Smoothwall Express 3.1 Finally Released
The Smoothwall Community are pleased to announce the release of the long awaited Smoothwall Express 3.1 Firewall.
After 1½ years of development, the Smoothwall Express development team have released the Smoothwall Express 3.1 Firewall system.
Smoothwall Express 3.1 is largely a refresh of version 3.0. Numerous latentand hard-to-reproduce bugs in 3.0 were eliminated during development. Updated runtime software includes linux 3.4.103, gcc 4.7.3, glibc 2.18, binutils 2.22, iptables 1.4.14 and xtables-addons 1.45, OpenSWAN 2.6.41, Snort 2.9.6.2, ClamAV 0.98.4, and Squid 3.3.12. New software available for further development include apcupsd, lm_sensors, smartmontools, iperf, ntop and suricata. Qemu and samba are available to spur development of virtual machines on top of the firewall. The user interface has been freshened with the new Smoothwall logo and a number of presentation improvements. There are two new features: Plug-n-Play Backup, and automatic translations for non-English-speaking users. The Smoothinfo, URL Filter and DHCP Lease Table mods have been fully integrated into the system. Installation on the KVM, VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V and Xen hypervisors and virtual environments is supported, as are the standard virtio drivers.
There is a new advanced installer that helps the admin prepare a bootable flash and install from it; it also allows the admin to install from a serial port console with network appliances that do not have VESA consoles. On the system level, symmetric multi-processing (SMP) is now standard, udev handles all devices, and Grub Legacy is the bootloader for all media. The Linux firmware collection is included to make even more hardware compatible with Smoothwall Express. On the development side, there's gcc 4.7.3, glibc2.18 and a vastly reworked build system--now with re-entrance and parallel make capability; the build system creates true i586 32-bit code and standard 64-bit code.
You should be able to install Smoothwall Express 3.1 on nearly all 32- and 64-bit x86 hardware older than one or two years. The usual caveat still applies: leading edge hardware may be too new to be supported.
Please see Release Announcement for more information and download links.