14 DAY TRIAL // On the first day of November 2016, Michael Tremer from the IPFire project, an open source, professional, secure and hardened Linux-based firewall distribution, proudly announced the release of IPFire 2.19 Core Update 106.
IPFire 2.19 Core Update 106 is the latest stable release of the Linux firewall OS, and it looks like it implements a new DNS proxy, namely Unbound, which replaces the Dnsmasq DNS forwarder and DHCP server used in previous releases. The decision was made because of the recent DNSSEC implementation by default in the distribution, which proves to offer better DNSSEC reliability, enhanced features, such as import of static leases, and improved performance.
"Because of our decision to enable DNSSEC by default and various problems in dnsmasq we have been toying with the idea of replacing it for a very long time," said Michael Tremer in the release announcement. "Unfortunately development resources are tight and because of this being a substantial part of the system and hooked into many other things, this was a very time-consuming project."
Other new features and updated components
Apart from adding Unbound as the new DNS proxy server, the IPFire 2.19 Core Update 106 release makes sure passwords are now being saved with a stronger hash like SHA512, enables the SMBv2 protocol by default for the Samba add-on, offers the firmware driver for MediaTek 7601 series of devices, updates the NTP client to wait for Wi-Fi connections to be established before booting up, and no longer requires a password for PPP connections.
IPFire 2.19 Core Update 106 brings many updated packages, among which we can mention OpenSSL 1.0.2j, StrongSwan 5.5.0, GNU make 4.2.1, smartmontools 6.5, Squid 3.5.21, iproute2 4.7.0, Midnight Commander 4.8.18, GNU nano 2.6.3, Transmission 2.92, Monit 5.19.0, Asterisk 11.23.1, GNU Diffutils 3.5, file 5.28, ipset 6.29, GnuPG 1.4.21, libnetfilter_conntrack 1.0.6, usb_modeswitch 2.4.0, and usb_modeswitch_data 20160803.
Additionally, the Attr 2.4.47, DejaGnu 1.6, libmnl 1.0, libgpg-error 1.24, libidn 1.33, Expat 2.2.0, Flex 2.6.1, Gettext 0.19.8.1, libgcrypt 1.7.3, libassuan 2.4.3, and Krb 1.14.4 updated packages are also present in this release, along with a polished version of the new Guardian 2.0 add-on’s user interface. Existing users are urged to update to IPFire 2.19 Core Update 106 as soon as possible, and newcomers can download the ISO image.