Hello, hello!

This update features a number of improvements such as link-local support for bridges, HA sync consolidation, adding local CAs to the trusted SSL certificates for most of the system download capabilities, plugin-based PAM authentication rework for IPsec and the web proxy as well as third party fixes for hostapd / wpa_supplicant 2.8 and Suricata 4.1.4.

Python 3 migration is also underway now which requires to pull in both Python versions which may be heavy on embedded Nano installs, but we cannot see another way for this tedious task which will probably stretch into 19.7 to be fully carried out in 20.1.

And speaking of 20.1: This is the first of many reminders that 20.1 will discontinue the i386 (Intel 32 Bit) franchise as discussed a number of times within the community over the years. Our hope is that ARM64 will make a viable replacement. But that is for another time.

As you may have noticed the project has not been delivering releases every other week and there are a number of reasons for it:

Security-wise we have not had a lot of necessary third-party software updates. Feature-wise we are sitting on a number of improvements for the upcoming 19.7 series that will trickle into 19.1.x now, but that have also required larger preparations and testing in the meantime. On the community side of the spectrum, sponsored by our partner m.a.x. it, we have started to work on better default gateway switching which led to an overall gateway integration rework and then quickly to interface handling restructuring, which in turn led to improving plugin capabilities of core services (OpenVPN, IPsec, Unbound, Dnsmasq, DHCPD, Dpinger). Looking at it now it has been the largest rework so far on code established many years ago and only occasionally patched. We hope this shows our dedication to the code base even when things are not always 100% bug free. If you feel like pitching in now is a good time to try the development version and let us know about how it performs.

Without further ado, here are the full patch notes:


Stay safe,
Your OPNsense team