New DNS Firewall appears not to be working

Did you check the firewall logs? If you set the standard FW rule for outgoing to DROP you will see something like this:

IPFire 2.29 - Core Update 201 has been released - with DNS Firewall

Until you didn’t create a rule for 81.3.27.55 on port 53 (TCP+UDP) the DNS Firewall can’t download any ruleset.