this is maybe not a typical post, but I just installed 197 and I think it is really amazing that you managed to keep backward compatibility with OVPN connections … me knowing that with OVPN even connecting with the wrong client configuration or different client/server version/configuration can lead to massive problems - I can’t imagine how much effort went into this.
All my OVPN sites came up flawlessly after the update, so I think it’s just time to say a very big THANK YOU …. to the developers, testers, the forum supporters, the community/users and everybody else involved into making this happen.
IPFire is a super great Firewall and I am very happy to be able to use it.
I more or less can only show my appreciation in writing this and making a donation to the project. If you feel the same way … feel invited to do the same.
Yes, I just updated on my home network without any issues. Corporate firewalls will get updated on Sunday when the network is idle. Those are where I have all the OVPN connections, so I’m excited to test them out.
It was a way bigger project than I ever hoped for, but it was a requirement to have WireGuard. OpenVPN was not in a good state and now we finally got it there. As things happen in the real world, WireGuard was released before this was all mature, but hey.
In terms of commits this is very hard to put into numbers. A lot of the refactored code has been rolled out in previous releases as it was needed by WireGuard, too. Some changes were independent from both projects and also shipped as soon as possible. But we must be close to a thousand commits here, because it was not only a lot of work, it required extra care to not break existing installations.
Thank you for your kind words. I wish we had more people that we could share this with, but we did not really get a lot of testing feedback lately and not on this one specifically. Because we could fuck up a lot of corporate networks, this was a huge gamble and it would have been nice to have more input from the community to help us to be more confident to get this over the line.
I know times are difficult and people have a lot on their minds, but don’t forget that IPFire (and a lot of other open source software) powers the world. Help us to keep it in a perfect state and keep it growing. Many have sadly stopped donating because of inflation or simply being disengaged from projects like this. I hope that this is only a short term and very soon we will get back to better times.
So, I appreciate your kind words even more so, and of course your donation!
If things keep going like this, we delivered a perfect release!
I just got done updating our two corporate firewalls, over OVPN no less! No issues. Yesterday, I went onsite and downloaded current backups just in case things went sideways. This morning, I VPN’d in to each, ran the updates, got disconnected briefly during reboot, then reconnected after they came back online. If anyone wonders, I am only a few miles away, so if something went wrong, it would not be a big deal to drive over in case I could not reconnect by VPN.
Both systems showed a pretty dramatic drop in cpu frequency. Interestingly, my home system (which I updated yesterday) showed no drop in cpu frequency, but that is because it was already running at very low idles (Celeron N5105).