iolbox v0.4.1

iolbox v0.4.1

A lightweight, Windows-native lab for Cisco IOL and VPCS. Ships no Cisco
software — supply your own IOL/IOU images and hold the appropriate
licenses for them.

This release folds in the v0.4.0 workstreams (node-start latency, refresh
survives a browser reload, LACP/LLDP passthrough) plus a v0.4.1 follow-up
round focused on trustworthiness of the shipped binaries and a real build fix.

Highlights

• Faster node start. Starting/stopping a node no longer re-walks every
  fabric link in the lab: a warm node.start dropped from re-attaching the
  whole lab's links to skipping everything already correctly wired
  (kernel-state verified, not just bookkeeping). Measured on a 9-link lab:
  cold lab.start 1083 ms → 579 ms; warm node.start down to ~3 ms.
• A browser refresh no longer kills your running lab. Previously,
  reloading the GUI tore down and reloaded the lab from scratch — stopping
  every running node. The GUI now detects a lab that's already running and
  adopts it in place; the server does the same for a second tab opening the
  same lab. An explicit switch to a different lab still does a real
  teardown-and-load, as before.
• LACP and LLDP now cross point-to-point links. A userspace tee carries
  slow-protocol frames (LACP, plus LLDP/802.1X via a bridge group_fwd_mask
  change) across the static-tap fabric, so link-aggregation and neighbor
  discovery labs behave like real hardware.
• Pre-login console banner. Every appliance (OVA, VMware, WSL, LXC) now
  shows an IOLBOX splash on the VM console before login — the Web GUI URL,
  live service status, and build version — refreshed every 20s. No more
  guessing the IP from a bare Debian login prompt.
• Smarter GUI caching. The embedded browser GUI's static assets are now
  cached correctly: content-hashed bundle files are cached for a year
  (immutable — a rebuild always ships new URLs), while the app shell
  revalidates on every load via ETag, so an upgrade is picked up immediately
  instead of risking a stale cached shell requesting vanished assets.
• Windows launcher: back to a plain, predictable exe. An in-between
  build added a local web control-panel to the launcher; it's been reverted
  in favor of the original simple, predictable design (an unsigned exe
  binding a listener and accepting uploads at startup is exactly the shape
  that trips antivirus heuristics). In its place: the launcher now asks for
  vCPU/RAM interactively on a normal double-click (vCPUs for the guest [4]: / RAM MB for the guest [4096]: — Enter twice for defaults), while
  --smp/--mem or a non-interactive/scripted launch skip the prompt
  entirely.
• Build fix: the repo now actually builds from a fresh clone. A
  .gitignore pattern (iourc*) had been silently excluding the
  supervisor/internal/iourc source package from every commit — the
  packaged binaries were never affected (they were built from a local
  checkout that still had the untracked files on disk), but anyone cloning
  the repo and running go build would have hit no required module provides package .../internal/iourc. Fixed and verified by CI building
  clean from this tag.

Downloads — which one do I want?

Situation	Artifact
Windows desktop, simplest path	iolbox-launcher-v0.4.1-windows.zip (launcher + disk + bundled QEMU, all in one archive)
VMware Workstation / ESXi / VirtualBox	iolbox-appliance-v0.4.1.ova
WSL2 already enabled	iolbox-rootfs.tar
Proxmox homelab	iolbox-ct-v0.4.1.tar.zst
Existing Linux server	iolbox-server-v0.4.1.tar.gz

Full step-by-step instructions for every target: docs/INSTALL.md.

The GUI comes up at http://<host>:4001 — it has no login of any kind;
keep it on localhost or a network you trust.

Note on the Windows launcher exe: it's unsigned. Some antivirus tools
(Malwarebytes in particular) may flag a fresh, never-seen, unsigned Go
binary heuristically on first run — this is a false positive, not a
detection of anything in the binary. Code signing is planned for a future
release.

Verifying your download

SHA256SUMS.txt (attached to this release) lists the checksum for every
artifact:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt

What's not included

The raw VMware .vmdk/.vmx pair is intentionally not attached to this
release — the OVA above is the same appliance in a single, smaller,
standard-format file. If you specifically need the pre-converted raw disk,
open an issue and it can be added.

Full changelog

v0.3.2...v0.4.1 — see the commit log.