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 first 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 in 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. And this is only the beginning… but let us not skip ahead.

Download links, an installation guide[1] and the checksums for the images can be found below.

• Europe: https://opnsense.c0urier.net/releases/17.7.r1/
• US East Coast: http://mirrors.nycbug.org/pub/opnsense/releases/17.7.r1/
• US West Coast: http://mirror.sfo12.us.leaseweb.net/opnsense/releases/17.7.r1/
• Full mirror list: https://opnsense.org/download/

Here is the full list of changes against version 17.1.9:

• system: added swap file option for SSD deployments
• system: bring back crash reports for all types of kernel crashes
• system: LDAP server StartTLS connection mode (contributed by Eugen Mayer)
• system: prevent anonymous binds to AD by rejecting empty passwords
• console: rewrote the backup restore to fix a possible licensing issue
• interfaces: instead of renaming new interfaces create them with the target name
• interfaces: the IP renewal was redesigned to prevent spurious reloads
• firewall: gateway code refactored
• firewall: rule generation code refactored
• dynamic dns: removed from core, installable as plugin
• rfc 2136: removed from core, installable as plugin
• ipsec: removed stale BINAT configuration items
• proxy: hardened the SSL configuration (contributed by Fabian Franz)
• src: netgraph/pppoe: user-supplied Host-Uniq tag and PADM messages

The list of currently known issues with 17.7-RC1:

• WLAN devices cannot be created. A patch exists[2] to remedy this problem.
• LAGG device destroy may cause a kernel panic. A patch currently in testing.
• The installer identifies itself as 17.1.
• 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

[1] https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/install.html
[2] https://github.com/opnsense/core/commit/5cb149d

# SHA256 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-dvd-amd64.iso.bz2) = 7455ff527a5e7ed1eac6db650fd4ddbd0a3257d2a270489fd85e273c83786d95
# SHA256 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-nano-amd64.img.bz2) = 8c7e23f3dadc22bd03e174cc768c171207d4a0d95f32273d7a4baaf2fa678b57
# SHA256 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-serial-amd64.img.bz2) = 597ca2fd3dfc7031785a35f5b23092633dee5ee1e385870ec977f364204035ed
# SHA256 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-vga-amd64.img.bz2) = ebaa162d7184286e8b1a03976e0c6bb7220dff7e2fda9d709a2e32334bdf7100
# SHA256 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-dvd-i386.iso.bz2) = 79affa59a6b7319278964890779e97ce6c89f3441bccaf783610b29c708198d8
# SHA256 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-nano-i386.img.bz2) = 36476da5610a90ac5e110d0a87a26356477b5ce1e17e551c06be09d3c23e35ae
# SHA256 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-serial-i386.img.bz2) = 514d2fef9efd081d2294cb961478ea85b7527e7f71091f91beed329c7ba36b5c
# SHA256 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-vga-i386.img.bz2) = 6dc5bc2264767722c722b3d5f7b116e943e41374612256b94c32c4f6bbd05a5d

# MD5 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-dvd-amd64.iso.bz2) = f5ec6d052c59ac785b7c631e8f24cb4a
# MD5 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-nano-amd64.img.bz2) = 986754b73391f8a6e063842bbdd0ce4b
# MD5 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-serial-amd64.img.bz2) = 8fa9c85c2bff1339f131d572c667b84d
# MD5 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-vga-amd64.img.bz2) = 2427efe4140f634086cbaa71da7aec03
# MD5 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-dvd-i386.iso.bz2) = 23f1f152a40d352809796046053972c9
# MD5 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-nano-i386.img.bz2) = 02f1cdb6a64f598b809045c262e21b58
# MD5 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-serial-i386.img.bz2) = 4c330c7dc7d8728bc061e4ba2399490c
# MD5 (OPNsense-17.7.r1-OpenSSL-vga-i386.img.bz2) = 0e5aa3f9117371e6c2acf93b29b25c79