Bonded Internet 2015.3 release notes

June 19, 2015

Bonded Internet 2015.3 adds support for mobile broadband modems (both USB and internal PCI), tracks leg outages to report the amount of downtime prevented by Bonded Internet, and adds an Administration section to the management server that provides a central place to manage various settings, many of which were previously available only by modifying text files on the server.

As announced in the 2015.2 release notes, this version is not compatible with versions of Bonded Internet prior to 2014.1. Partners will only be eligible for the 2015.3 upgrade when they have upgraded all their nodes to 2014.1 or later.

This release deprecates support for the performance charting features of Bonded Internet 2014.3 and earlier. Support for performance metrics collection from 2014.3 and earlier nodes will be removed in 2015.4. Since only the old performance metrics feature is being deprecated, partners with 2014.3 and earlier nodes will still receive the 2015.4 upgrade.

Bonding Node

Additions

  • USB and internal PCI modems can be connected to a bonder and used as a leg. All leg features such as latency reporting, MTU detection, and bandwidth adaptation are supported. To use mobile broadband legs, a bonder must run Debian 7 (“Wheezy”), not Debian 6 (“Squeeze”). It also requires a recent Linux kernel such as 3.14 or later. The 3.16 kernel has been installed by default for all new bonders since late 2014. Wheezy bonders imaged prior to that can be remotely upgraded to a recent kernel.
  • Connectivity to DNS servers is monitored for each leg. This allows bonders to connect to the management server more reliably in rare cases where one or more legs cannot contact any DNS servers.
  • Default configurations have been added in core applications to improve reliability if certain config files are out-of-date.
  • A number of fields have been added to the bond, leg, connected IP, and route hooks. See the hook documentation for the latest list of fields.

Removals

  • Removed handling for certain cached configuration files from very old versions of Bonded Internet.

Changes

  • Error messages from the nodeconfig, nodessl, and installer applications have been improved and clarified.

Fixes

  • Fixed an issue that could prevent a leg from being used as a failover leg in the tunnel even if it appeared as failover in the management interface.
  • The available Ethernet interface modes for legs and connected IPs are detected properly on Squeeze bonders.
  • Fixed an error in the tunnel that could occur under rare network or host error conditions.
  • Fixed an error handing issue in nodeconfig and nodessl that could result in a traceback being shown.

Bonding Admin

Additions

  • Mobile broadband legs can be managed from the web interface. Available settings include a field to enable or disable roaming, options to limit the modem to certain access modes (2G/3G/4G) and radio bands, and an optional IMEI field to make the leg use a specific modem. Data reported from the modems include signal strength, carrier name and modem model information.
  • Mobile broadband provider settings are managed in profiles that are applied to one or more legs. Provider profiles can be created from scratch or by searching an included crowd-sourced database of mobile providers.
  • Leg outages are tracked in order to report the amount of downtime prevented by Bonded Internet for a bond. For example, if a leg fails for one hour, but Bonded Internet prevents an outage by failing the customer’s traffic over to a different leg, this is reported as one hour of prevented downtime. Values are reported for individual bonds and for the partner’s entire environment. Bonders must be upgraded to 2015.3 to report this data.
  • Leg statuses are are tracked and displayed in a 24-hour line chart on the bond details page. This makes it easy to tell at a glance when a leg is down, up, or degraded over the past 24 hours.
  • The custom node provisioning ISO offers an option to use serial on ttyS1 instead only ttyS0, to support devices with USB-mode console connections such as the new Netgate RCC series.
  • The provisioning ISO shows the management server URL on the first dialog.
  • A set of pages dedicated to administrative settings has been added to the web interface:
    • Aggregator failover—configures the timeout values used by the aggregator failover service
    • HTTPS security page—shows details about the TLS/SSL certificate used by the management web server, and displays a certificate signing request that can be used to get a signed certificate from an SSL vendor
    • ISO defaults—allows changing the root password and time zone settings configured when installing a node from from the custom ISO
    • Backups—shows details about local backup files and offers a ZIP file download containing a backup of critical management server data
  • Certain environment-wide settings are available in the API and server command line. All new settings added in future releases will also be available in the API.

Removals

  • Removed compatibility with nodes running versions of Bonded Internet earlier than 2014.1.

Changes

  • The leg user interface and editing forms have been redesigned to make more effective use of screen space.
  • The bond edit form has been clarified by enabling or disabling fields that depend on certain values in other fields. For example, the encryption cipher option is disabled unless the tunnel security option is set to encryption.
  • Performance of the speed test API and index page has been significantly improved.
  • The Users page has been moved to the Administration section.
  • The software repository option has moved from the Node Setup page to a dedicated page in the Administration section.
  • The periodic task that updates the list of nodes connected to the management VPN server now fetches the data from OpenVPN’s control socket, not from its status file.
  • Configuration updates for bonds, legs, and other objects are no longer sent to aggregators that have never been online.
  • Backup files in /var/lib/bondingadmin/backups are no longer compressed.

Fixes

  • Validation of fields set via the API has been improved.
  • Validation is improved for node metric reporting and collection intervals.
  • Pagination of the bond index page and other index pages now works properly when a search filter is applied.
  • Speed test results no longer return with partial data.
  • The aggregator list page no longer has icons for sorting by bond counts, since this was never supported.
  • When a speed test fails, the speed test list shows the error message instead of a generic message.