Airlock 5 Highlights

Airlock 5.0 Feature Overview

While the main focus of Airlock 5 is the platform port from Solaris to Linux, Airlock 5 comes with many new features that simplify the daily business of administrators.

Platform Port to Linux - The main focus in Airlock 5 development was the operating system port from Solaris to Linux. Although the port was complex and laborious, basing on Linux brings many immediate and strategic benefits. Linux is a sustainable platform and has a large developer and user community. Even though the SPARC platform will not be supported anymore, Linux gives Airlock customers more flexibility regarding modern hardware vendors. We are looking forward to boot/install systems with USB sticks. Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) ensures a secure system architecture by running critical components, such as the web listener which terminates HTTP and SSL, in separate security compartments. All Airlock programs and processes natively use the features of 64-bit hardware.

Session Viewer - The new session viewer allows inspection of active user sessions directly in the configuration center. This facilitates integration works and troubleshooting even more.

Apache Expert Settings - The configuration center supports settings that directly affect the doorway Apache server. This adds a great level of flexibility to Airlock's configuration capabilities, without resorting to the command-line. All Apache expert settings are included in the configuration backup and survive updates. Possible scenarios include for instance: time based maintenance pages, client certificate whitelisting or optimized renegotiation settings.

Regular Expression Engine - With version 5, Airlock uses the PCRE syntax for regular expressions. The new engine is significantly faster than the Solaris standard engine. The PCRE syntax is much more intuitive for human-beings than the old ERE syntax and it comes with enhanced functionality. If possible and meaningful, existing regular expression patterns are automatically converted to the new syntax. Ambiguous patterns are not altered and will create warnings in the GUI.

Performance Gain - Performance ratings are not trivial - many aspects depend on the current usage. Our various standard scenarios indicate a performance gain of about 20% in terms of CPU cycles. Airlock contains optimized individual performance settings for physical and virtual machines.

Mapping Specific Idle Timeout - This feature allows configuration of scenarios like re-authentication enforcement without session loss or adaptive timeouts without the need for authentication.

API - Airlock APIs are extended more and more. It's possible to define own mapping templates for using them in the configuration center. Other APIs allow the activation on command line or including own back-end checks in the failover logic.

Version Upgrades - Of course, all components are updated to the newest stable versions.

For detailed information on this release, don’t hesitate to contact us through our support form.   

4.2.6.x support: 
Airlock major versions are usually supported for one more year after publication of the following major version. To ease platform migration to Airlock 5, support for Airlock 4.2.6.x will be guaranteed for additional 6 months. That is, Airlock 4.2.6.x will be supported for 18 months after publication of Airlock 5.0, until July 2015.

Upgrade Guide:
Start using Airlock 5 today by following the Airlock 5 Upgrade Guide.