The Beta will run for the next few weeks until approximately the mid of November. During this time, we will be gathering your feedback (and adding it to our own considerable development and testing efforts), making changes, and getting this version into a release-ready state. For the best Beta experience, you should read this post in its entirety!
We'll start with the standard disclaimer:
This is a BETA and not final, production-ready software. This is a work-in-progress; there will be bugs, broken areas of functionality, and parts where things just do not work as expected or planned. While much of this release is stable and ready, there will likely be unexpected side-effects as it is applied in various network types and situations. If you decide to use this someplace in production you do so at your own risk and if it causes things to go horribly wrong for you, well...consider this a friendly word of caution.
By offering you the chance to test the product early you need to be aware that you will see stability and completeness issues. We use this opportunity to discover and quash bugs that we might not have otherwise discovered during our own testing, and greatly appreciate your feedback and comments. We will use them to further shape our product and polish things for the final GA release of ASG 8.100.
Being a Beta, some of the documentation and associated collateral's, online-help, language translations, and other written support information are not yet available.
[SIZE=3][Download Information][/SIZE]
The first public Beta release is numbered 8.050, and is available for both ASG Appliances or your own hardware. To use the V8 Beta ISO image, you need to download it, burn it to a CD and install it, then restore a backup or build anew - there are no plans to offer an Up2Date from a previous 8.00x to this Beta release. Once you’re running V8.100, there shouldn’t be a need to re-install, because we’ll release Up2Date packages for the duration of this Beta, and we plan (barring any unforseen technical barriers) to also offer an Up2Date from the Beta to the official 8.100 release, so you won't need to re-install at the end of this testing period. Regarding the license: If you already upgraded to the on-demand licensing scheme, you can simply use your existing license for the V8.100 beta. If not, please upgrade your license by visiting my.astaro.com. We’re also making available a time-limited separate license for those of you that continue to use the old license schema, but this license will completely expire in January.
Please see the the latest "Beta Update Release" posting in this forum for current download information for the Beta. Remember, this Beta process is very important to us. We are here to help and assist your testing! If you need anything, have feedback to report (both the good and the bad please), and otherwise want to participate in the V8 Beta feedback, post away here in this Beta forum. Thanks in advance for donating your time. We have some good Astaro prizes for our top testers.
[SIZE=4]Feature Overview of V8.100[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2][Major New Things][/SIZE]
- WiFi - Adds our Wireless Controller and support for Astaro Access Points
- RED Transparent/Split Mode - Improved deployment choices
- Usability improvements like:
- Dashboard Quick-Links
- Sortable Tables
- Batch-Operation for Tables - Multi-Failover/Uplink Interfaces
[SIZE=2][Minor New Things][/SIZE]
- HTTP Parent Proxy Routing
- SLE 11 SP1
[SIZE=3]Feature Details[/SIZE]
[SIZE=2][Wireless][/SIZE]
The Astaro Access Points (Astaro Access Points) are now supported in V8. There are no major differences in functionality between V7 and V8 in this area.
[SIZE=2][RED Transparent/Split Modes][/SIZE]
The RED Appliances now support a third operating mode: "Transparent / Split". In this mode the ASG is not responsible as the gateway for the remote network behind the RED device (eg. it does not provide a DHCP server and is not the default gateway). Instead, all traffic per default goes transparently through RED to the normal gateway at the branch; only traffic for the defined networks will be redirected to the ASG. At RED Managment >> Deployment helper you can find a setup form for RED devices which gives a bit more context and help instead of the standard Add RED form, similar to a wizard-style approach.
[SIZE=2][Various Usability Improvements][/SIZE]
- Improved Object Tables: Certain actions (delete, enable, and disable) can now be applied to multiple selected objects. Also object tables can now be sorted by different attributes of objects.
- Dashboard Links: Various parts of the Dashboard now allow you to directly jump to the relevant page in WebAdmin via the green arrows in the head lines. Also all the topics in "Current system configuration" are now linked to the respective page.
- SMTP Profiles Redesign: SMTP profile configuration has been redesigned to be more in line with the rest of WebAdmin.
- Streamlined Interface Setup: When creating or editing an interface object, per default not all the options are shown anymore. Some of the more advanced settings or rarely-used options are hidden by default.
[SIZE=2][Uplink Balancing Mixed Mode][/SIZE]
In uplink balancing you don't have to choose anymore between either full multipath or failover. You can now define a default set of multipath interfaces and still define one or more failover interfaces which will be activated if all the default interfaces fail.
This can be useful if you have one line that is much slower or expensive than the others and should only be used as a last resort.
[SIZE=2][HTTP Parent Proxy Routing][/SIZE]
You can now define more than one parent proxy for the HTTP proxy at Web Security >> HTTP/S Profiles >> Parent Proxies. Each parent proxy can be limited to a list of hosts. At Web Security >> HTTP/S >> Advanced you can define the list of enabled parent proxies and the order in which they should be matched.
[SIZE=2][Updates][/SIZE]
Open-Source Software updates:
- Base system was updated from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 11 to SLE 11 SP1. Includes updates to e.g. glibc, gcc, quagga and fixes for many more packages.
- Intel networking drivers were updated
- Bind DNS server was updated from 9.5 to 9.6-ESV
[SIZE=2][Fixed Issues reported in 8.000 Beta][/SIZE]
Just to show that we do not forget your feedback even if we weren't able to fix all issues for 8.000 [:)]
- [13257] [UBB][7.900] Packet filter time managed rules not working properly during winter/summer time change
- [13525] [UBB][7.903] Executive-Report VPN Usage Top10
- [13535] [UBB][7.903] Exec Reports PDF differs from Popup
- [13975] [UBB][7.920] strip whitespace around ip addresses to avoid DATATYPE_OBJECT_ATTRIBUTE error
- [14178] [UBB][7.950] Feature: change motd "and by others"
- [14203] [UBB][7.950] new style error messages for logfiles section
- [14206] [UBB][7.950] improve error messages for certificate management
- [14208] [UBB][7.950] consistent date format when showing configuration changes
- [14222] [UBB][7.950] installation wizard, put "select all"-button on imp2p page
- [14232] [UBB][7.950] GeoIP-GUI: add country code to alt tag
- [14257] [UBB][7.950] error message cosmetic: DNS resolver cache flushed
- [14322] [UBB][7.951] old-style error message Email-Encryption
- [14325] [UBB][7.951] old-style error message Bridging
