First Beta build is now ready for public testing

May 31, 2016 01:25 GMT  ·  By

NethServer Community Manager Alessio Fattorini has informed Softpedia today about the general availability of the first Beta release of the NethServer 6.8 server-oriented GNU/Linux operating system.

Based on the recently released CentOS 6.8 operating system, which, in turn, builds on the freely distributed sources of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 distro, NethServer 6.8 is now in development as the newest long-term support release.

The first Beta has arrived today with numerous new features and improvements, among which we can mention a much easier way to perform Multi-WAN configurations, better spam filtering by using the DNS-based Blackhole List (DNSBL), IPsec site-to-site support, as well as support for configuring policy routing in the firewall.

There are also a new button for cleaning the YUM transactions for freeing up disk space, support for using IP and CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) ranges as the source and destination for the proxy bypass settings, and a new Bonding mode on the Network page, allowing sysadmins to choose from multiple bond modes.

"I have just released the new Beta 1 based on CentOS 6.8, final will be released soon," says Alessio Fattorini in an email sent to Softpedia. "The Beta release contains all the exciting features of NethServer 6.8 in a form that anyone can help test. This testing, guided by the NethServer team, helps us target and identify bugs."

NethForge is now installed and enabled by default like in NethServer 7

As reported by us last week, the NethServer 7 series entered development, with a third Alpha build seeded for public testing. NethServer 7 is based on the latest CentOS 7 Linux release and includes more advanced features than the forthcoming long-term supported NethServer 6.8 branch based on CentOS 6.8, which, in turn, is more stable and reliable.

One of the features backported from NethServer 7 is support for installing and enabling the NethForge Software Center category by default, allowing users to find extra modules built by the community. Numerous other improvements and bug fixes are coming soon to NethServer 6.8, but you can get an early taste right now by downloading the Beta 1 64-bit ISO image from our website.