14 DAY TRIAL // Michael Tremer, a developer for the ipfire.org team, has announced that IPFire 2.13 Core 82, a new stable build of the popular Linux-based firewall distribution, is available, bringing quite a few security fixes.
IPFire releases are not usually very big, but this latest update in the series is quite substantial. A number of features and changes have been made and the devs are working to bring even more options to the masses.
As usual, if you already have this distribution installed, you don't have to do anything special, just to upgrade the system. It will be enough to get all of these goodies.
IPFire gets new features
"This Core Update's main features are the inclusion of the crowd-funded Windows Active-Directory Single Sign-On Web Proxy and the option to disable masquerading (NAT) on the local networking interfaces. In addition to that, several system libraries and tools have been updated, and minor bugs have been fixed."
"Proper and secure authentication against the squid Web Proxy has not been possible in IPFire before. The 'Windows' authentication has been broken for a long time since there were bigger changes in the Windows Domain Controllers. This update adopts IPFire to the new and secure Active Directory authentication interfaces which use the SMB and Kerberos protocols," reads the official announcement.
According to the changelog, disabling masquerading on local zones is now possible to configure from the GUI, the firewall will not need to NAT any packets at all, a fix for some Voice-over-IP devices that fail to register after reconnection of the Internet connection has been implemented, all the packets that are sent to the firewall will now be dropped until the Internet connection has been fully established, and pppd has been updated to version 2.4.7.
Also, gmp has been updated to version 6.0.0, mpfr has been updated to version 3.2.1, the generated configuration files from OpenVPN now contain correct line endings, IP addresses from the static OpenVPN address pools are now colored correctly, some coding style and minor bugs have been fixed in the ddns.cgi script, and the bacula package has been added.
Where to get it
IPFire is a modular Linux distribution, which means that it can be deployed as a firewall, a proxy server, or a VPN gateway, and the TOR add-on has been updated to version 0.2.4.23.
The developers recommend all users of IPFire to upgrade their distributions. More details can be found on the official website. You can download IPFire 2.13 Core 82 right now from Softpedia.