Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 gains security, networking upgrades

“Web console now includes a file management component provided by the cockpit-files package,” Scott McBrien, technical product marketing manager, RHEL, at Red Hat, told Network World. “It allows users to navigate the filesystem, upload new files to the machine, as well as regular file operations like copying, moving and renaming files.”

Enhanced networking infrastructure brings more IPv6 access

As an operating system platform that is used as the basis for enterprise, cloud and even telecom scale deployments, RHEL’s networking stack is of particular importance to users.

RHEL 9.5 introduces significant networking improvements designed to enhance connectivity and security across hybrid environments. The platform now supports simultaneous use of firewalld and nftables services, removing previous limitations that restricted administrators to one service at a time. Firewalld is a commonly used Linux firewall service while notables provides filtering and classification of network packets.

Also of particular note for networking professionals is the fact that the RHEL NetworkManager now supports connecting to IPsec VPNs that use IPv6 addressing.

“Previously, NetworkManager supported only IPv4 addressing when using the NetworkManager-libreswan plugin to connect to Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) VPN,” the RHEL 9.5 release notes state. “With this update, you can connect to IPsec VPNs that use IPv6 addressing.”

NetworkManager now also supports the ‘leftsubnet’ parameter for IPsec VPNs, enabling more sophisticated subnet-to-subnet configurations. Additionally, the nmstate utility gains support for the congestion window clamp (cwnd) option, providing better control over TCP traffic management.