Ubuntu Server For Linux

As usual, the desktop edition of Ubuntu 23.10 steals the show when it comes to public attention. With the release of Ubuntu 23.10, code-named Mantic Minotaur, the world also gets a new server version.

Considering that 23.10 is an interim release (meaning it will be supported for only nine months, until July 2024), this server release is mostly used to showcase what we can expect from the upcoming 24.04 LTS.

Starting from the top, Ubuntu Server 23.10 now features an upgraded version of apache2 (namely 2.4.57). Compared to 2.4.55, this new version adds the BCTLS and BNE RewriteRule flag to mod_rewrite and fixes a few important security issues and bugs.

Django has also been updated to 4.2 (which is the latest LTS version available), and it includes various features and bug fixes.

Dovecot also receives a new version jumping from 2.3.19 to 2.3.20. This release is mainly aimed at fixing whatever bugs were introduced in 2.3.19.

The monitoring plugins pack is now shipped with version 2.3.3. There's a new PRld64 and RPlu65 feature (which replaces the %ld), as well as various important bug fixes and other enhancements.

With the release of Ubuntu Server 23.10, Nginx is updated to 1.24 (from 1.22) and Spamassassin is now present as version 4 that introduces support for DMARC. https://nginx.org/en/CHANGES-1.24

The docker.io package has also been updated to version 24.0.5, and is shipped with a lot of changes, including two new Docker CLI plugins (docker-buildx 0.11.2 and docker-compose-v2 2.20.2). This is also a good time to point out that the AUFS and legacy overlay storage drivers have been removed in Ubuntu Server 23.10.

Containerd has been updated to version 1.7.2, and the samba package is now available in 4.18.x version. The 4.18.x series is heavily focused on incremental improvements.

Other changes include a new ISC Kea version (2.2.1), a new QEMU version (8.0.x series), an upgrade for the libvirt package (9.6.0), to OpenLDAP (2.6.6), and sssd (2.9.1).

Last but not least, Ubuntu Server 23.10 now includes the latest version of OpenStack (2023.2) and features changes to the following components: OpenStack Identity - Keystone, OpenStack Imaging - Glance, OpenStack Block Storage - Cinder, OpenStack Compute - Nova, OpenStack Networking - Neutron, OpenStack Telemetry - Ceilometer, Aodh, Gnocchi, OpenStack Orchestration - Heat, and many others.

Ubuntu Server 23.10 is by no means an exciting release, but it does show the continuous evolution of the Server variant of Ubuntu. It's also a good indication of what we can expect from the future release of Ubuntu Server (24.04 LTS).