IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 152 is available for testing

by Michael Tremer, October 29, 2020

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It is time for another Core Update: IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 152. It comes with various smaller bug fixes and improvements and updates the Windows File Sharing Add-on.

IPFire is a small team of people from a range of backgrounds sharing one goal: make the Internet a safer place for everyone. Like many of our open source friends, we’ve taken a hit this year and would like to ask for your continued support. Please follow the link below where your donation can help fund our continued development: https://www.ipfire.org/donate

Changes

  • Intrusion Prevention System: The IPS has been updated to suricata 5.0.4 which fixes various bugs and security vulnerabilities
  • Leo-Andres Hofman contributed for the first time and cleaned up code that shows the DHCP leases on the web user interface. They are now sorted and expired leases are shown at the bottom of the list for better usability.
  • Steffen Klammer fixed a bug which rendered an invalid proxy.pac configuration file when subnets where added in the CIDR notation
  • Values for average, minimum and maximum were swapped in the firewall hits graph which has been corrected in this release
  • Updated packages: knot 3.0.1, libhtp 0.94, python 2.7.18, python3 3.8.2, unbound 1.12.0, yaml 0.2.5

Add-ons

  • Updated packages: mtr 0.94, nano 5.3, tor 0.4.4.5
  • Updated Python 3 packages: botocore 1.16.1, colorama 0.4.3, dateutil 2.8.1, docutils 0.16, jmespath 0.9.5, pyasn1 0.4.8, rsa 4.0, s3transfer 0.3.3, six 1.14.0,

Windows File Sharing Services

Samba, has been updated to 4.13.0. Because of various reasons and lack of development time, we were stuck on Samba 3 which is unmaintained for a while. With this new version of Samba, new protocol features like SMB3 and encryption are supported. We have also rewritten large parts of the web user interface, made them tidier and fixed some usability issues.

We also dropped some features which we believe are not being used any more. This mainly concerns compatibility to MS-DOS clients, WINS, and using IPFire as Primary Domain Controller for Windows NT domains.

The new streamlines web user interface provides fewer controls and we have changed some defaults to work in modern networks - or that were ineffective in the newer release of Samba.

New features are as follows:

  • Printing with CUPS now works out of the box
  • SMB file transfers are faster, because of some performance tuning
  • IPFire will now always try to become the master browser for its workgroup
  • The file sharing and printing services will be announced to the local network using mDNS with Avahi
  • Extensions for Mac OS X are enabled by default

Because of the vast amount of changes, we need some extra help to find any regressions introduced here. Please also consider if running this package is following best-practise rules in your organization.