Version 2.3.0 released

[dswd]

VpnCloud version 2.3.0 has just been released 🎉

In this post, I want to summarize all the changes in the new version.

📦 Installation packages can be found on the release page and installation instructions are given on the project homepage. As usual, the packages will be put on the repositories in a few days.

📋 Changes

💡 New platform: ARMv5TE

Thanks to @xek VpnCloud is now also available for ARMv5TE. Automatic builds have been updated to build VpnCloud for armv5te on Debian and as static binary automatically.

💡 New feature: Option to specify advertised addresses

Thanks to @jisqyv for contributing the option to specify the advertised addresses (instead of determining them automatically from the local IP and/or the NAT router).

Citing #185:

This configuration option permits the declaration of external or public
addresses instead of attempting to learn them from port forwarding or
interfaces. This is useful in situations where it isn’t possible to
accurately obtain the correct external addresses that peers should use.

Add the --advertise_addresses control argument to accompany the new
configuration option. Also parse the listen address/port to extract the
port to advertise with advertise_addresses instead of assuming it is
just a port.

💡 New feature: Nodes now learn their own address from peers

Related to the previous feature, nodes now learn their addresses from their peers when they exchange the node lists.
Whenever one node connects to a new peers, this peer stores the origin address of this connection attempt. In the next peer list exchange the peer sends this address back to the node and helps it to detect its public IP address and port.

🪲 Bugfix: Fixed problem with IPv4 addresses in listen option

A bug in the socket options caused problems when an IPv4 listen address was explicitly specified.

🪲 Bugfix: Fixed periodic broadcast messages in switch mode

A bug in the peer list exchange caused the side-effect that nodes forget all forwarding table entries of a peer whenever they process a peer list exchange of that peer. Now, those nodes should no longer periodically send out broadcasts for addresses that should still be in the forwarding table. This has been discussed in #253 and #255.

⬆️ Updated dependencies

The builds have been updated to use Rust 1.57.

All dependencies have been updated to their latest versions.

The chrono crate is now used instead of the time crate (the time crate broke some functionality to fix a security issue and did not fix that functionality since).

📊 Performance

According to the experiments on AWS the changes were:

• Throughput plain: 5791 MBit/s -> 6388 MBit/s (+10%)
• Throughput AES256: 3918 MBit/s -> 3802 MBit/s (-3%)
• Throughput AES128: 3697 MBit/s -> 3880 MBit/s (+5%)
• Throughput ChaCha20: 3194 MBit/s -> 3126 MBit/s (-2%)