14 DAY TRIAL // CentOS developer and maintainer Johnny Hughes has had the great pleasure of announcing today, May 25, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the CentOS Linux 6.8 operating system.
Based, of course, on the upstream freely distributed sources of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.8 operating system, CentOS Linux 6.8 arrives today with major changes, among which we can mention the latest Linux 2.6.32 kernel release from upstream with support for storing up to 300TB of data on XFS filesystems.
The VPN endpoint solution implemented in the NetworkManager network connection manager utility is now provided on the libreswan library instead of the Openswan IPsec implementation used in previous releases of the OS. Moreover, it looks like the SSLv2 protocol has been disabled by default for the SSSD (System Security Services Daemon), which also comes with support for smart cards now.
"There are many fundamental changes in this release, compared with the past CentOS Linux 6 releases," says Johnny Hughes in today's announcement. "All updates since the upstream 6.8 release are also on the CentOS mirrors as zero day updates. When installing CentOS 6.8 from any of our media, you should always run 'yum update' after the install to apply these."
Numerous applications have received updates
CentOS Linux 6.8 also comes with many updated applications, among which we can mention the long-term supported LibreOffice 4.3.7 office suite and Squid 3.4 caching and forwarding web proxy. Additionally, many of the available apps are now supporting the TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2 protocol, including Git, YUM, Postfix, OpenLDAP, stunnel, and vsftpd.
Last but not least, the dmidecode open-source tool for dumping a computer's DMI table contents in a human-readable format now supports SMBIOS 3.0.0, it is now possible to pull kickstart files from HTTPS (Secure HTTP) sources. Then, the NTPd (Network Time Protocol daemon) package has an alternative solution as chrony, SSLv3 has been finally disabled by default to keep users safe, and there's better Hyper-V support.
Download CentOS Linux 6.8 installation images, as well as Live CDs right now via our website.
