Version 2.2.0 released

[dswd]

VpnCloud version 2.2.0 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 feature: Interactive config wizard

Configuring a VPN network has been hard for some users due to the config file syntax and the huge amount of options (most of which are expert-only).
This release features an interactive config wizard, that helps users to create and modify config files. The wizard can be invoked using vpncloud config. It then asks the config values in an interactive manner, using existing values as default. The wizard uses three levels:

• Simple: in this mode, it only asks the most basic options and assumes the default for everything else
• Advanced: in this mode, it asks some more options (those that some users might want to change)
• Expert: in this mode the wizard asks all options

Please note that the wizard will overwrite your config file instead of modifying it. so any formatting or comments will be removed.

Here are some examples (I plan to use text-based demonstration more often in the future):

Beginner mode

Advanced mode

Expert mode

💡 New feature: i686 rpm, static binaries & self-(un)install

Starting with this release I am building and publishing i686 RPMs and static binaries for amd64, arm64 and armhf.

The static binaries are the easiest way to use VpnCloud as it requires no package system. You still need root permissions to run VpnCloud so this won't help you if you lack permissions to install it. To save space, the static binaries are compressed using UPX, which reduces their size to less than 2 MB.

Also, VpnCloud now comes with an installer/uninstaller feature. If you run vpncloud install or vpncloud install --uninstall, VpnCloud will put its current binary in the right place and create all required additional files (systemd startup files, manpage, example config). This functionality is feature-gated (feature installer) and currently only compiled for the static binaries.

💡 New feature: service target file

This release also brings a service target file for Vpncloud (vpncloud.target) that covers all VPN networks (e.g. vpncloud@mynet) and lets you start, restart and stop all networks at once.

Thanks to @mnhauke for contributing this change.

🔧 Change: restructured example config

As another effort to improve the experience when configuring VpnCloud, I restructured the example config file. The new config file, now contains the options listed on the left with explaining comments on the right. This way, the options are not spread and hidden among the comments. Also basic config options and advanced options are split into two sections.

⬆️ Updated dependencies

The builds have been updated to use Rust 1.51.

All dependencies have been updated to their latest versions, except for the time crate. The time crate had a security issue when multi-threaded applications modify their environment variables while retrieving the local time. As a mitigation, the crate deactivated the local time feature completely until a proper fix has been implemented. Since VpnCloud uses this feature but is not affected by the bug (not multi-threaded and not modifying environment variables) it uses the last version that still has the feature enabled.

📊 Performance

All of the micro benchmarks are within ±1% to the last release.

Once I performed end-to-end speed tests on AWS, I will update this post.