Web Safety 8.0 Release Candidate

[rafael....@diladele.com]

Hello everyone,

The next version of Web Safety 8.0 is now in Release Candidate state. This version has some major technical changes and internal updates and contains some breaking changes compared to version 7.6 so we decided to promote the version to 8.0.

The following changes are included into this build:

• Added support for Squid 5.2 on Ubuntu 20. The virtual appliance and Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS images will be based on this version too.
• Breaking Change - the supported version of RedHat Linux is now 9 (currently in beta), if support for RedHat 8 is required, please continue using Web Safety 7.6
• Updates of definition files are performed using new updates.diladele.com server. Updates should be faster now.
• Technical Change - internal ICAP web filtering modules are moved to boost 1.77. More standard C++ libraries are used now. A lot of unification with Web Filtering Proxy for Microsoft Windows is implemented.
• Removed some decommissioned and non-working functionality in YouTube guard module.
• Removed some old settings from Admin UI that are not supported by Squid 5 (for example, no more dns_v4_first setting present).
• Breaking Change - default user in the Admin UI is now named admin instead of root as before. This is to strictly separate the operating system level users and application users.
• Breaking Change in virtual appliance - default operating system user root is now only able to login using console; remote login using ssh is disabled. This is to prevent security issues in default deployments when administrator forgets to change the default credentials.

Please if you have time do give it a look. Add issues and comments using github's new issue page at https://github.com/diladele/websafety/issues/new.

Upgrade steps are described at https://docs.diladele.com/administrator_guide_stable/upgrade/index.html the upgrades are not easy as always.

The virtual appliance images can be downloaded from:

• for VMware ESXi/vSphere - https://packages.diladele.com/websafety-va/8.0/websafety.zip
• for Microsoft Hyper-V - https://packages.diladele.com/websafety-va/8.0/websafety-hyperv.zip

Next steps are testing and preparing cloud images for the upcoming release. This is planned in February 2022.

Thanks for everyone for making this possible.
Dev Team

P.S. If you need an easy to use, native, non-virtual filtering proxy for Microsoft Windows, consider taking a look at our new project https://webproxy.diladele.com - this is more or less Web Safety packed in MSI installer (with our own HTTP/HTTPS proxy implementation), running on Microsoft Windows as native application.

[Mark Williams]

Here is the irony, years ago I would have bitten your hand off for the windows version.  I came from the old "squid->dansguardian->squid" sandwich (then squid->dansguardian as time went on) on debian.  It was the first time I had ever used linux in a production environment.  I made so many mistakes, learnt quite a bit but now I prefer to use diladele on linux; I am not entertaining the idea of a windows version (even though we have a hyper-v environment!)  funny how things work out.