14 DAY TRIAL // Chris Buechler from the pfSense project has announced the availability of the first point release in the stable 2.3.x series of the open-source, BSD-based firewall platform.
pfSense 2.3.1 arrived on May 18, 2016, as an upgrade to the pfSense 2.3 Update 1 (a.k.a. pfSense 2.3-1) released at the beginning of the month to introduce an important patch to the Network Time Protocol (NTPd) package, which has been upgraded from version 4.2.8p6 to 4.2.8p7.
Therefore, pfSense 2.3.1 shouldn't be confused with the tiny pfSense 2.3 Update 1 patch, as the former is a major update introducing over 100 changes for most of its components, including the configuration upgrade, gateways support, the backend, the web-based interface, IPsec support, DNS Resolver, and DHCP Server.
pfSense 2.3.1 is also about security fixes, in particular for the OpenVPN and OpenSSL packages, as well as FreeBSD's sendmsg and atkbd tools. Our tech-savvy readers who are curious to know what exactly has been added or improved in the pfSense 2.3.1 release need to check out the full changelog attached at the end of the article.
pfSense 2.3 users can now upgrade to pfSense 2.3.1
pfSense 2.3 arrived on April 12, 2016, introducing some major new features like the brand new pkg system that lets the project's maintainers update only individual parts of the system, thus being able to release those tiny "Update 1, Update 2, etc." patches. Please check out the introductory video below for details.
If you're using pfSense 2.3 or pfSense 2.3 Update 1 (2.3-1), you can now upgrade to pfSense 2.3.1, but you should be aware of the fact that some known issues are still present, such as the non-functional IPsec IPComp, which has been disabled by default, the inability of IGMP Proxy to work with VLAN interfaces, and incompatibility of OpenBGPD with IPsec.
If you're new to pfSense, download the pfSense 2.3.1 64-bit and 32-bit Live ISO images.