A new update has been released for IPFire

Oct 28, 2015 12:43 GMT  ·  By

Michael Tremer, one of the developers for the ipfire.org team, has just announced that IPFire 2.17 Core 94, a new build of the popular Linux-based firewall distribution, is now available for download.

IPFire is one of the few modular Linux distributions out there, and that usually means that users will be able to benefit from it in quite a few ways. It's possible to change the purpose of the distribution so that it can be used as a firewall, a proxy server, or just a simple VPN gateway. The fact that it's a Linux OS also means that it's built with security in mind.

As you can imagine, the number of changes or improvements in this release is not a big one. Still, some of the updated packages do bring some significant modifications and new features, such as the addition of support for elliptic curves (ECDSA and ED25519) with the new OpenSSH 7.1p1.

IPFire 2.17 Core 94 is now available for download

"An internal mail agent was added that is used by internal services to send out reports or alerts. So far only a few services use this (like the squid accounting add-on), but we expect to add more things in the future. This is a very simple and lightweight mail agent that can be configured on the web user interface and will usually require an upstream mail server" is noted in the official announcement.

According to the changelog, a new checkbox in the advanced settings page of an IPsec connections has been added, required fields are now marked with a star, and a monthly forced ddns update has been removed. Moreover, some crashes have been fixed with IDs that only contain 0xff, coreutils has been updated to version 8.24, squid 3.4.14 has been implemented by default, and several other packages have been updated as well.

The developers recommend all users of IPFire to upgrade their distributions. More details can be found on the official website. You can download IPFire 2.17 Core 94 right now from Softpedia and give it a try.