Unraid Server OS 6.4.0 Released!

Meltdown/Spectre Security Patching

No doubt many of you have already heard about the two major security vulnerabilities recently discovered that are affecting the bulk of the CPUs in the market today. While patches for the Spectre vulnerability are still in development by the open source community, the Meltdown patches are included in version 6.4. If you’re not familiar with Meltdown or Spectre and would like to learn more, this site offers good insights on the issue and how it affects systems.

Disk Encryption

While data loss is a very scary thing, data theft can be even worse. Disk encryption protects your devices from being accessed in the event of loss or theft. Simply select an encrypted version of any of our supported filesystems. Next, make sure you set a passphrase and then format your devices (note: this will purge all existing data on the disk, so only do this with a disk you don’t mind blowing away). Each time before you can start your array, you will be prompted to enter that passphrase. Without that passphrase, your encrypted devices will not mount and their data will not be accessible. Whether you are protecting your family photos or your engineering design for a real flux capacitor, encryption has you covered.

Certified SSL Connectivity

The beauty of SSL is that it provides you with the same benefit as disk encryption, but as it applies to your interactions with the webGui itself. This ensures that when you login to the webGui, enter your encryption pass phrase, create user accounts, or anything else, the connections to your server are completely secure. Thanks to Let’s Encrypt, we didn’t just add SSL support, we got it certified and personalized just for you. This ensures that when you connect to the webGui, not only is your connection secure, it can be trusted (and no annoying browser warnings). Best of all, we made this all available to you at the click of a button and at no cost to you. Considering that a normal SSL certificate can range between $5-70 a year on top of the cost of registering a domain name itself, we hope you appreciate the value!

New webGui Themes

Our very own Community Member bonienl has been hard at work to include two new theme options for Unraid 6.4: Azure and Gray. Both of these new themes present the menu for the webGui along the left hand side, providing a fresh and new way to navigate through it. Please be sure to give this man some kudos over in the forum for his efforts in this area!

Expanded Hardware Support

As with each new release, we always look to include support for more and more devices. 6.4 is no exception to that, as we’ve added support for a number of new devices including 4Kn hard drives, EDAC, additional 10 gigabit Ethernet controllers, and some new storage controllers.

New and Improved Web Server

Thanks to the use of nginx as our new web server for Unraid 6.4, you might notice a bit of a performance improvement (consider that an understatement ;-). In addition, nginx also provides us with SSL and websocket support, the latter of which will let us do some pretty neat things with the webGui going forward to provide a truly more dynamic web interface. All in all, nginx is a very welcome addition to Unraid OS, and we’re pretty sure you guys are going to like it as well.

UEFI Boot Support

With newer and newer hardware, we are finding support for UEFI as a boot mode. In some cases, we’ve even seen some hardware drop traditional VGA-BIOS support. It is for this reason that we’ve added support for it in version 6.4.

Flash Backup to PC

A common question we see from the community is how to make a proper backup of your USB flash device. With 6.4, we’ve made it as easy as clicking a button. Simply navigate to the Flash device settings page to find it!

IPv6 Support

As the number of Internet-connected devices continues to increase at an ever growing rate, our need to have a new standard of Internet addressing becomes more and more important. You can now leverage routers and switches that are adopting this new standard. Thanks again to bonienl who has greatly improved Unraid OS networking support.