NethServer 7.3 update 1 Released

Originally published at: http://www.nethserver.org/nethserver-7-3-update-1-released/

Another new milestone in NethServer history. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that NethServer 7.3 update 1 has been released and is publicly available.

We’re confident that it will be as always a great release and it will achieve our mission: making sysadmin’s life easier with Open Source. This is thanks to the most vibrant, supportive and friendly community in the Open Source space (and not only Open Source).

The new release improves the installation process and the first system configuration. In addition, it contains some improvements (Accounts provider page, diagnostic tools) that are very important, especially for people that install NethServer for the first time.

Configuration backup enhancement

Starting from @Ctek’s work and straight from our meeting at FOSDEM17, @davidep has developed a configuration backup enhancement. The goal is:

  • "restore from backup" at first system boot (FirstConfigWiz UI module)
  • configuration backup history
  • history length customization
  • upload an item to the history
  • restore from history

More info

New backup panel

OpenvPN: improve net2net tunnels

The main goal of this refactoring is to simplify the creation of tunnels to connect 2 remote networks using a VPN. (Kudos to @giacomo)

More info about the new workflow here

Other features:

  • Tunnel status is displayed on the configuration page:

OpenVPN page has been split in two pages:

  • OpenVPN roadwarrior
  • OpenVPN tunnels

  • Tunnel client can be now enabled and disabled

The administrator is able to add extra push options to roadwarrior server like:

  • select if the client must receive all configured static routes or only routes for green networks
  • push extra DHCP options such as:
    • Domain
    • DNS server
    • WINS server
    • NBDD server

WebTop 5.0.7 (first upgrade pack)

Thanks to our @webtop_team these are the new features introduced in the last update:

  • Support complex filters (multiple conditions and actions) and Sieve script selection
  • Support to paste-image inside html editor
  • New view management IMAP folders
  • Improved the view of new mail in discussions
  • New interactive search, using ctrl+enter on search field or selecting "interactive" as the search field

More info

Backup data: basic WebDAV support for backups and storage stats

Thanks to @dnutan we have implemented WebDAV as backend for backup data and the dashboard now displays backup storage utilization statistics

UI tweaks for IPSec tunnels

We have improved the web interface, now you can:

  • allow IP addresses and host names in the "Remote IP" field
  • enable and disable tunnels from the table view by adding two new actions

Web proxy: support divert and priority rules

Firewall rules for routing traffic to a specific provider, or decrease/increase priority, are applied only to network traffic which traverses the gateway.
These rules don’t apply if the traffic goes through the proxy because the traffic is generated from the gateway itself.

The new web interface for the web proxy, will allow to create rules like:

  • HTTP/S traffic from host badpc has low priority
  • HTTP/S traffic from CIDR service_net has high priority
  • HTTP/S traffic from myprinter diverted to myslownet provider (automatic failover)
  • HTTP/S traffic from mywebserver forced to myfastnet provider (no switch if the WAN goes down)

NextCloud 12

Nextcloud has been upgraded to latest upstream release (12.0.0).

Accounts provider update

After a few (re)iterations of development/testing/fixing, the new UI for accounts provider management is available.

Main features:

  • Both AD and LDAP local accounts provider can be installed/uninstalled from Accounts provider page
  • LDAP remote accounts provider: connection parameters are probed automatically
  • AD remote accounts provider: NetBIOS domain name and LDAP connection parameters are probed automatically
  • AD local accounts provider: you can assign any DNS domain/Realm to AD. It is no longer bound to the host domain name. This fixes many issues with mail server configurations
  • Change the IP of the nsdc Linux Container: available with a shell script

Nethserver network diagnostic tools

When it’s time to check the network expert system administrators are used to open the terminal and type some commands.
But there are a lot of people who are not really at ease working on a terminal, for this reason, our amazing @stephdl has developed a network diagnostic tool for NethServer

Other improvements

For further information, all closed issues are reported on our bug tracker.

Thank the overall NethServer community

As usual, we’d like to first thank the overall community for contributions toward these improvements — whether it was in feedback, bug reports and suggestions or our personal favorite, feedback based on participation in our very own NethServer community.

Download and Test

Who wouldn’t want all these fantastic new features?

  • You can install NethServer on a virtual machine or on a bare-metal server using a DVD or USB stick
  • Upgrade from 7 versions are supported through the Software center

If you find a bug, please report it here – every bug you uncover is a chance to improve the experience for thousands of NethServer users worldwide, also our amazing beta testers team will be called upon to give its support on that!

Ready to check it out? Then head to the docs and download:

NethServer 7.3 update 1 (740MB)


12 Likes

Just AWESOME! A lot of goodies in it. Especially the Accounts provider update. I like that one a lot. It makes things so much easier.

I will give webtop another go. I like the looks of the interface, but the feel of webtop is a bit sluggish. Maybe the VPS I was running it on didn’t have enough memory, I don’t know.

2 Likes

Nethserver always evolving!!

3 Likes

It’s a great and usefull update, thanks to everyone who has realised this.

@webtop_team do you have any minimum requisites for a webtop VPS installation?

Devs played surely a big role here but the whole community is essential supporting them with discussions, feedbacks and tests!

1 Like

Depends on many backends requirements (dovecot, lucene indexing, postgres db, java and tomcat), so it’s not easy. Surely it depends on the number and size of the mail accounts.
Tomcat may be optimized to have more memory on the VM startup.
We usually have it with 1G to 3G max memory on installation around 100 users.

I suggest a minimum modern 2 cores processor 2-3Ghz with hyper threading to handle all the stuffs, at least 4GB memory.
Also disks topology and technology will change everything.

2 Likes

Goodmorning everyone
But to do this upgrade I have to force it through iso from dvd or there is another way
thank you

Apply updates from Web UI (server-manager).
Concepts behind an ISO image release:

When I do an update through the software center it doesn’t install the new diagnostic tool. How do I install it?

Thanks,

Steve

Hi @zardeefonder,

yum update @nethserver-iso

Found here:

5 Likes

Thanks Markus, that did the trick.

Steve