IPFire 2.21 - Core Update 125 is available for testing

by Michael Tremer, November 11, 2018, Updated November 13, 2018

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The next IPFire update is ready for testing! It comes with a lot of big fixes and cleanups as well as a couple of new features.

802.11ac WiFi

The IPFire Access Point add-on now supports 802.11ac WiFi if the chipset supports it. This allows better coverage and higher network throughputs. Although IPFire might not be the first choice as a wireless access point in larger environments, it is perfect to run a single office or apartment.

Additionally, a new switch allows to disable the so called neighbourhood scan where the access point will search for other wireless networks in the area. If those are found, 40 MHz channel bandwidth is disabled leading to slower throughput.

Misc.

  • strongswan 5.7.1: This updated fixes various security vulnerabilities filed under CVE-2018-16151, CVE-2018-16152 and CVE-2018-17540. Several flaws in the implementation that parsed and verified RSA signatures in the gmp plugin may allow for Bleichenbacher-style low-exponent signature forgery in certificates and during IKE authentication.
  • The IO graphs now support NVMe disks
  • The SFTP subsystem is enabled again in the OpenSSH Server
  • Swap behaviour has been changed so that the kernel will make space for a large process when not enough physical memory is available. Before, sudden jumps in memory consumption where not possible and the process requesting that memory was terminated.
  • The backup scripts have been rewritten in Shell and now package all add-ons backups with the main backup. Now, it is no longer required to save any add-on configuration separately.
  • Updated packages: apache 2.4.35, bind 9.11.4-P2, coreutils 8.30, dhcpcd 7.0.8, e2fsprogs 1.44.4, eudev 3.2.6, glibc 2.28, gnutls 3.5.19, json-c 0.13.1, keyutils 1.5.11, kmod 25, LVM2 2.02.181, ntfs-3g 2017.3.23, reiserfsprogs 3.6.27, sqlite 3.25.2.0, squid 3.5.28, tzdata 2018g, xfsprogs 4.18.0

New Add-Ons

  • dehydrated - A lightweight client to retrieve certificates from Let's Encrypt written in bash
  • frr, an IP routing protocol suite and BGP and OSPF are supported on IPFire. Find out more on their website.
  • observium-agent - An xinet.d-based agent for Observium, a network monitoring platform

Updated Add-Ons

  • clamav has been updated to 0.100.2 and the virus database files have been moved to the /var partition. This makes more space available on the root partition.
  • nfs 2.3.3, haproxy 1.8.14, hostapd 2.6, libvirt 4.6.0, tor 0.3.4.9