14 DAY TRIAL // The SME Server 9.0 Linux operating system was revealed on June 29 by the non-profit Koozali Foundation, Inc. corporation, through the announcement posted by Ian Wells on the project’s mailing list.
First of all, we should mention that this SME Server release is dedicated in the memory of Chris Burnat, who passed away on Wednesday, June 11, 2014. He was a strong supporter of this CentOS Linux distribution, and without him SME Server 9.0 would not have happened.
The official announcement reads, “We dedicate this release of SME Server 9.0 to Chris. Without him it would be nowhere near ready. If you download and use it, please remember him and his work, and that of all the other contributors who work tirelessly to make Koozali SME as good as it is.”
Getting back to the release notes of SME Server 9.0, which is now based on the highly acclaimed CentOS 6.5 distribution of Linux, which in turn is based on the Red Hat Enterprise 6.5 operating system, we will list below only the changes since SME Server 9.0 Alpha 3.
Therefore, we can mention that SME Server 9.0 introduces numerous improvements to the “Workstation Backup” component, including WOL and Mail subroutines, backupname seconds, and CIFS mount error reports. The workstation backup report has been simplified and the text in the Backup panel has been updated.
Additionally, the Dar (Disk Archive) software has been updated to version 2.4.10, the incremental backup function has been fixed, the Desktop Backup function has been improved, allowing the user to set up the compression level, and Wake on LAN can now be used before starting a backup using the Dar application.
We should also mention the fact that the NFS syntax is now deprecated for CIFS mounts, and the use of UNC paths and cifs-utils is now a requirement. The console restore has been updated to the latest version available, and time routines have been simplified dramatically.
On the file server side of things, SME Server 9.0 introduces support for Windows 8 domain joining and user login, adds templates for wide links and max protocol, adds a Windows registry file for network performance enhancements, as well as the ability to configure waiting for networks in Windows 7 systems.
There are many other changes in this build, so make sure you check out the release notes for details. You can download SME Server 9.0 from Softpedia as two installable-only ISO images, supporting both 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (x86_64) hardware platforms.