Introducing LiquidFiles v3

LiquidFiles v3 is a major LiquidFiles release with quite a few changes, feature additions and enhancements. This page highlights the important changes.

New Operating System Platform — CentOS 7, 64bit

While this is not a major functional feature in itself, it is important from an installation/migration perspective. Since we're moving between major CentOS versions and from 32 to 64 bit, it's not possible to do an in-place upgrade from LiquidFiles v2.x to v3.

The good thing though is that we have a well tested process for moving data between two installations, for instance if you where moving from EC2 to a local system, from Hyper-V to VMware or just between two systems in two different locations. It's the same process we'll use when moving from your old LiquidFiles v2.x system to a new LiquidFiles v3 system.

Please see: https://docs.liquidfiles.com/install/move_server.html for instructions how to migrate your data to a new server. You will need to update your LiquidFiles system to at least version v2.6.27 before migrating.

With the move to CentOS 7 64 bit we have a stable, long term platform that is supported at least until 2020.

File and Folder sharing

This has been one of the most requested features for years. The ability to have a folder structure where a group of users can login and share files with each other, without the need to attach files to messages. And if a file is updated, it's still in the same location and the next user that accesses the file will access the updated version, and so on.

With LiquidFiles v3, you will now have access to this feature and you will be able to assign different LiquidFiles groups to different LiquidFiles Shares with either read or read/write access, or more granular down to a user basis as well.

Let's Encrypt

LiquidFiles now supports Let's Encrypt, which is a free and open Certificate Authority with automatic certificate renewals. Once you've made sure that your LiquidFiles installation is reachable from the Internet and has the domain name you wish to use, you can just click to enable Let's Encrypt and you will never have to worry about Certificates again. And it's all free.

Email From from one email fixed email address

In the past few months, we've gotten quite a lot of requests for this feature. Mostly driven by challenges of configuring Email Relay's to trust any email sent from LiquidFiles, and also challenges configuring local mail servers to not validate SPF records from LiquidFiles. Setting the Email address to use one fixed email address will make it a lot easier in these instances and is the new default setting in LiquidFiles v3.

Email Domain Aliases

For companies with multiple domains and the same users with several different email domains, i.e. where joe.user@company.com and joe.user@subsidiarycompany.com is the same user, it's now possible to define Email Domain Aliases to tell LiquidFiles that in this instance @subsidiarycompany.com is a domain alias for @company.com and any user in the alias domain should be treated as someone from the primary domain. This will make it a lot easier in situations where a domain name changes for users and in the transition they have access to both email addresses.

LDAP attributes automatically update users

In version 2.x of LiquidFiles, LDAP attributes are only set at the time a user is created. If you change email address, name or LDAP group down the track, LiquidFiles won't be updated with the new information. In LiquidFiles v3, except for sysadmins (to avoid you locking yourself out), whenever a users LDAP attribute changes, name, email address or group, LiquidFiles will be updated on the next login.

Outgoing HTTP/HTTPS proxy support

Primarily in larger enterprise networks, it's been challenging to permit downloading updates, license validation, fetching geolocation data and so on. LiquidFiles v3 adds support for outgoing HTTP and HTTPS proxy support to make it easier to deploy in networks that require proxies for outbound traffic.

Updated Admin pages

In LiquidFiles v3, all Admin pages are now responsive so easily browsable from mobile devices. We've also added a Performance Page that gives better historical data of CPU Usage, Data Disk Usage, Memory Usage and Swap usage. We've also added a Admin/Attachments page where you can much more easily find current attachments on the system if you quickly need to delete a few large attachments to make room.

JSON API

For those of you that integrate LiquidFiles into your environment using the API, we have now switched the API method from XML to JSON. The Admin API has always been JSON only, the Filetransfer API functions that currently exists in LiquidFiles will still support XML for the time being and we will drop support for XML in v3.2 so you will have some time to update your integrations.

FTPdir — simple FTP directory to drop files in

In a way, it's amazing that we're still relying on these very old standards like SMTP for email and FTP for automated file transfers. We've gotten quite a few requests from companies that want to use LiquidFiles as just a FTP store where some function can drop some files or folders, and another function can login and pickup files later and with LiquidFiles v3, this is now possible. There's no web integration or anything further than just a simple FTP directory where you can drop files (up to a predefined quota) and then pick them up later. And if you have a process that relies on FTP, LiquidFiles can now be used for that process as well.

SSH Admin and SCP/SFTP TCP port changes

In LiquidFiles v3, TCP port 22 is now used for FTPdrop and FTPdir when you use scp or sftp. This was previously used for SSH Admin of the LiquidFiles appliance and this has now been moved to use TCP port 222 instead.

It's also now supported to set a separate IP address limit for SSH Admin to limit access from dedicated Admin networks or systems.

Other Changes

• New versions of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Nginx, Postfix, Proftpd and most other underlying system functions.
• Moved from MySQL to MariaDB (the free and open branched out version of MySQL).
• Updated background processing method that's more scalable and with less limitations.
• Data storage mount point has moved to /data (used to be /var/data in v1.x and v2.x).
• Data storage structure now treats all domain, including the default domain the same.
• Updated HTML Editor that plays nicer with more browsers.
• Better support for enabling individual features for groups — you can now enable File Requests without Enabling Sending Messages.