SD-WAN Internet 4.3 release notes

October 12, 2011

Additions

  • The bonding tunnels now negotiate the largest MTU that can be used across a set of legs. The accepted MTU is shown on the bond details page in the configuration interface. This will eliminate data transfer issues arising from mismatched MTUs between bonders and aggregators.

  • Ping probe timing for failover legs can now be changed in the configuration interface. This allows, for example, a 3G failover leg to send pings less frequently than a DSL failover leg, in order to save bandwidth. A new Munin plugin tracks the timing configuration.

Changes

  • The bonding tunnel now uses an event-based design rather than a multi-threaded design. This reduces CPU load, allowing an aggregator to host more bonds than before and increasing network throughput on devices that were previously bound by CPU power, such as Soekris devices with AMD Geode processors.

  • Packet authentication is now done by OpenSSL directly, rather than through a secondary library. Between this change, using an evented dispatch model, and a variety of minor changes, CPU usage has dropped by about 66% under load and 90% at idle.

  • The Bonding log file is now rotated by logrotate. Past daily logs have names such as bonding.log.1, bonding.log.2, and so on. Two weeks of logs are retained.

  • The Bonding installer now creates empty hook directories in /etc/bonding.

  • PPP no longer runs in “debug” mode and logs fewer details.

Fixes

  • The tunnel process is now always restarted by Bonding if it crashes or hangs.

  • Bonding no longer discards output from the tunnel when the tunnel process quits. All output from the tunnel is written to the Bonding log file.

  • The tunnel now starts even if the default root qdisc on a network interface is not pfifo_fast. It can now handle any type of root qdisc, or an absent root qdisc.

  • Bonding no longer queues traffic rate updates for submission to the config server. Rate updates are now sent once and discarded after a failure. This is more appropriate than retrying them because old updates are of little interest and because updates occur with such frequency that the update backlog becomes very large when the config server is unavailable.

  • Bonding no longer crashes if the tunnel executable is missing.

  • When the tunnel is restarted with a delay, the log message now accurately says when the tunnel will be restarted.

  • The tunnel reports the correct version number when called with “–version” as an argument.