We are very proud to announce the next SKUDONET Community Edition v7.1.0, we have been working hard for more than 6 months and finally, the results are awesome.

SKUDONET v7 is based on Debian 12, with Kernel 6.1.90 LTS (long-term support) and replaces its predecessor SKUDONET 5. We have been working with SKUDONET 5 for more than 5 years but now is the time to update the Kernel and use all the new properties that this great Operating System offers to network developers.

1. SKUDONET v7.1 IMPROVED KERNEL FUNCTIONALITIES

  • Better hardware support for networking devices, physical and virtual. SKUDONET works as a networking device, the load-balanced traffic by SKUDONET will be able to use those features offering better performance and managing more concurrency and throughput per second.
  • CPU scheduled programs, improved algorithms and more intelligent CPU usage that will improve the response speed of multi-core processors. Now SKUDONET does more with the same number of processors.
  • Memory management improvement: this new Kernel improves memory management, improving memory allocation, support for transparent huge pages, memory compression and cache management, SKUDONET manages better the assigned memory to the Load balanced and cyber security processes like WAF, DDoS, Load balancing, SSL offloading among others task that require Memory.
  • Network performance, this kernel version has substantially improved the network stack, optimizing the TCP/IP protocols and adding new algorithms to enhance network performance. Added support for Multipath TCP connection to increase network performance and reliability. The most important task done by SKUDONET is using the Networking stack, now we will move more packets with the same hardware resources in a more efficient way.
  • Enhanced security in the kernel, this version includes a stronger kernel self-protection mechanism to enhance system security with an improved mandatory access control (MAC) framework.
  • Power management improvements: This kernel version enhances the power consumption including optimizations to processor power and new algorithms. SKUDONET hardware will save power consumption in case the system doesn’t require resources and will wake up faster in case the usage of resources is demanded by the Load balancing or cyber security cores.
  • Virtualization support enhancement: This new version adds support for virtualization technologies, like optimization for virtual machine monitors, virtual machine performance and security. SKUDONET enhances the behavior in virtualization environments by doing more with the same resources and working natively in more Hypervisors like Vmware, Hyperv, Xen, KVM, Proxmox, Nutanix, Citrix, Oracle and Red Hat virtualization environments, etc.

2. SKUDONET v7.1 NEW FUNCTIONALITIES:

Apart from the new improvements offered by the Operating system, we have been working hard to include new functionalities, those functionalities are focused on our open community requests, see here a described list:

New features

[networking] added DHCP to NIC and VLAN. This new feature is mandatory to be a native cloud Load Balancer, the majority of the IP assignments are managed with DHCP, for example, Azure and AWS work in that way.

[farms] added support for FQDN as backend IP in HTTP farms. As a native cloud Load Balancer, the backend configuration can be pointed to a DNS instead of an IP because cloud providers can change the backend IP in any reboot, this feature joined to DHCP support gives us the possibility of working as a Cloud Native solution.

[farms] added a new directive TLSv1.3 for HTTPS farms. Now TLS protocols can be enabled/disabled as convenient.

Improvements

[farms] added more 100-Continue modes: Pass, Ignore, Silent Pass, and Not Allow. This header is essential for a simple reverse proxy, many customers requested the possibility of changing the behavior of the proxy based on this header.

[system] added QEMU hypervisor in the dashboard. The system detects automatically if it is working in this Hypervisor and the SKUDONET core is configured automatically. This feature is used to support QEMU hypervisors like Proxmox natively.

[farmguardian] added a UDP check using nc. Customers reported some issues with health check_udp, we have included nc binary in the health checklist.

[ssl] added CSR Key Get call. The certificate signing request generation process has been improved, now the system saves a copy that can be used later in the Pem file generation.

[system] sorts log files and reverse content. We have improved the logs view inside the web GUI to show the recent events first. We have improved this logs view to make it easier for the system administrator the task of checking logs for troubleshooting or monitoring.

[ssl] added retries when restarting farms in the Let’s Encrypt renewal action. We have fixed some errors found in the automatic restart farms process that use Let’s Encrypt

[gui] disabled old TLS versions in the web GUI. TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1 are not used anymore because they are marked as deprecated.

[farms] HTTP reverse proxy profile now uses opensslv3 libraries. The OpenSSL library has been updated to allow a maximum level of security in SSL/TLS protocols.

[gui] The new brand SKUDONET is applied in the web GUI. Now there is only one web GUI, and no differences between Enterprise and Community versions. We want to save time in software maintenance.

[system] Linux Kernel and operating system updated. We wanted to integrate the SKUDONET packages with the Debian Operating system, to let the users install or adapt the operating system without breaking anything. Now Debian 12 installation packages are fully supported.

Bugfixes

[system] fixed nftables package dependency. We have been maintaining this package and continue doing this task as our version is more recent than the one maintained by Debian 12 without breaking any Debian 12 dependency.

[farms] fixed Farm graphs when the farm name starts with “dev”. Now farms with the prefix dev are shown properly in the graphs section.

And many more features are currently under development, keep an eye on us!

We hope you enjoy using the SKUDONET Operating System v7.1 as we have enjoyed developing it.

Our vision is to make the Internet a little bit safer, do you want to help us? If so, please use SKUDONET Application Delivery Controller v7.1, and contact our community ecosystem.

With our community, you will be in touch with SKUDONET users and SKUDONET developers, who will be thrilled to help and listen to your ideas and proposals.

We are looking forward to hearing from you, so do you join us?

And download our work?