AREDN Production Release 3.24.10.0 is now available.

The biggest change in this release if you haven't been keeping tabs on AREDN, is the "new UI". The User Interface or UI is how data is presented to a person. The old UI, written in LUA not only looked old, it was hampering the implementation of new features.  Now written in JavaScript, among other things it's more economical on bandwidth used to display the user interface.  It's also much easier to add new features. The new UI has taken 6 months and the work of many, many people. We’d like to thank everyone involved with developing, documenting, and especially debugging this; we really appreciate our community!

Because it's new, navigating around it may initially be a challenge. Steve, AB7PA, keeper of the AREDN docs, has done a stellar job in documenting the new UI. It's highly recommended you at least skim them, here: http://docs.arednmesh.org/en/latest/ Within the new UI you will also find a Help button for every dialog. Please press it and read the inline help at least once. Finally, we recorded a walk through of the new UI which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG_2ploIYzg (note that there have been a few minor changes since we did this).

After upgrading, you may be returned to the old UI or you might see the new UI. In either case you will see a green button in the upper-right-hand corner of your browser window which lets you toggle between them. In the new UI you will initially be in Guest mode. To log into Admin mode, click on the little guy in the upper-right-hand corner, click on Login and enter the node's password (no need for a user name).

Updating notes

1. Devices running nightly builds will only notify about new nightly builds; going forward the same behavior will hold for devices running production release code; they'll only notify on detection of new production releases. Regardless all builds will be available in a refreshed update list.
2. If a watchdog timer is enabled, recommend disabling during updates. If the watchdog kicks off during an update it could derail the update process.

Enhancements

• New UI. All the enhancements below are in the new UI only. The old UI remains unchanged.

• New custom UI when first installing nodes.

• Ability to remove unused tunnels

• Added a weight to tunnels, now on a per-tunnel basis (the "weight" artificially degrades the tunnel's ETX; if an RF also route exists and its ETX value is better, it will be preferred)

• Themes support: default, high contrast, color-blind, dark, and light.

• Portable themes let you set a theme on your localnode and see it on every other node. So if you’re color blind for example, you can set that once and see that theme on every node you visit.

• If a node can get to http://downloads.aredenmesh.org it will indicate if a code update is available. Nightly nodes will be notified of nightly updates, while release nodes will be notified of release updates.

• Added update progress indicator when downloading or uploading firmware.

• Added ability to switch between 12 hour and 24 hour displays

• DHCP aliases are now rewritten when DHCP range changes

• Now show metric units if your locale isn't "en-us" or “en-gb”

• Added the option to prevent LQM from blocking poorly performing links. This allows you to keep LQM active and let it manage link performance, without it shutting down crucial connections.

• Added topic-sensitive help in every configuration dialog.

• Added always-running NTPD option

• Added GPS support (see https://github.com/kn6plv/WhereAndWhen for how to install a GPS receiver) which is shared by all DtD connected nodes.

New Device Support

• Ubiquiti Nanobeam 5AC WA

• Support for newer Mikrotik devices that use the newer Mikrotik v7 bootloader

Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed Ubiquiti AC devices failing WiFi scan if on 10MHz

• Fixed time drifting problem on Basebox 5, QRT 5, non-AC mANT 19S

• User firewall rules are now preserved across upgrades

• Fix supernode locator. Now correctly finds the closest one.

Post-release

Just a heads-up - this is what will happen in the first nightly build after this production release:

• The old UI will be removed from the software.  Having both of them there impacts the older 32 MB devices and going forward keeping both UI’s compatible isn’t possible.

• A secondary NTP server option will be added

• WiFi scanning of non-mesh and multiple wifi devices will be supported

• Support for different wireless WAN client encryptions will be added

Post-release note

Those of you who like to run nightlies may want to hold off for a few releases after this production release; there are a lot of changes queued up for the next nightly build (more than shown above) and there's apt to be some breakage for a bit.

Notes

• The way the tunnel addresses are allocated has changed in the new UI. In some unlikely cases you may need to remove a tunnel and re-add it.

• While we provide both UIs in this release, trying to use both interchangeably can cause problems. Once you start using the new UI, please don’t go back and use the old one.

• There remain problems with the TP-Link CPE710.

• GL.iNet GL-B1300 does not support negative channels on the 2.4 GHz band.

• The Litebeam M5 is no longer supported.