Shortly before Christmas 2024, Fortra released version 7.7.0 of both GoAnywhere MFT and GoAnywhere Agents, unveiling some notable new features and enhancements. To help our GoAnywhere customers fully understand these updates and what it means for their file transfer solution, we tapped into the expertise of our Principal Technical Consultant, Richard Auger, who took a deep dive into the latest release.
What is fixed in this release?
Broadly speaking, most of the eleven fixes in this release are minor, and the majority of administrators will not have been impacted by the issues that have been addressed.
If you have had problems managing address books and secure forms using LDAP group membership, this has been resolved. There were some fixes for PeSIT issues (compression and concurrent tasks), and FIPS selection problems (including one that prevents successful upgrade of FIPS enabled agents). Otherwise, the remaining fixes were more cosmetic in nature and addressed issues with the views that the administrator may have received.
What is updated in this release?
There are several updates, but the most notable are the following:
- The SQL Server JDBC Driver in both GoAnywhere MFT and Agents has been increased from 6.4 to 12.8, and the version of tomcat in GoAnywhere MFT has been upgraded to 9.0.97.
- FIPS 140-2 compliant cipher list has been updated, as well as now permitting the selection of cipher/mac/algorithms in SSH clients.
What has changed in this release?
It seems that there are quite a number of enhancements in this latest release of GoAnywhere MFT. In my opinion, the most important of these are:
- The process of cancelling ‘ghost’ or ‘stuck’ jobs has been improved. These are jobs where the background thread has completed but there is still a record in the active jobs table, normally caused by the end of job record not being written to the database. These can be challenging to detect and clean up, if this really has resolved this longstanding problem then this change alone warrants upgrading.
- The transfer process between GoAnywhere MFT and Agents has been improved by reducing memory fragmentation.
Other than these two changes, most updates occur in the administrator portal and are on the whole aimed at the performance of the web UI, for example a faster response time on the monitors page.
What is new in this release?
Support for newer more secure algorithms (curve25519 KEX and HMAC-SHA algorithms) have been added to the SSH resources – useful if you are exchanging files with newer systems.
Azure blob resources can now be configured using a SAS token rather than a storage account key – great if you are concerned with granting too much access via a storage account.
Something that is probably not too important to a lot of administrators is that GACMD now has the ability to manage AS4 features - adding or removing message channels to the AS4 service, or else managing all aspects of a web users AS4 settings.
Perhaps the biggest change in this version of GoAnywhere MFT is that two other Fortra products have been linked into the software. These are currently both in Beta release and require extra modules to be purchased to make use of them.
The first of these is Threat Brain, which you can read about here. Threat Brain works with HTTPS connections and can be considered as an advanced version of IP blocking. However, it isn’t just looking at one particular GoAnywhere instance, rather it can access a repository of information drawn from machines across the planet. The intent is to pre-emptively stop malicious attacks on your system.
You can configure the Threat Brain settings from the system menu.
The second new integration is FileCatalyst as a service. FileCatalyst has been part of GoAnywhere MFT as a resource since version 7.0, but it is now available as a service too.
This has obviously required a few changes, for example adding a Trigger, feature for web users, audit etc. The licence has been moved out of FileCatalyst and into GoAnywhere MFT as well:
If you’ve not come across FileCatalyst previously, it is a fast file transfer application, similar to the GoFast application (which has not yet been deprecated). FileCatalyst has superior compression when compared to GoFast and is consequently able to deliver large files more quickly.
In summary, even if Threat Brain and FileCatalyst are not on your wish list, this version of GoAnywhere is worth upgrading to, if only for the better management of stuck jobs, more secure ciphers, and enhanced transfers between MFT and Agents
The release notes can be found at:
- https://hstechdocs.helpsystems.com/releasenotes/Content/_ProductPages/GoAnywhere/GAMFT.htm
- https://hstechdocs.helpsystems.com/releasenotes/Content/_ProductPages/GoAnywhere/Agents.htm
If you have any questions about the release of GoAnywhere MFT 7.7.0, or around how to install it, please get in touch with one of our technical experts and we'd be happy to help.
|
About the Author |
|
|
Richard Auger is the Principal Technical Consultant at Pro2col, and has been working in the field of file transfer and middleware for around twenty years. He’s currently Pro2col’s lead Technical Consultant helping clients get the most out of their MFT solution. One of the reasons why Richard loves tech is his curious nature. Tech is constantly evolving, so he is always trying the latest tech releases and testing their limits. |
