SME Server:7.4
November 21 2008
The SME Server development team is pleased to announce the release of SME Server 7.4. This release is based on CentOS 4.7. Other major changes in this release are the use dar for backups and the change to UTF-8 along with translation into 6 additional languages.
All SME Server users should upgrade to this release.
The release should be obtained from your closest mirror, see http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Download
Bug reports and reports of potential bugs should be raised in the bug tracker (and only there, please);
About SME Server
SME Server is the leading Linux distribution for small and medium enterprises.
SME Server is freely available under the GNU General Public License and is only possible through the efforts of the SME Server community. However, the availability and quality of SME Server is dependent on meeting our expenses, such as hosting costs, server hardware, etc.
Thanks
The development team would like to thank all of those involved in this release. However, this distribution cannot continue with the current level of support. More people are required to help with bug triage and verification testing.
This release contains many new features, all released updates for
SME Server 7.3 and fixes for many reported problems. Upgrades
will be available by CD, the Software Installer and command line.
Upgrades
- Always perform a backup prior to major system upgrades
- An upgrade will preserve the existing data
Changes in this release
Installer
- Fix grub label to keep consistent with the SME Server brand.
Mail system changes
- Introduce a web interface to configure the pseudonym "visible" property (internal|external)
- New feature now allows a "catch all" situation where you have the ability to redirect "@virtualdomain1.com" to user "joe".
- Fix the "Ugly" log messages (Use of uninitialized value) when spam checking results in 0 hits.
- Emails sent to a null address like ""@domain without the username part are now rejected.
- qplogsumm is a optional feature that should be disabled by default.
- A request that the log information is reduced with the default loglevel setting of 6 in qpsmtpd.
- Support for sending mail to ISP via Secure SMTP
- Enable the auth plugin for local lan connections
- Migrate (remove) "ordb.net" from the RBL lists to prevent mail bouncing.
- Remove blackhole.securitysage.com as service no longer in use.
- Remove sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org from default lists and use a more improved list in zen.spamhaus.org.
Console
- Improved validation will check password on first enter password screen before verifying if too simple then asking to verify and proceed to configuration of server.
- Passwords should be validated for strength on first entry rather than waiting for the second confirmation entry.
- The console should validate passwords using the common method, using esmith::util::validatePassword
- The last item in the server console, "Exit from server console", is removed as it is redundant.
- Display frames in console server-manager. When browsing server-manager through console pressing 'H' goes to http://localhost/server-manager
Backups
- Backups now use dar which enables a backup to consist of more than 2GB of data to a workstation in any of the following supported methods:
cifs, nfs or local usb disk. It also gives the option to set how many rotating backups are required and allows to split size of backup to DVD size.
- Removed 'restore from desktop' functionality
- The error codes from tar are now logged, in line with flexbackup, and do not cause a backup to fail.
- A Iomeage USB REV-drive was by default mounted in /media as a cdrom device. It is now automagically mounted as an usbdisk so it can be used as a backup device without manual intervention.
- Set dar compression to default to gzip
- dar backup to be less verbose in panel
- Correct mounting for usb disks
- no compression for ogg media files
- Make dar use defined list of directories to backup
- Remove obsolete smbfs backup method
Localisation
As part of a major update with translations we have added six new languages and made it much easier to add other languages in the future.
We now support the following languages in the server-manager: Danish, Dutch, English, French, Greek, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
We have made major strides to assist the non-English community by using a tool called pootle. This is a web based translation tool that will allow new languages to be added and existing languages to be more easily maintained.
We have cleaned up a lot of the packages as a part of getting them towork with pootle. Another big change as part of this upgrade is the switch from ISO-8859-1 (Latin) charset to UTF-8 (Universal) charset, this will allow us to support languages that don't use latin characters (like Greek).
Other fixes include updated translations for the existing languages.
Software Installer
- smeextras repository added, it is used for building the installer and ISO
- The yum-update event now includes the yum-import-keys action to allow users to update yum packages and configuration without rebooting, which enables updating when there is a compatibility problem.
- Correct yum-update-dbs action to adjust yum service properly.
- The BaseURL property has been removed for repos with mirrorlists.
- The message "This system is up to date." is displayed if no updates are available.
Webmail
- Horde, imp, turbo and ingo have been updated to the latest versions
- Support the ability to save user kronolith free/busy information to the LDAP database.
- Servers with a custom template for 110AppRegistryHorde found webmail no longer worked.
- The name of the webmail installation is now configurable. To use * config setprop horde Name xxxx ; signal-event email-update.
Server manager
- The name of the log file being viewed via the Server Manager 'View log files' is now displayed as the first line.
- Disabling the daily update check in the server-manager did not stop the check4updates task sending mail to the server administrator.
- Server-manager > printers > add printer * now advises users to avoid certain names and descriptions as this causes printer state to be incorrect.
- Fix the Unknown heading in server-manager after an update.
- Fix inconsistency within the navigation.xx files which no longer adds extra spaces and newlines in panel headers.
- The Anti-virus (ClamAV) panel text was updated to remove the word 'entire' as this could be misleading.
- Allow server-manager to successfully create a one character user account.
- After adding a user and trying to set password via server-manager or user-password using the ";" sign you encountered a "white screen of death". This was due to the version of perl-Object-Persistence being used.
- Remove the last 'pleasewait' message as it is no longer needed.
- The button to add a new user in the server-manager was missing due to a problem with the free/busy code in usermanager causing the panel to exit.
Other fixes and updates
- Updated Samba resolves various file sharing problems
- The length of an Ibay name is now configurable via maxIbayNameLength
- The Samba "unix extensions" are turned off for Mac compatibility
- radiusd.conf allows support for additional authentication methods
- Ability to modify pseudonyms with special characters
- Prevent NameServer being set to current IP of SME Server
- Allow support for server side includes for ibays when a directory is browsed.
- Made mtu/mru settings configurable.
- Increased the templating in php.ini
- Fixed timezone detection issues for certain timezones during certificate generation
- Added support for cciss RAID controller
- Enable a new feature to allow admin to have own password not shared with root.
- nut is now started after the network to avoid mails to the admin mailbox about lost communication.
- e-smith-openssh contained unused template fragments were removed.
- ibays can now be set as non-browsable (hidden), but accessible via their UNC. An ibay can be hidden by setting the Browsable property to disabled.
- Suspicious string scanning (supscan) has been disabled due to being CPU and I/O intensive and prone to producing false positives.
- The audittool script has been updated to also identify modified events.
- If a custom motd was used this could have been sent with the smolt data, now only the version from e-smith-release is sent.
- The wrong URL was shown for the smolt profile, it has been updated to http://smolt.contribs.org/
- Patch djbdns around TCP bug: http://alkemio.org/dns_transmit-bug.html
- Change license of djbdns to "Public Domain' * http://cr.yp.to/distributors.html
- Do not display symlinks via ftp.
- New LPRng where both inbuilt filters as well as smbprint filters work.
- Resolved false positives that were being reported by rkhunter.
- Move the clamav scan schedule to the correct crontab file for ease of use.
- Use yum installonlyn plugin to keep only the last 5 kernels.
- Change Wpad URL to match system domain to enable the Wpad feature.
- dnscache will now ignore referrals when in forwardonly mode.
- On servers with no ibays and less than two users the shadow-copy-rotate script would fail.
- Correct the step-ticker to pool.ntp.org hosts.
- Hide normally hidden files from view when using roaming profiles.
- The dungog yum repository has been obsoleted as the packages are in smecontribs.
- When a user is deleted from the server-manager his/her pseudonyms should not appear in any configuration file.
General features
- Based on CentOS 4.7 and all available updates
Differences from previous releases <=7.2
After installing for the very first time
- First night you may receive an email from cron about sa_updates.
- First night you should receive a large email saying a bunch of groups/users were removed/added (rkhunter email notification).
- Any time you change users/groups you will receive an email the next day about those changes (rkhunter email notification).
Ian Wells, on behalf of the SME Server development team.