Hello *,
Core Update 161 (testing; no release announcement or changelog has been published, yet) is running here for about 12 hours by now without any major issues known so far.
During the upgrade, I noticed the Pakfire CGI still does not display log messages as it used to do, but at least there is now a spinning loading icon displaying the message that an operation is currently in progress. From a UX perspective, this is okay I guess.
The reconnection necessary for upgrading pppd went smooth, albeit Pakfire could not download add-on upgrades afterwards since the VPN did not came back in time, so I had to do this manually.
To my surprise, some IPsec N2N connections did not reconnect automatically, even after rebooting the testing machine. After manually clicking on one of the "restart" buttons on the IPsec CGI, they came back instantly, and have been stable ever since.
This affected N2N connections not being in the "on-demand" mode only. While it is not really a show-stopper if someone is sitting in front of his/her/its IPFire machine, remote upgrades might be tricky.
Apart from that, this update looks quite good to me. The IPS changes are really noticeable, and bring a throughput I think I never experienced with IPFire and the IPS turned on. :-) This is certainly worth mentioning, as it finally makes the IPS suitable for everyone, hence massively increasing security without worrying too much of performance impacts.
(For the sake of completeness: Unfortunately I did not yet have time do conduct a penetration test against this. Personally, I can imagine the IPS changes permitting some attacks after Suricata decided it cannot analyse a connection further. Switching protocols might be an issue, starting with TLS, while using something completely different afterwards.
While I do not really consider this to be a critical attack surface, I wanted to look deeper into this as soon as I have some spare time to do so.)
Tested IPFire functionalities in detail: - PPPoE dial-up via a DSL connection - IPsec (N2N connections only) - Squid (authentication enabled, using an upstream proxy) - OpenVPN (RW connections only) - IPS/Suricata (with Emerging Threats community ruleset enabled) - Guardian - Quality of Service - DNS (using DNS over TLS and strict QNAME minimisation) - Dynamic DNS - Tor (relay mode)
I am looking forward to the release of Core Update 161.
Thanks, and best regards, Peter Müller