The distribution now provides wireless 802.11ac support

May 21, 2017 22:02 GMT  ·  By

Untangle NG Firewall, the open-source and powerful Debian-based network security platform featuring pluggable modules for network apps, has been updated to version 13.0, a major release adding new features and numerous improvements.

The biggest improvement brought by the Untangle NG Firewall 13.0 release is to the poor latency generated by excess buffering in networking equipment, called bufferbloat, by supporting a queueing algorithm designed to optimize QoS and bandwidth to enforce a controlled delay.

"Version 13 brings with it a host of enhancements to the core NG Firewall platform," said Dirk Morris, founder and chief product officer (CPO) at Untangle. "We continue to optimize the NG Firewall administrative experience in an effort to make the lives of IT administrators easier."

Untangle 13.0's new features speed up enforcement, configuration

There are many innovative features implemented in Untangle NG Firewall 13.0, including Tags and Triggers, which promise to speed up enforcement and configuration. While tagging lets sysadmins tag a host, user or device to quickly create policies, triggers allow them to tag same things when a specific event occurs.

Other new features include the ability for Captive Portal to use MAC addresses to track devices, which might just come in handy when installing Untangle NG Firewall in small or branch offices, as well as a revamped administrative interface that now loads, responds and renders a lot faster than before.

To complement the Sessions, Devices (MAC addresses) and Hosts (IP addresses) tables in User Tracking, Untangle NG Firewall 13.0 has added a "User" table too, and it looks like the Command Center now features policy management, allowing organizations with multi-site deployments to easily manage all of their policies.

Among other cool new features introduced in the major Untangle NG Firewall 13.0 release, we can mention wireless 802.11ac support, support for the open source Turris Omnia router, OpenVPN 2.4.0, the ability to override Untangle’s OpenVPN configuration via a new "Advanced" tab of the OpenVPN application.

Last but not least, the ASUS AC88U router is no longer supported in this version, and the Web Filter Lite has been officially removed. There are many other minor improvements implemented in Untangle NG Firewall 13.0, which you can download right now from our website. Check the release announcement page for more details.