14 DAY TRIAL // The Endian team is proud to announce the first release candidate of the Endian Firewall 2.2 "Community" edition. This version includes a lot of bug fixes, improvements and some new features. We, at Softpedia Labs, took the 2.2 RC1 release for some tests and among the new features we've noticed the initial support for multiple uplinks, for the ICMP protocol (in both the Zone and Outgoing firewalls), for HTTP and VPN proxy and for NATed and VPN endpoints.
The management of WAN/RED connections was greatly enhanced and each interface benefits now of multiple IPs/networks in STATIC mode. In order to allow different rules per uplink, multiple uplink support was added and there is now an uplink editor. Moreover, the Endian team added uplink monitoring (with automatic failover).
On the other hand, the system/firewall access policy was set to DENY, the external access has been greatly enhanced and it was renamed to 'System Access', the firewall services can now automatically define ports for their own proper function and there are also some sort of GUI enhancements for the Zone and Outgoing firewalls, the HTTP proxy, Port Forwarding and the System Access.
Through the updated packages in Endian Firewall 2.2 RC1 we can find Squid 2.6, which performs better than previous releases, a new version of the ClamAV and Amavis virus scanners, and the latest version of Postgrey, the Postfix greylisting policy server.
Endian Firewall Community is a Linux distribution that turns systems into a full featured security appliance. It is easy to install, manage and administer. Among its features, we notice a stateful packet inspection firewall, application-level proxies for various protocols (HTTP, POP3, SMTP, FTP) with antivirus support, virus and spam filtering for e-mail traffic (for both POP and SMTP), web content filtering of Internet traffic and a "hassle free" VPN solution (based on OpenVPN). Endian Firewall's main advantage is that it is a pure "Open Source" solution that is sponsored by Endian.
If you want to take a closer to look at all the changes brought by this first release candidate of Endian Firewall 2.2 Community Edition, please visit the official press release here.