NetMAX Newsletter - November 2006

1. [Support] Holiday Hours
2. [New!] NetMAX 5.51 Released
3. [Tips and Tricks] Serial ATA in NetMAX 5.51
4. [General] Let's Hear From You

1. Holiday Hours

It's the holiday time of year, and we here at NetMAX would like to wish you a happy Thanksgiving! Like many folks, we here at NetMAX will be spending Thanksgiving with our families, which means that NetMAX Support will be closed on Thursday, November 23rd and Friday, November 24th. Online help will continue to be available during this time, and our technical support number will still be accepting support messages over the holiday weekend, but immediate live phone support will be temporarily unavailable.

Because of these holiday hours, any support requests or orders received after 2pm on Wednesday, November 22nd may not be addressed until we resume normal support hours on Monday, November 27th.

Thanks for your patience, and have a happy holiday season!

2. NetMAX 5.51 Released

The NetMAX Team has released an update to our NetMAX 5 product family, which upgrades all NetMAX 5.5 products to 5.51. It is strongly recommended that users of all NetMAX 5.x products use NetMAX Package Management to update to version 5.51 at their earliest convenience.

This download is also available via FTP on the NetMAX Downloads page, as are detailed release notes:

www.netmax.com/support/downloads/downloads.html#notes

Some of the updates include:

• NetMAX Professional Suite 5.51 now supports many new SCSI, Serial ATA, and Ethernet chipsets and adapters.
• Installation onto SCSI adapters supported by the LSI Logic mptscsih driver is now supported.
• Installing onto Marvell and 3ware 9xxx Serial ATA adapters has also been added.
• The Marvell/SysKonnect sk98lin driver has been updated to support gigabit Ethernet adapters such as the D-Link DGE-530T.
• The Intel e1000 gigabit Ethernet driver has also been updated to support the latest chipset revisions.
• The syncing functionality added in NetMAX Professional Suite 5.5 has been added to NetMAX VPN Server 5.51.
• The e-mail address(es) in Reports | Alerts | Notification is/are now used for all e-mail sent to the root account on the NetMAX server (this behavior can be overridden by adding "skip /root/.forward" to /etc/commit.conf).
• 69.*, 72.*, and 75.* have all been removed from the IP spoofing blacklist.
• Minor bugs in CIFS, FTP, and procmail log file rotation have been fixed.
• Minor fixes have also been made to the named and PPPOE committers.
• A difficult to trigger bug with adding and removing VPN credentials for two separate accounts simultaneously has been fixed.
• PKCS12 files now owned by the appropriate user for easy download.

Please note that installing this update will reboot your system!

3. Serial ATA in NetMAX 5.51

NetMAX Professional Suite 5.51 supports three Serial ATA solutions. For hardware RAID we support 3ware's 9xxx series with version 9.3.0.4 of the 3w-9xxx driver. For info on these adapters, please refer to:

www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata9000.asp

We now ship version 3.6.1 of the Marvell mv_sata driver, which supports the MV88SX5080, MV88SX5081, MV88SX5040, MV88SX5041, MV88SX6081, MV88SX6041, MV88SX6042, and MV88SX7042 chipsets. Marvell chipsets appear on a wide variety of motherboards and adapters, including the Adaptec 1420SA. NetMAX Professional Suite 5.51 also continues to support the Silicon Image 3112 Serial ATA chipset, which is found on adapters such as the $50 (retail) Belkin F5U198v Serial ATA PCI card.

For Marvell and Silicon Image 3112 RAID configurations you must use NetMAX Professional Suite's software RAID functionality.

4. Let's Hear From You!

We would very much like to hear from you - especially about how you use NetMAX and Linux in your business, and what features we can add to NetMAX to make it better suit your needs. Please contribute your input to the NetMAX Forum at:

www.netmax.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

or to our general NetMAX contact form at:

www.netmax.com/partners/contacts.html

Let us know about your likes, dislikes, and general comments. We are especially interested in the features that you would like to see in the forthcoming NetMAX 6.0 release.

Thank you!