ipfire-2 9 i586-full-core44 iso

IPFire is a server distribution with intended to use as a firewall. It focuses on flexibility, and scales from small to middle sized business networks and home networks.

Along with this hardened, minimalist come lots of addons that can be installed with a simple click. That's what makes IPFire different from other firewall distributions: it is easy to configure for any task, and easy to administer once it's set up.

Fireinfo

The IPFire has got a new service that is called fireinfo. This can be enabled at your option and sends anonymous information about the system to the project.
We strongly recommend the users to enable this feature so that we can learn from the statistics that are made. It is important for the developers to make decisions about the project and these are very much easier if there is some information available.

Every user can (but does not have to) make his own profile public. It is very easy to compare hardware setups then and maybe we can build a hardware compatibility list, soon.

Please visit http://fireinfo.ipfire.org to learn more about fireinfo and to watch the charts, that are accessable by everybody.
You can find a link to your own profile (if you have enabled fireinfo) on your web interface. This is the URL you are supposed to share and if you want you can add a nice signature image to your forum signature (on the IPFire forum or any other forum, too).

Kernel Update

IPFire 2.9 bases on the latest linux kernel 2.6.32.28 which will be maintained by the kernel developers for several years. So all of the integrated patches will get into IPFire as well, bringing hardware-compatibility, stability and most importantly security into the next releases of IPFire.
Additionally to the default kernel, there is a PAE-enabled kernel (physical address extension) that is able to handle more than 4GB of memory.
Besides of changes on the power-management, which makes IPFire less power consuming again, the most noteable change is the removal of the legacy IDE stack which was replaced by the new libata stack.

New hardware detection

IPFire changed to dracut (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/dracut) which creates an initial ramdisk with lots of advantages for us. The most important one is, that you can take a harddisk that has IPFire installed, put it into any computer and IPFire will boot properly. The only thing to do is to reconfigure the network interfaces and so you are able to replace a broken machine with a backup harddrive within a minute.
IPFire boots within a couple of seconds, which is a very big boost compared to older releases.

The little things

* Lots of improvements in the web user interface for more usability and minor bugs were solved.
* The network time daemon (NTP) is enabled by default.
* Quality of Service: A miscalculation of the used bandwidth in VPN connections was fixed which cause a slow-down of those connections.
* MTU problems on various connection types were solved: Some cable modems have a broken DHCP daemon that sends 576 bytes as default MTU which causes very slow connections. For all connections, there is an option to set a user-defined MTU.
* Firewall groups are editable which brings more comfort to the configuration of the outgoing firewall.
* Software updates: apache2 (2.2.17), dhcpcd (5.2.9), snort (2.9.0.2), strongswan (4.5.0), smartmontools (5.40), cpio (2.11), findutils (4.4.2), libcap (2.19), attr (2.4.43), iw (0.9.20), wpa_supplicant (0.7.3), hostapd (0.7.3), wireless-tools (30.pre9), kvm-kmod (2.6.34.1), v4l-dvb (2010-09-12), vim (7.2), syslinux (4.02), udev (125), usb_modeswitch (1.0.6/database 22.12.2010)