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Hephæstos

Release 26

Release Status:

Active

Hephæstos: he was the god of technology, blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals and metallurgy, and fire. [ Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hephaestus (2007-11-18) ]

Release 26.12

Item	Type	Details
HTTPS Inspection	Enhancement	Transparent scanning of HTTPS traffic - both for the direct proxy, and the Netbox acting as a gateway. This provides visibility of exactly what is happening over encrypted connections and allows access control to HTTPS sites based on the category of the content on the page.
Authentication	Enhancement	Direct proxy users can now view the logs correctly when they have usernames with spaces in their name when using an external authentication service.
SMTP Rate Limit Blacklist	Enhancement	The ability to configure the amount of time a host is blacklisted is now available under Configuration > SMTP Server. If a host is blacklisted, it will still be able to receive SMTP traffic (eg: from a SMTP Pass-thru Domain), but all other traffic to and from it will be ignored (dropped), this allows alerts to still come through.

Release 26.11

Item	Type	Details
Email Scanning	Enhancement	A global email quarantine has been added to Email Scanning. Any rule that uses this new sub-action will result in the email being put into a special queue accessible from Email Scanning > Quarantine, where email can be released to the user it was original sent to, redirected to another email address, or deleted.
Configuration	Enhancement	It is now possible to configure a 'search domain' in the Netbox DNS configuration, so that if you have the Netbox in direct proxy mode and you have 'example' as your search domain, and 'host.example' is a domain name, you can access it via 'http://host/' as well as 'http://host.example/'.
Authentication	Enhancement	Under Configuration > Authentication > Lookup User it is now possible to lookup a user by IP address, username, username and password, or email address. Relevant information such as group membership and email aliases will be displayed.
Administration	Enhancement	The currently allocated DHCP leases can now be viewed under Administration > Network Tools > DHCP Leases. This will list the IP address, MAC address, and lease expiry times.
Email Scanning	Fix	Word searching will now more accurately find word sequences in emails.
URL Filtering	Fix	The block screen now displays the current categories for a blocked page, previously it was displaying the older category names.

Release 26.10.1

Item	Type	Details
Content Filtering	Enhancement	Provide the ability to have a hybrid local cache categorisation database, with real-time lookups for unknown sites. This provides the best of both worlds with a local database to minimise latency (especially for high latency or jittery links), with the benefits of a cloud based service for near real-time categorisation.
Traffic Shaping	Enhancement	Improve the selection of the primary interface so it is now selectable on the traffic shaping menu rather the the first configured link.
Content Filtering	Enhancement	The user interface for content filtering now exposes more fine grained categories for the administrator to filter on. For information on what categories match what type of content, the help article has a comprehensive explanation. This increases the number of available categories.

Release 26.10

Item	Type	Details
Authentication	Enhancement	The direct proxy authentication system now natively supports Windows 7 with no client side configuration (or Group Policy changes) for pass-through authentication.
Authentication	Fix	Resolve a problem that may occur in multi-group support when the primary group does not exist on the Netbox, but a secondary group does. Sometimes the secondary group would not match a policy.
User Interface	Enhancement	When viewing a page of the Netbox user interface, a link to the relevant logs may appear in the top right hand corner, allowing the administrator to quickly analyse configuration changes.
Administration	Enhancement	The information about the site that is recorded on the Netbox has changed to include more data to assist our support team in providing support when problems occur.

Release 26.9.3

Item	Type	Details
Operating System	Enhancement	Support for the latest generation iSeries hardware has been included in the latest kernel, as well as the latest security enhancements.
Failover Links	Fix	In some configurations (PPP based primary link, with a failover to a secondary PPP link, with no load balanced links), when a link failed over, it would not always fail back immediately or leave the failover link active. This has been fixed.
Authentication	Fix	In situations where an LDAP server such as Active Directory is using LDAP referrals, the Netbox would be unable to resolve user accounts. Support for gracefully handling LDAP referrals has been added.
URL Filtering	Fix	When a URL is blocked by URL Filtering and the URL also has a space in it and the user interface was not running on a default port, it was possible for the Netbox web interface to be unable to report what category that URL was in when clicking on the link provided in the block page. This is now fixed.
Web Interface	Fix	The configuration page for Web Proxy would always warn that having the HTTP proxy available on the internet side was dangerous when the page first loads, even if it was disabled. This warning now only appears when the proxy is actually enabled on the internet interface.

Release 26.9.2

Item	Type	Details
URL Filtering	Fix	Some configurations in URL Filtering matching against multiple groups did not work as expected, this could also affect the proxy authentication white-list. This has been corrected to work as expected.
Query Interface	Enhancement	Certain data sets would cause graphs to not render properly or raise errors in Internet Explorer 8. This is been fixed.
Traffic Shaping	Enhancement	When a Netbox does not have a default route the traffic shaping system would not activate. LAN side traffic shaping when there is no default route link is now activated.
Monitoring Reporting	Fix	Some languages (other than English) could cause the monitoring data to not be processed due to differences in the display of decimal numbers. This has been fixed, and past data will automatically be processed.

Release 26.9.1

Item	Type	Details
SMTP Server	Enhancement	When a host exceeds the rate limits of the SMTP server, the Netbox will now firewall off that host for 15 minutes. This feature can be configured under Configuration > SMTP Server.
Pass-through Networks	Enhancement	When configuring Pass-thru networks under Configuration > Advanced > Pass-through Networks a comment field is now available for administrators to add extra information about what each network is.
Intrusion Prevention	Enhancement	A whitelist has been added to the Intrusion Prevention System under Advanced Firewall > IDS Configuration > Whitelisted hosts. Any host listed on this whitelist will not be subject to scanning with IPS Stream Scanning.

Release 26.9

Item	Type	Details
Reporting	Feature	All of the interfaces for querying data on the Netbox, including the Email Monitoring, URL Filtering Blocked Sites and Network Monitoring screens now all have interactive graphs. You may select from pie, line or bar charts, the graph may also be resized. All of these new graphs may be included in the periodic reports emailed out from the Netbox as well. Note: The Netbox now only supports modern browsers (Internet Explorer 8+, FireFox 3+, Opera 10+ or Safari 4+), and requires Adobe Flash.
Reporting	Feature	It is now possible to click on data in the emailed reports generated by the Netbox to bring up further data in order to drill down and see more detail and interact with the data in real time.
Email Scanning	Enhancement	There are now many more types of fingerprint detection for a larger variety of classes of spam (rather than all grouped together). These include phishing, spam, URLs, scams, malicious and images, each with their own sensitivity settings.
Update System	Enhancement	When a Netbox is behind a restrictive firewall, that can sometimes be a barrier to the Netbox being able to download its firmware updates. The Netbox will now try to download its updates multiple ways in order to receive them.
Intrusion Detection	Enhancement	When a user on the LAN has been blacklisted by the Netbox whenever that user attempts to go to a webpage they will get a webpage explaining that they have been blacklisted, instead of no a refused connection.
Sophos Virus Scanner	Upgrade	Virus Engine has been upgraded to the latest version to address security concerns and combat the latest threats.
Authentication	Enhancement	Passthrough authentication for Windows hosts now supports Microsoft Windows 7.
Email Scanning	Enhancement	The Netbox by default will automatically allow any connecting host that is specifically allowed to send mail for its sending domain configured using SPF to bypass greylisting and be accepted immediately. This is now optional under Configuration > SMTP Spam Control.
Users & Groups	Enhancement	The password requirements setting is now based on the user that is logged in as well as the user being edited. The default requirement for a 'tech' or 'admin' account is 'Weak' and cannot be changed.
Authentication	Bugfix	Previously, when Novell eDirectory reported a user is logged in at the same IP address more than once the Netbox would fail to authenticate that user.

Release 26.8

Item	Type	Details
Email Scanning	Enhancement	When searching through an email using Email Scanning > Criteria > Text Search there are new options, 'Match whole words' and 'Search through zip files'. Matching whole words will allow scanning through many new formats of documents such as HTML and Office Documents. For the purposes of searching style and punctuation are ignored.
Email Scanning	Enhancement	When checking if an email is spam using Email Scanning > Criteria > Spam Detection URLs can be checked against databases for known malicious sites. For more information on what type of sites will be detected see http://www.antiphishing.org/ and http://www.stopbadware.org/.
Email Scanning	Bugfix	When searching an email to see if it came from a known spammer, make sure that dynamic IP blacklists aren't used, as this can sometimes block emails that were sent via ISP smart host.
Email Scanning	Enhancement	An option has been added Email Scanning > Criteria > Spam Detection > Block embedded JavaScript. This will detect any email that contains <script> tags in the body or attachements.
Web Proxy	Enhancement	The Netbox publishes a wpad.dat file for web proxy auto-detection, and now it is possible to configure hostnames or IP addresses that will not be proxied, for cases where intranet sites don't need to be proxied via the Netbox. This is configurable under Configuration > Web Proxy > Proxy auto-configuration exclusions.
URL Filtering	Enhancement	URL Filtering now supports the concept of a user being in multiple groups. If a user is authenticated from Active Directory or eDirectory and is in multiple groups the URL Filtering policies can match against all those groups instead of their primary group. You may turn on this behaviour under URL Filtering > General > Group resolution.
Authentication	Enhancement	The Netbox user interface now enforces good passwords. When selecting a password, a password gauge is shown that shows the strength of a password. A user can be forced to select good passwords by configuring their permissions under Users & Groups > Manage Groups > Password Strength. Additionally, alerts will be sent for users with extreamly insecure passwords on a peridoic basis to the site contact(s).
LCD	Bugfix	In some circumstances, when a PipePlus Load Balanced link is used as the default route the LCD would display "Link Initalising" when the link was in fact up. The LCD now displays the link status accurately when PipePlus links are used.
ClamAV Virus Scanner	Upgrade	Virus Engine has been upgraded to the latest version to address security concerns and combat the latest threats.
VMware Support	Enhancement	Functionality has been added to the Netbox software to allow it to easily expand its partitions when the size of the datastore in VMware is increased. In order to increase the size of the a disk image, please contact support.

Release 26.7

Item	Type	Details
Authentication	Enhancement	Novell eDirectory is now supported as an additional Netbox authentication plugin. This adds support for eDirectory alongside the other authentication plugins the Netbox already supports.
Authentication	Enhancement	When setting up Active Directory authentication, establishing the connection to the Active Directory server can now be done over SSL. This also requires the AD server is configured to allow encrypted connections.
Authentication	Enhancement	When a user is a member of multiple groups, on the Active Directory or eDirectory server, it is now possible to allow that user to authenticate as being a member of one of those groups without using the concept of a Windows "Primary Group". Groups can be ordered under Users & Groups > Manage Groups and the policy for what method of finding the user's group to use may be configured in Authentication > Active Directory Plugin > Group resolution.
SMTP Server	Enhancement	Option has been added under Configuration > SMTP Server > Custom SMTP greeting hostname to allow you to change the SMTP HELO greeting.
SMTP Server	Enhancement	Incoming connections to the Netbox services are now rate limited at layer 3 so that a single host cannot make many concurrent connections very quickly. This is in addition to the traditional anti-DoS prevention the Netbox has to allow for more rapid and effective DoS rate limiting.

Release 26.6.3

Item	Type	Details
Operating Kernel	Enhancement	Upgrade the operating kernel to improve performance for some platforms and hardware configurations and reliability improvements.

Release 26.6.1

Item	Type	Details
Reports	Enhancement	When a NetBox has its modules updated, the default reports are now updated to reflect what modules have been enabled.
Firewall	Enhancement	Access on the internet side of the NetBox to services such as SMTP, POP3 or IMAP can be toggled on and off via Configuration > Advanced.
URL Filtering	Enhancement	The entire URL that is blocked in URL Filtering is now reproduced in the report under URL Filtering > Blocked Sites. This will allow administrators to see precisely what URL was blocked by the NetBox.
Intrusion Prevention	Enhancement	When the Intrusion Prevention System detects a brute force password attack it automatically firewalls off the host that is attempting and failing authentication too rapidly. An option to disable this behaviour has been added to Advanced Firewall > IPS Configuration.

Release 26.6

Item	Type	Details
Intrusion Prevention System	Enhancement	Introduction of the Intrusion Detection System. This system will allow the NetBox to inspect all traffic going in and out of the network and to block or report on specific types of traffic in a far more configurable manner.
HTTP Antivirus	Enhancement	Introduction of HTTP Antivirus. This feature will allow all users who are using the NetBox for HTTP and FTP downloads to be automatically protected from viruses in the files they are downloading.
Email Scanning	Enhancement	The NetBox can block backscatter emails when they are received by its mail server, but will now be able to also block those emails when they are being received indirectly, such as when they are scanned by the Transparent POP3 Proxy.
Test Configuration	Enhancement	The configuration testing screen (accessed via Administration > Test Configuration) has now been optimised and will complete its tests much faster. The NetBox will now test the servers that are listed in the Configuration > Passthru Domains to make sure that they support Recipient Address Verification and that they are responding on port 25. Access to more internet services is checked by these tests, to verify that the NetBox is not having its performance impacted by firewalls in front of it.
Test Configuration	Fix	When doing a check on the SPF record associated with a Local or Passthru domain, sometimes the check would report a failure when an MX pointed to the sitekey.safenetbox.biz DNS entry, because the NetBox resolves that to its internal IP address. The NetBox will now use internet DNS servers to lookup the sitekey DNS entry explicitly in this test so that it will be accurate.
Internet Connection	Enhancement	Routes can now be specified to simply go over the interface associated with a PPP, PPPoE or Wireless link, instead of requiring that a gateway be specified. This will make forcing routes via dynamically configured links easier.
ClamAV Virus Scanner	Upgrade	Virus Engine has been upgraded to the latest version to address security concerns and combat the latest threats.
URL Filtering	Enhancement	The ability to test what URL List matches a URL has been added to URL Filtering > URL Test.
User Management	Enhancement	Finer grained permissions have been provided under Users & Groups > Manage Groups. It is now possible to allow a user to have access to more specific parts of the NetBox user interface.

Release 26.5.5

Item	Type	Details
Passthrough Authentication	Fix	When configuring Passthrough Authentication with Active Directory for the first time in a particular order on a NetBox running 26.5.4 an error in the configuration may cause Passthrough Authentication to fail certain tests - this has been corrected for all valid situations.

Release 26.5.4

Item	Type	Details
Traffic Shaping	Fix	In rare circumstances, a configuration of the NetBox could result in Inbound Traffic Shaping turning on when it should not. This will now not happen.
Logging	Enhancement	Internal logfiles are now rotated and expunged more often, reducing the amount of disk space needed by the NetBox.

Release 26.5.3

Item	Type	Details
Email Scanning	Enhancement	Email scanning will now be more sensitive about image spam using words in PNG images, which are now the predominant form used to transport spam messages with embedded images.
Passthrough Authentication	Enhancement	The Windows Passthrough Authentication service has been further enhanced to improve speed and error handling. A new version will need to be installed on the Windows Server by the network administrator.
User Permissions	Fix	Some pages were accessible via a direct URL (if known) when they shouldn't have been by authenticated users. This has been addressed and all deep nested pages are all secured correctly.

Release 26.5.2

Item	Type	Details
Hardware Support	Enhancement	Update to the latest version of the firmware for the RAID controllers used in the iSeries and iSeries Redundant NetBoxes.
Internet Access Support	Enhancement	Improve the testing of links in failover and load balanced situations so that the most appropriate links are tested and activated sooner. Support turning off of LCP Echo Requests for PPPoE connections, to resolve a problem where the NetBox would disconnect from an ADSL link when the DSLAM would not respond to Echo Requests when large amounts of data are being transferered.
Web Filtering	Fix	When there are multiple policies to block a site, sometimes the wrong policy would be reported in the URL Filtering Blocked Sites report when using the transparent proxy.

Release 26.5.1

Item	Type	Details
Passthrough Authentication	Fix	Improve the backwards compatibility support of the NetBox when talking to and older version of the Windows Passthrough Authentication agent.
Port Forwarding on Non-Load Balanced Active Links	Fix	When several Ethernet links on different physical interfaces had links configured that were not in a load balanced configuration, and a port forward was configured from more than one link to a common internal host, the traffic would only work through one link.

Release 26.5

Item	Type	Details
Internet Access Support	Enhancement	Support for 3G modems has been added. It is now possible to plug in a USB 3G modem and use it as an internet link. In conjunction with PipePlus this can be used to automatically bring up a 3G modem as a failover for a main internet link.
Email Scanning	Enhancement	Email Scanning now observes all IP addresses in the X-Originating-IP headers of emails. This will allow us to do IP based blacklisting more effectively, and block more spam emails especially in situations such as when the NetBox is doing POP3 proxying of emails.
ClamAV Virus Scanner	Upgrade	Virus Engine has been upgraded to the latest version to address security concerns and combat the latest threats.
URL Filtering	Fix	Some search terms used in the URL Filtering Block Activity web interface could cause the interface to have an error and not return results. This has been fixed.
RAID Array Driver	Upgrade	Drivers for the RAID Array used in the iSeries NetBox have been upgraded. Firmware for these RAID cards will also be upgraded automatically.
Passthrough Authentication	Upgrade	The Active Directory Server program that the NetBox uses to identify users automatically has been upgraded to increase lookup speed and increase resiliency on networks with high latency and/or jitter. This will require the administrator of the Active Directory server to upgrade the service.
Email Scanning	Fix	Some spam emails containing an invalid zip file with an invalid file manifest could result in that spam email being stuck in the email scanning queue. Now these messages are correctly dealt with.

Release 26.4.7

Item	Type	Details
Proxy Quota Enforcement	Fix	Some configuration settings could cause quota enforcement to not function in 26.4.6.
Email Scanning	Fix	Unrecognised character encodings could sometimes avoid text searching. Many new email encodings are now recognised.

Release 26.4.6

Item	Type	Details
Proxy Quota Enforcement	Enhancement	User quotas are now enforced for traffic via the direct proxy. A user can see their remaining quota via browsing to "auth.netbox" or "quota.netbox".
Sophos Virus Scanner	Upgrade	Virus Engine has been updated to 4.39.0.
ClamAV Virus Scanner	Upgrade	Virus Engine has been updated to 0.94.2.
Web Proxy	Fix	URL Filtering based on Group Membership in the direct proxy with authentication now works when the user name has a space in it. Previously a users group membership would not be respected.
Virus Updates	Fix	'Force Virus Updates Now' facility provided under Email Scanning was not functioning properly under 26.4.* releases prior to 26.4.6. (Although automatic updates always worked).
URL Filtering	Enhancement	Google Talk can now be blocked using URL Filtering > General > Block Google Talk.
URL Filtering	Enhancement	Support restricting Google Safesearch to just 'active' instead of 'strict' mode.
Email Scanning	Enhancement	Now the Email Scanning > Actions screen lists a summary of what each action does under its name.
Reporting	Enhancement	A new report has been added to the Reporting package that lists the top blocked sites by URL Filtering. This report will be automatically appended to the Detailed report.
Port Forwarding	Enhancement	Added a 'comment' field for the Port Forwarding screen so that an annotation about what each port forward is for can be added. The Port Forwarding screen is also now sorted instead of in order of creation.
Spam Control	Enhancement	The facility to block backscatter email has been added to Configuration > SMTP Spam Control. Email that the NetBox discerns is likely to be backscatter bounce messages from spam mailouts can be dropped using this option.
Content Filtering	Enhancement	Performance of the content filtering service has been improved.

Release 26.4.5

Item	Type	Details
SPF	Enhancement	Provide SPF (Sender Policy Framework) capabilities in Email Scanning and in SMTP Spam Control. The ability to enforce SPF only for your own domains or for all email is provided. Enforcing SPF on your local domains and configuring your DNS records correctly is an effective deterrent for spam that appears to be sent 'From' the intended recipient (i.e.: email coming from yourself).
Content Filtering	Enhancement	An interface is now provided under URL Filtering > Category to inspect what category a URL is in, to assist in finding why a URL is blocked by the content filter.
URL Filtering	Enhancement	When a URL Filtering policy blocks a user from accessing a web resource, the user, the time the request was made, the URL they are trying to access and the name of the policy that blocked the user are all logged, and an administrator can review that information under URL Filtering > Block Activity.
Network Tools	Fix	Test Email Configuration tool was not displaying results in 26.4 releases prior to 26.4.5, this is now resolved.
Email Scanning	Fix	The email sender whitelist was not being respected at the Email Scanning level prior to 26.4.5, this is now resolved.
Webmail	Change	When listing emails in Webmail, the NetBox used to sort and display the time the email had listed in its headers. This can be forged or incorrect due to the sender's clock being incorrect. This would cause emails to appear out of order. We now display and sort by the time the NetBox received the email.

Release 26.4.4

Item	Type	Details
1:1 NAT	Enhancement	Don't transparently proxy any connection coming from a machine that is subject to 1:1 NAT.This completely opens up access to and from the system that has the 1:1 NAT in place.
Web Proxy	Enhancement	Add the ability to specify web sites that don't require authentication when accessed via the web proxy. This is required for some clients that can't, or can't reliably do NTLM authentication (eg: Windows Update).
Security	Enhancement	Better protection against attackers attempting to gain access to the mail system on the NetBox by way of brute force password attacks has been added. Attackers will now be completely firewalled off from the NetBox when they are detected.

Release 26.4.3

Item	Type	Details
Interface Statistics	Fix	Resolve an issue that would cause the Interface Statistics screen to sometimes show no data.
Web Proxy	Fix	Improve the NTLM authentication system to handle more cases that can occur when joining to an Active Directory domain server when the default wizard settings have not been used.

Release 26.4

Item	Type	Details
Web Proxy	Enhancement	The web proxy can now be used in both 'transparent' and 'direct' mode simultaneously. When used in 'direct' mode, the IP address of the user accessing the proxy will appear under Network Monitoring. Proxy authentication is now supported, using either NetBox authentication, or NTLM authentication against an Active Directory server. Autoproxy configuration using a wpad.dat / autoproxy.pac file is provided by the NetBox. This feature allows for users in a Terminal Server environment to be monitored and managed on a per user basis, even though the traffic is coming from a single IP address.
NetBox User Interface	Enhancement	The user interface for the NetBox has been restyled to make it more visually appealing.
1:1 NAT	Enhancement	A new feature has been provided that will allow a NetBox that has multiple internet IP addresses to forward all traffic to an IP address through to an internal host, and make it appear that all traffic from that internal host will appear to come from that selected IP address when it connects to hosts on the internet.

Release 26.3.2

Item	Type	Details
Hardware Support	Enhancement	Many new NetBox Blue appliances are supported by this latest software release. It is important for NetBox Blue's global expansion.
Remote Access (PPTP)	Fix	In some configurations the Remote Access user interface would not load if an invalid LAN configuration was previously configured. This has been resolved.
External Email Pickup	Fix	In some situations where a remote POP3 server had changed its configuration it would cause email to not be downloaded. This feature improves the handling of what happens when a remote server's configuration has changed.
Port Forwarding	Fix	Port forwarding on a link that is a PipePlus failover link has been upgraded. Now port forwarding of services provided behind a failover link works if the users attempt to connect to the A record for sitekey.safenetbox.biz or a DNS name that is a CNAME to that same record.
URL Filtering	Enhancement	When a URL filtering policy blocks a user from going to a website, the page that is displayed now informs the user the name of the policy that caused them to be denied access. This will assist administrators when ascertaining why a page is blocked.

Release 26.3

Item	Type	Details
Internet Quota	Enhancement	A new feature to the group management interface on the NetBox that will provide the ability to give everyone in a group a quota that is replenished at the end of a time period, such as daily, weekly or monthly. This feature is integrated into the existing Internet Authentication and Quota Management.
Content Filtering	Enhancement	Content Filtering has been enhanced and integrated into the URL Filtering User Interface on the NetBox. This provides group management based policies for Content Based rules.
Email Scanning	Enhancement	Many enhancements to the speed and handling of emails in languages other than English have been added to the NetBox.

Release 26.1

Item	Type	Details
Pass-through Authentication	Enhancement	A new method of authentication has been added, allowing users who are logged in to a domain on an Active Directory server to be automatically allowed to get to the internet as if they had logged in with Internet Auth. As a result, users are not prompted for a password when they use the internet, Quota Management will still work as expected and Network Monitoring will record their internet usage against their login name.

Release 26.0

Item	Type	Details
PipePlus	Enhancement	A new premium feature option has been introduced called PipePlus, allowing load balancing (and fail over) between multiple internet links. This can be used to increase the effective bandwidth within an organisation and/or to provide additional redundancy. Please speak to your NetBox Blue Partner for more information and pricing.
Traffic Shaping	Enhancement	The performance and reliability of Traffic Shaping has been improved.