14 DAY TRIAL // Smoothwall Express, a free firewall that includes its own security-hardened GNU/Linux operating system and an easy-to-use web interface, is now at version 3.1 RC5.
The current build of Smoothwall Express has arrived after years of continuous effort and promises to be the best release as of yet, but the developers are not yet sure about launching the final version.
The Heartbleed bug that emerged only a couple of weeks ago affected mostly online services and Linux distributions that were using a particular version of OpenSSL. You can imagine that most of the Linux servers have also been affected by this problem, but it turns out that not even firewalls were safe.
“RC5 corrects a number of issues found since we released the fourth RC, settles on i586 and x86_64 as the architectures that will cause the fewest problems when upgrading from v3.0, contains a well-refreshed QoS feature, and has Marco's URL Filter mod and the DHCP Lease Table mod fully integrated.”
“If you are running RC1, RC2, RC3, RC4 or an earlier RC5 daily build, you must install RC5 ASAP. OpenSSL had a major bug that could leak data to unauthorized parties. Second, IPv6 was not correctly firewalled before RC4; there's a small chance your UI and/or SSH could be accessed from RED via a link-local address; this bug is present in Roadster, too,” said the developers in the official announcement.
The rest of the changes in this latest version are not all that exciting and consist of mostly updated packages. For example, Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.4, glibc has been updated to version 2.18, GCC has been updated to version 4.7, perl has been updated to version 5.14, Squid has been updated to version 3.3, httpd has been updated to version 2.2.26, iptables has been updated to version 1.4.14, and openswan is now at version 2.6.4.
Also, Grub Legacy is now used to boot all drives (still no sign of the 2.0 version), SMP is standard for 32 and 64-bit installations, an option to make a bootable install flash drive has been added, and the bandwidthbars presentation has been reworked and enhanced.
A complete list of changes and improvements is available in the official announcement. Download Smoothwall Express 3.1 RC5 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.