Its goal is to work with the open source community to build a secure, complete and stable firewall exclusively from open source software.

Download Endian Firewall Community 2.3 right now from Softpedia.