Web Safety 8.6 Release Candidate is available

[rafael....@diladele.com]

Hello everyone,
 
The next version of Web Safety 8.6 is now in Release Candidate stage. We are actively using the version internally and plan to finally release it in September/October of 2023.
 
The following changes are included into this version:

• Added support for Debian 12
• Dropped support for Debian 11
• Dropped support for network management in Debian 12, you now have to use usual manual commands to setup IP address configuration on that platform. Network management in Ubuntu 20.04 continues to work as usual.
• Internal deployment scheme of the application is switched to venv in preparation of switching to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS in the next version.
• Fixed errors in reporting module which led to rarely failing generation of a daily report.
• Added ability to exclude domain names from filtering using regular expressions.
• It is now possible to configure the max size of reporting CSV files to render in the Admin UI.
• Django framework switched to version 4.2.4, Python pandas to 2.0.3, some reports are re-implemented on the new Pandas version.
• Fixed rendering issues in Advanced Exclusion Lists.
• SSLDB is now stored in /var/spool/squid/ssldb (needed for later use in Kubernetes in Cloud Proxy)
• Cache folder for Squid proxy is moved to /var/spool/squid/cache (also needed for later use in Kubernetes in Cloud Proxy)

The virtual appliance images can be downloaded from here:

•    for VMware ESXi/vSphere
•    for Microsoft Hyper-V (being uploaded now).

Upgrade steps required are described in the Admin Guide. As always list of open issues is available on GitHub. Please do not hesitate to add more if something is missing or needs to be improved.
 
Next step is to ensure the application works as expected in Docker, prepare and test the Azure and AWS virtual appliances. Hope you will find this useful.
 
Best regards,
Rafael