Taking a leap forward from 4.7, 4.8 focuses on one of the more major changes in the industry today, the addition of IPv6, both to help combat the scarcity of remaining IPv4 addresses and their rising financial upkeep costs.
Additionally, Further QoL changes have been made to SERVERware to streamline DNS record management as well as the overall experience with using the SERVERware GUI.
Let’s find out about it in a bit more detail, shall we?
SERVERware
Adding IPv6 Address Support
While IPv4 addresses still retain relevance, their growing scarcity has started to impose issues for address translation for SIP traffic as well as monetary issues in regards to their procurement.
That’s why we have enabled support for IPv6 addressing in both SERVERware and sipPROT.
This support relays across most of SERVERware’s core systems like: networking, addressing, geo-redundancy and DNS resolution.
Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are still supported thanks to SERVERware’s dual stack network configuration support with the note that the IPv6 feature is still in the testing phase and may receive changes down the line.
Networking has added a new tab for adding IPv6 subnets where both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses will be available when reserving address space for Partition resources and configuring VPS network interfaces.
As far as Addressing is concerned, both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses can be assigned.
However, currently only static IPv6 addresses can be assigned, but look forward to dynamic IPv6 addressing in the future.
With Geo-Redundancy, both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address can be used as a failover option under Geo-Redundancy settings.
And for DNS Resolution, SERVERware’s CoreDNS service responsible for handling DNS queries now supports resolving AAAA records for IPv6 addresses.
French Language Localization
In an effort to support localization of our products and make them easier to use for users who aren’t native English speakers, a French translation for SERVERware will be available with v4.8.
Almost every aspect will be fully translated, including backend messages.
The only parts of SERVERware that will remain in English are system logs in order to ensure quick response times from our Support and Dev teams for troubleshooting purposes.
We aim to localize SERVERware across more languages in the future. Should you have any particular requests on which languages you’d want us to add next, feel free to reach out to us.
Official and Community Template Verification And Signatures
The inclusion of the SERVERware template restructure was well received, however we always aim to provide you with the best experience which is why we’ve continued to improve upon it as v4.8 introduces template verification and online signatures for templates stored on the Bicom repository.
This serves to add an extra layer of protection to your systems as unsigned templates will now trigger a warning to notify you that you’re about to install an unsigned template at your discretion, allowing you to either proceed with the install or cancel it if you were prompted to install a fake or unsafe version by mistake.
CNAME DNS Records For VPSs
The next major update coming with 4.8 is CNAME record resolution and assignment support for VPSs that are running on SERVERware which should help simplify DNS A record management for domains.
This change has made it possible to create multiple CNAME records for a single VPS with different DNS names that’ll still be resolved to the same IP address by the SERVERware Controller.
In order to facilitate this change, we’ve redesigned the existing DNS SRV tab to provide a more intuitive layout that should simplify the addition of DNS records to a designated VPS, with the option to edit existing records.
Secondary DNS Zone Persistence
In order to provide further redundancy options for any unforeseen downtime, 4.8 is adding secondary DNS zone persistence for SERVERware sites that depend on the Controller’s ability to respond to DNS queries.
It ensures that the DNS zone information remains reachable even if the primary DNS zone goes down for any reason as all the information on it is stored on the site that’s designated and configured to act as the secondary DNS zone.
It should respond to DNS queries in place of the primary zone should the latter go down.
API Documentation
To provide a way for seasoned developers to recall all of SERVERware’s functionalities in regards to VPS management as well as make it easier to onboard new ones, we’ve introduced API documentation to SERVERware.
It can be found under the “Account Settings” tab and it provides detailed information about managing VPSs with example outputs and the possibility to test each API call directly from the UI.
sipPROT
sipPROT and IPv6
As mentioned earlier, sipPROT has also seen an update with SERVERware’s IPv6 address support, allowing sipPROT to further enhance its security capabilities by adding IPv6 address ranges into its attack detection radius.
This also applies to its dynamic blocking, allowing it to automatically detect and block potential malicious actors trying to stage an attack on your systems from an IPv6 address.
API Documentation
Similar to SERVERware, sipPROT is also getting its own API documentation section, detailing all actions revolving around IP address list management as well as including calls for fetching data from Attack Logs and Hosts tabs, making it useful for devs both new and seasoned.
The standalone version of sipPROT will receive its own API documentation section in the next sipPROT release.
And More…
Alongside these major changes, we’ve also been hard at work ironing out any kinks and squashing bugs that were present prior, ensuring a smoother experience with both SERVERware and sipPROT alike.
For more detailed information regarding all the changes, you can check out the full v4.8 release notes here.
We are sure to continue our efforts in developing a platform that satisfies the needs of your clients while retaining its intuitive design throughout and we are looking forward to showing you more of what we have in store, but more on that in our future releases.
Until then, we hope to have met your expectations and that both you and your clients remain satisfied.