Hello, hello!

For more than two and a half years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.

We are writing to you today to announce the second release candidate for version 17.7, which, over the course of the last 5 months, includes highlights such as SafeStack application hardening, the Realtek re(4) driver for network stability, a Quagga plugin with broad routing protocol support and the Unbound resolver as the new default. Additionally, translations for Czech, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and German have been completed during this iteration.

Focus in OPNsense has shifted to improving and streamlining its various systems and providing continuous updates, which amounts to over 300 individual changes made since 17.1 so far. The plugin infrastructure is growing as well thanks to our awesome contributors Frank Wall, Frank Brendel, Fabian Franz and Michael Muenz. And we, last but not least, have been working more closely than ever with HardenedBSD by unifying our ports infrastructure. Although this is only the beginning, let us not skip ahead.

Here is the full list of changes against version 17.7-RC1:

The list of currently known issues with 17.7-RC2:

Users of 17.7-RC1 can upgrade to RC2 via the usual online updates. Images are not provided with this particular release. As always with our pre- releases, only OpenSSL is provided at this point, but can be switched for LibreSSL as soon as the release is available. This release candidate does update directly into the 17.7 stable track and subsequent release candidates. Please let us know about your experience!


Stay safe,
Your OPNsense team