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After many months of intense development, ZeroTier is proud to release version
1.0.3 of ZeroTier One.
This version focuses on under-the-hood and network level improvements to
prepare the way for more user-facing improvements in the months to come, as
well as new products built around the ZeroTier core.
1.0.3 contains a large number of changes, so we're not going to push it out
via our auto-update mechanism yet. We're going to update the download links
on the web site and let users try it out for a while first. If problems are
found, we'll do a 1.0.4 before we push it out to existing installations.
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Important note for Linux users: we've decided to stop pushing auto-updates for
Linux, and this version's official Linux binaries are built without update
checking enabled. Linux is used mostly on servers, and based on user feedback
we've found that most users don't like anything auto-updating outside of the
normal package management channels. Instead, we'll be working over the next
few months to get ZeroTier One included in a number of upstream Linux
distributions. That way you'll be able to 'apt-get' or 'yum' install it and
stay up to date that way. Auto-updates will remain for Macintosh and Windows
users until/unless we can move to 'app store' deployment on those platforms.
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Now for the change list. It's a big one!
NEW FEATURES and IMPROVEMENTS
* Client support is in place for preferred relays on a per-network basis.
This allows you to define statically assigned nodes that act as relays for
indirect communication and connection setup for communication between peers
on a given virtual network. If defined, they'll be used in preference to
supernodes for this purpose. If they're offline, ZeroTier will fall back to
global supernodes. This will require support on the web control panel for
most users to use.
* This version sends NAT "keepalive" packets every 20 seconds, which is
similar to the behavior of most SIP phones. This should improve reliability
behind NATs with short timeouts and certain cheap consumer NAT devices.
* Improvements have been made to NAT traversal to traverse more symmetric
NAT configurations, and to rate limit traversal attempts to avoid looking
like a port scan.
* New direct paths are now confirmed prior to use. This should improve
reliability in cases where a NAT traversal attempt "half succeeds" by
preventing the use of direct links that aren't actually usable.
* A new geo-located TCP tunneling fallback implementation should improve
performance for heavily firewalled users who can't use UDP.
* ZeroTier now uses remotely reported accounts of your external IP address
to detect changes in your network connectivity instead of relying on
"fingerprinting" of the OS-level local network environment. This should
improve reliability in cases where external routers have dynamic IPs or
when changing between networks with different external IPs but similar
internal addressing schemes. This should also improve reliability for
use within virtual machines, since the external link address might change
but the VM's link addresses will not.
* We've eliminated the old Unix domain socket (or named pipe on Windows)
control bus in favor of a local HTTP JSON API. It runs on 127.0.0.1
port 9993 and can be accessed via standard HTTP. This improves
interoperability with scripts and other tools and allows us to use
HTML5 for the desktop UI component. See README.md in the service/
subfolder of the source tree for JSON API documentation.
* The old Qt GUI has been dropped in favor of a React-based HTML5 UI. The
code for this is found in ui/, and if ui/ is present in the ZeroTier
home folder the JSON API HTTP server will serve it on 127.0.0.1/9993.
The Windows and Mac UIs are now web control wrappers which access this
UI locally and automate the process of token lookup and login.
PACKAGING / INSTALLATION IMPROVEMENTS
* The Macintosh version is now packaged as a .pkg file instead of the old
.app that would download its components and bootstrap itself. Several
Mac users had problems with this, so we made it a package instead.
* The Windows installer now includes a cleaner driver installation module
that installs the driver as part of the main MSI file instead of spawning
a subprocess.
BUG FIXES
* Windows now comes with an updated NDIS6 Ethernet tap device driver.
If you still have the old NDIS5 driver installed you'll keep using it,
so if you want to switch to the NDIS6 driver uninstall your old version
and do a fresh install of the new one. NDIS5 is deprecated, so we are
hoping an NDIS6 driver will fix a number of difficult to reproduce
issues that some Windows users have reported. It will also likely
improve performance.
* Fixed a "pseudo" memory leak related to the old auto-update code. The
amount of "committed" (but not used) memory would increase over time.
Since this was not actual used memory it didn't cause real problems,
but the issue is gone now.
* A very rare threading deadlock was fixed.
* Fix for Linux installer that would falsely recognize systemd on some
Ubuntu systems.
DEEP UNDER THE HOOD
* This version has been heavily refactored at the source code level! The
node/ subfolder now contains the core ZeroTier network virtualization
engine without any OS-specific or transport-specific code. This is in
preparation for future plans around embedded devices, etc. There is now
a public C-level API in include/ZeroTierOne.h that defines an interface
to the node core.
* A new network controller implementation is in 1.0.3 based on SQLite and
the local JSON API control bus. IT HAS NOT BEEN HEAVILY TESTED YET, so we
do not recommend using it in production until the next version. You are
welcome to experiment with it.
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