v0.8.9

[Revertron]

New Features

• System tray icon — ALFIS can now run with a hidden UI and be shown/restored via tray icon actions (Windows, Linux) (Feature/tray icon #397)
• Dark theme — Updated UI styles with dark theme support
• Adaptive DNS server selection — NS servers are now selected based on RTT (round-trip time) banding, automatically preferring faster servers
• Adaptive forwarder selection — RTT-based server selection extended to configured DNS forwarders as well
• DNS cache memory limit — Cache now enforces a configurable memory limit instead of growing unbounded
• Bare IP forwarders — Config now accepts plain IP addresses for DNS forwarders (without requiring a full URL)

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• Fixed large DNS responses over DoH — Resolved issue where very large DNS results failed over DNS-over-HTTPS (Out of range access when receiving large response from upstream server #411)
• Fixed 0x20 encoding in DNS cache — Cache now correctly handles case-randomized query names
• Disabled 0x20 encoding for NS queries — Prevents issues with authoritative servers that don't preserve query name casing
• Fixed TXT record parsing — Corrected a bug in DNS TXT record deserialization
• Faster initial sync — Blockchain initial synchronization is significantly faster
• Fixed sync regression — Resolved a bug in the new sync logic
• DNS server starts earlier — DNS server now initializes before blockchain sync completes, reducing startup latency
• Windows service improvements — Made the Windows service handler more robust
• Tuned DoH HTTP client — Improved HTTPS client settings for DNS-over-HTTPS requests
• Disabled DevTools & context menu in release builds

Internal / CI

• Updated dependencies
• Updated CI workflows for parallel release builds
• Reduced noisy ureq trace logging

Important notice

The GPG key for the Debian repo has expired. The recommended solution is in #412

---

This discussion was created from the release v0.8.9.