BrickStor SP 23.7 Release Notes

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Thank you for choosing BrickStor SP. The RackTop team is pleased to announce the availability of BrickStor SP 23.7.

About the Release Notes

The release notes provide critical and release-specific information for BrickStor SP 23.7 behavioral changes.

 

23.7.0

Hub

Release 23.7 marks the full production release of Hub, BrickStor SP’s new web-based management and administrative interface. Hub was available as a preview in 23.6 and has since been expanded in depth to cover all major areas of functionality. The legacy MyRack Manager GUI for Windows is deprecated and will no longer be available in release 23.8.

S3 Object Storage (Technology Preview)

A new S3 protocol access is available as a technology preview. This permits S3-enabled applications and infrastructure to store and retrieve files on a BrickStor SP while enjoying the protection and monitoring of RackTop’s Active Defense technology. S3 is enabled via the command line utility s3adm. RackTop’s S3 implementation supports NTFS ACLs as well as concurrent SMB and NFS share access.

Active Defense

  • New assessors for detecting denied file access, unexpected dataset access, off-hours access, unexpected user/host access, and system administrator attempts to access the BrickStor SP.

  • Improvements were made to the assessors to reduce false-positive incidents.

SMB and NFS

  • SMB versions earlier than 2.1 are now disabled by default. Refer to the Breaking Changes section for instructions on how to activate SMB protocol versions older than 2.1 if these are required for some clients.

  • The SMB service can be bound to a specific network interface.

  • Improved support for non-Windows SMB clients, such as Linux and various printers.

  • Support added for SMB directory persistent handles.

  • Support added for SMB GMAC signing and improved signing performance.

  • Active Directory interaction and membership management improvements.

  • Support added for named NFSv3 exports. NFS shares can now be exported with a free-form name that is visible to NFS clients instead of the traditional path-based share name when using NFSv3.

TDM

  • L1 read cache with prefetch improves read performance.

High Availability

  • Improved cluster shared disk support with SCSI PGRs (Persistent Group).

  • Automatic secondary node power-off feature has been deprecated.

  • Improved iSCSI LUN failover in HA cluster environments.

System

  • Shared admin accounts now generate Warning level security events. A unique admin account should be created for e ach operator.

  • The iSCSI initiator will now emit Send Target Discovery requests to the specified iSCSI server to get a list of available IQNs, reducing the need to know the desired IQN in advance.

  • Improved reliability when removing iSCSI LUNs that are no longer being served to the BrickStor SP.

  • Crash dumps are now enabled by default, enabling quicker fault analysis.

 

Breaking Changes

Minimum SMB protocol version

Support for SMB versions older than 2.1 was disabled by default in BrickStor SP release 23.7. The older versions of the SMB protocol are designs that predate modern security and authentication mechanisms. They also lack many performance-oriented features that later SMB versions have. If support for the older protocol versions is still required for devices in your organization, they may be enabled via the BrickStor SP CLI:

Enabling SMB 1.0

SMB 1.0 is also referred to as Common Internet File System (CIFS).

$ sudo sharectl set -p min_protocol=1 smb
Enabling SMB 2.002

SMB 2.002 was the first public release of "SMB 2.0" by Microsoft and had a short life before being superseded by SMB 2.1. Despite that, some devices may be limited to using this version.

$ sudo sharectl set -p min_protocol=2.002 smb

In order to maintain a positive security posture, RackTop recommends that customers identify systems that require SMB versions older than SMB 2.1 and upgrade them, as newer firmware for printers and similar devices might give them the ability to access shares via SMB 2.1 or newer. That would eliminate the need to reactivate support for the deprecated SMB versions in BrickStor SP.

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