This section summarizes the new features and enhancements in Open Enterprise Server (OES) 23.4 release.
Micro Focus is now part of OpenText. Products across the portfolio are now rebranded to reflect OpenText or a more appropriate name. This corporate change impacts the name of products and components, user interfaces, logos, and so on. As a result of this corporate change, OES 2023 SP1 is now referred as OES 23.4.
The documentation is being updated in stages to reflect these changes, including names and screenshots. You can still come across references to Micro Focus in the documentation library until all of the manuals are updated.
The OES Welcome page has been redesigned for an intuitive look and feel and to better manage access to OES resources. In addition, the OES Welcome page is rebranded to reflect the OpenText style. The page highlights the top features for the release along with few important links to Management tools and so on.
After logging in, the user can access to OES resources, community forums, and client downloads from the UMC home page.
Channel upgrade is supported for updating OES 2023 to OES 23.4 using Wagon, Zypper, or Micro Focus Subscription Management Tool (MFSMT).
For more information, see Channel Upgrade from OES 2023 to OES 23.4 or OES 24.1 in OES 23.4: Installation Guide.
Managing Open Enterprise Server (OES) services is made easier by the Unified Management Console (UMC). Highly responsive, simple, and secure management tool for managing small and large heterogeneous deployments. As a single point of administration for OES resources, it takes the place of the multiple management consoles.
UMC provides customized access to network administration utilities and content from virtually anywhere using the Internet and a web browser similar to iManager.
Provides comprehensive security through a token-based authentication system, supported by enhanced authentication methods and Single Sign-On (SSO) enhancements. These measures work in synergy to ensure robust security protocols, safeguarding user access and data integrity while streamlining the authentication process for a seamless user experience.
Built through strategic utilization of the Angular framework, leveraging its robust capabilities, in tandem with the thoughtful incorporation of UX Aspects, to ensure a highly tailored and user-centric development approach.
Utilize effective and efficient management capabilities for maintenance of file and print services, seamlessly supported by the robust eDirectory system. Manage file and print services that have been meticulously integrated with the versatile Active Directory infrastructure.
The platform offers end-to-end workflows, enabling administrators to efficiently manage multiple servers simultaneously. It features a versatile dashboard that provides both basic and advanced analytics, giving users valuable insights into system performance. Additionally, the system incorporates role-based management, allowing for tailored access control and permissions.
A centralized REST-based API server, which serves as a lightweight and efficient management service for OES servers. This integrated solution facilitates streamlined server management tasks, promoting efficiency and ease of use for system administrators.
In this release, you can manage the Server Settings, Storage, Files and Folders, NCP, and Cluster services. For more information, see OES 23.4: Unified Management Console
Beginning with OES 23.4 release, DFS provides the following enhancements and changes:
DFS Management Tool (dfstool) is a command line utility for managing DFS operations that works only with DFS junctions and Management Context.
DFS junction now supports non-OES targets along with OES targets.
dfstool allows you to create the DFS junctions pointing to the target type which can be either OES or non-OES targets.
OES supports both NCP and SMB target whereas non-OES supports only SMB targets.
DFS junction support pointing to multiple OES targets.
For more information, see What’s New or Changed in Distributed File Services in OES 23.4: Distributed File Services Administration Guide for Linux.
To enable and disable support for large MTU, a novcifs option has been added. With a large MTU, the maximum data unit size can be up to 1MB, as opposed to 64KB for a normal MTU. A large MTU enables a server to support multi-credit operations and is available from SMB 2.1 or later.
Centralized certificate management helps administrators in managing the certificate lifecycle. The features are:
Mail notifications notify the administrator and the root user of the certificates' impending expiration.
Indicates where each service's certificates can be found.
Indicates the certificate's type, such as whether it is self-signed or CA-signed.
Indicates whether the certificates are still valid.
Reconfigures the OES services to use a new certificate when certificates are invalid, corrupted or expired.
A browser-based tool (Unified Management Console, or UMC) that enables remote management of certificates across servers will be available in the upcoming releases.
For more information, see Centralized Certificate Management in OES 23.4: Installation Guide.
To improve the performance and reduce the data migration time from the DST shadow volume to the CIS volume, only folder-level checks are done when multiple migration iterations are performed.
Beginning with OES 23.4, Elasticsearch is replaced with OpenSearch.
For improved security, updated to the latest version of Go, Kafka, and Zookeeper.
|
Infrastructure |
Old Version |
Updated Version |
|---|---|---|
|
Go |
1.14 |
1.19 |
|
Kafka |
Kafka wurstmeister/kafka:2.12-2.5.0 |
bitnami/kafka:3.4.0 |
|
Zookeeper |
3.5.7 |
3.8 |
In order to fetch the printer attributes, iPrint has incorporated the feature enhancement of secure communication through IPP on port 443 between the iPrint gateway and printers. To accomplish this feature, the iPrint gateway by default communicates with printers through IPP.
If the printer is not supporting IPP or if the communication between the iPrint gateway and printers through IPP fails then the printer's attributes are retrieved using SNMP.
For more information, see Modifying the Printer’s Gateway Load Commands in OES 23.4: OES iPrint Administration Guide.
After Google enhanced their authentication, if you are providing Gmail ID in Email configuration, you must provide App Password (application specific password). For more information, see Global Email Settings in OES 23.4: iPrint Advanced Administration Guide
For improved security, updated log4j to the latest version.
The OES 23.4 server supports the NAS 7.x Synology version, which offers DirSync search capabilities and compatible attributes for all users and groups. DSfW has extended the support to DirSync search capabilities
Thus, the NAS server is able to fetch users and groups data from the server using DirSync search and DSfW returns data as per the latest requirement.
The Samba version was updated from 4.10 to 4.15 to be compatible with SLES version of Samba and to resolve library conflict between base SLES and earlier SLES versions.
Additionally, Samba 4.15 supports important changes to security vulnerability.
A new audit log is initiated for tracking the operations for security configuration such as MFA and encryption for NCP connections. For tracking, the users must login through NCP connections.
Beginning with Client for Open Enterprise Server 2 SP7 (IR4) and later, the "OES Copy" functionality will take advantage of Open Enterprise Server capabilities to perform server-side copy operations. This capability will be available only if the source and destination paths specified in the “OES Copy” dialog are within the same volume, or for paths that represent distinct volumes within the same server.
When the supplied paths are determined to qualify for taking advantage of OES server-side copy capabilities, the files is copied using OES server-side copy NCPs. This will be more efficient than reading and writing the data through the Client for Open Enterprise Server workstation, and can also substantially increase the performance in scenarios where VPN or low-bandwidth networks are involved that would otherwise limit the data transfer rate.
For more information, see Client for Open Enterprise Server 2 SP7 Documentation.
Cache devices (cachedev) are special block devices that are designed for hosting cache for the NSS storage pools. You can group the free storage space available in the fast storage devices to form the cache device. Adding partitions or more devices will allow you to expand the cache device even further.
For additional storage operations like building a pool, you can utilize cache device like a regular block device.
To configure and manage the cache devices, you must use the NLVM command-line utility. For more information, see NLVM Commands in OES 23.4: NLVM Reference.
NOTE:Currently this feature is available only on local devices and with 512-byte sector size devices.
The NSS storage pools can have cache on a specific cache device in order to improve the IO performance. Three components constitute the Cache Enabled Pool: the cache, cache metadata, and data from the NSS pool. Cache and metadata are not accounted as part of the pool's space and hence they will not increase the available NSS pool's space.
Performance improvements are achieved by reading and writing blocks from the storage device with greater speed. The persistence nature of cache, keeps the cache warm across reboots too.
When a pool is created, the cache can be assigned to it and linked to it, or it can be enabled later.
For more information, see Cache Enabled Pools in OES 23.4: NSS File System Administration Guide for Linux.
NOTE:Currently this feature is available only on local pools and with 512-byte sector size devices.
Beginning with OES 23.4, administrator can configure the log-level attribute using Java Management Console. During dynamic reconfiguration or novell-named.service restart, the DNS server detects the changes and reconfigures novell-named with log-level specified in Java Console. The log-level attribute changes are also saved in the named.conf file.
For more information, see Configuring Log-Level using Java Management Console in OES 23.4: DNS/DHCP Services for Linux Administration Guide.
Besides branding and bug fixes, there are no other changes to the following components:
Linux User Management (LUM)
Business Continuity Clustering (BCC)
OES FTP
Storage Management Services (SMS)
OES Cluster Services (NCS)
VLOG
Dynamic Storage Technology (DST)
Micro Focus Subscription Management Tool (MFSMT)
OES User Rights Map (NURM)
Novell Remote Manager (NRM)