Irdest April 2022 announcement ══════════════════════════════

Dear readers,

it's been a few months since our last announcement and a lot of things have happened since then!

Grant funding updates ─────────────────────

In the last e-mail I hinted that we were going to open/ rework our NLnet [1] grant funding agreement. This has now happened and I'm very excited to welcome new people to the core Irdest development team.

Together we will work on everything from driver integration, user-facing clients, better packet encoding and encryption, and testing frameworks. A full breakdown of milestones is available in our wiki [2].

I'm very excited for this summer of development and the progress we will make towards an Irdest beta. In the meantime, we also have another small release ready for you!

Ratman v0.4 ───────────

This version of Ratman fixes some significant bugs that existed in 0.3 that prevented various peering mechanisms to work properly. A lot of testing has gone into this version to make sure it is easier to use and less prone to crashing. /Note that this is a breaking update/. Following is a short overview of significant changes.

• Ratman stores runtime settings in a configuration file and has better default configuration values, which allow you to start the daemon without any arguments

• We now provide a simple web dashboard on `localhost:8090' where you can see existing addresses on the network. This dashboard will be expanded in the future

• The Ratman daemon can now also be launched via the –daemonize and –pidfile flags to make integration into operating systems easier. It now also supports logging into syslog

• Network floods are now namespaced via an address, instead of going to every participant. Filtering still has to be done on the client-side, which will likely change in the next release

• Various bug fixes, performance, and documentation improvements :)

You can read more details in our new CHANGELOG [4]. Overall I am very happy with this release and would like to thank the following people for making this version of Ratman possible 🖤

• Bluju bluju@Bluju.local • Lux lux@lux.name • Manos Pitsidianakis el13635@mail.ntua.gr • Yureka yuka@yuka.dev • embr git@liclac.eu • oooh chew gx_339-4@pm.me

You can download Ratman v0.4.0 from your friendly neighbourhood package repository, or from https://irde.st/downloads

If you have questions or comments, feel free to drop by our community mailing list [4] or our matrix channel [5].

~ Kookie

Citations ─────────

[1]: https://nlnet.nl/project/Irdest/ [2]: https://hedgedoc.irde.st/M-v5_NZLTTid27-hndogZg [3]: https://git.irde.st/we/irdest/-/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md [4]: https://lists.irde.st/archives/list/community@lists.irde.st/ [5]: https://matrix.to/#/#chat:irde.st