VyOS - Blog

Growing VyOS community and project side by side

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 08:31:25 GMT

There is a popular fiction that if you have a good project, a community automatically forms around it and gives it the publicity it deserves. In reality, it varies. It’s more than possible to have a lot of publicity without any project at all, as we see with a lot of startups that turn out to be vaporware. They get their publicity by talking about the supposed product everywhere.

The reality is that good projects also get their publicity… by talking about their project everywhere. The more you talk about it, the more visible you are. In CatB, Eric Raymond admits that he “grew his beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted him about fetchmail”—a practice that looks borderline spammy.

Telemetry poll results and their implications

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 20:23:00 GMT

Our previous post regarding the prospect of introducing telemetry ended up pretty divisive. Apart from the sensitive nature of the topic itself, there were some poor wording and poll design mistakes that made it look more evil than we ever planned it to be. Still, we were able to collect feedback. Thanks to all who participated! Now let’s discuss the results and what it means for the telemetry module design.

Anonymous stats collection from VyOS routers: we need your opinions!

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Fri, 29 May 2020 16:30:15 GMT

The T-word. Telemetry. Everyone hates it, not least because the most widely known implementations are unambiguously evil. We hate collection and sale of personal information as much as you do, so before we dive deeper into the subject, let’s set it straight: we will never collect any personally identifiable information from VyOS devices without explicit consent, ever.

However, not collecting anything at all does limit our ability to correctly prioritize issues. Now we are thinking of including anonymous stats collection into VyOS images (rolling and LTS alike) by default, and it needs a broad and serious discussion with the community. Our preliminary plan is to enable collection of basic usage stats by default, and provide CLI options to enable more detailed reporting. For that we need to know what people wouldn't hesitate to share by default, so we included a poll in this post.

VyOS Project May 2020 Update

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Tue, 26 May 2020 15:17:32 GMT

As usual, May was a busy month for VyOS. Originally we’ve planned a soft freeze of the 1.3 branches for early May, but it didn’t work as planned—in reality May brought us a lot of new features from both community contributors and maintainers. However, it also brought us a lot of fixes, refactoring, and polish, so we are actually closer to the stable 1.3 release than before.

Images for labs, geeks and other non-production use

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Tue, 12 May 2020 16:33:34 GMT

You might have noticed Patreon and BuyMeACoffee donate buttons. We introduced them silently, and we are happy to see people donating just because they want to support the project. However, there are benefits for those who donates—you asked us for a new way to contribute and get access to LTS images, and now it's here.

VyOS Foundation Announcement

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Sun, 10 May 2020 20:30:00 GMT

As you may already know, the VyOS project was started as a response to the cancellation of Vyatta Core, an open-source version of Vyatta that we used and loved. We have succeeded in this and seven years later we have a truly open-source network OS that people rely on. VyOS team is grateful to our customers and contributors who work together with us, and of course to all maintainers of open source software that VyOS is built upon.

Is VyOS CLI fast yet?

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Fri, 08 May 2020 21:13:47 GMT

Many people have noticed that in rolling release builds, everything was getting slower.

Boot time, commit time, and even the time it takes to enter set commands got uncomfortably slow, and for a time it was only getting worse.

We are neither blissfully unaware of it, nor we intentionally ignored that problem. We knew it, and we hated it as much as you did. In fact we considered it a blocker for the 1.3 branch freeze.

The good thing is that the worst of it is over: we’ve found a way to make everything almost as fast as in 1.2.x. If you download a rolling release image built after May the 8th, the worst performance problems should be gone, for most configs. If your boot time is as bad as before, let us know! And if your config broke from this change, let us know too.

If you are interested in the details, read on

VyOS Project April 2020 Update

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Sun, 03 May 2020 21:36:48 GMT

Hello Community!

Here is the April update from the VyOS project.

Despite the global crisis, we are working on the project and expanding our services. There’s some good progress towards the future 1.3 release and more work on the 1.2 LTS branch.

There are also multiple new partnerships with hardware manufacturers and cloud providers that will bring VyOS to more users and expand the range of supported platforms.

We are grateful to all community members who participate, to people who support us on Patreon, and to customers who trust VyOS and use our services!

VyOS Certification Discounts in May

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 22:15:27 GMT

When we announced the VyOS Certified Network Engineer exam, we said the first hundred applicants will get a 50% discount and need to pay only 100 EUR rather than 200.

However, we underestimated the number of people who will sign up. By now the waiting list is about 140 people and we are doing our best to make that line move faster. Our original certification lab setup was built with an assumption that only a few people will be interested, so we are scaling it up now to keep up with the demand.

VyOS and Nutanix collaboration moves to new level

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 19:40:34 GMT

Happy Friday!

We hope you all are doing well and stay safe! While it´s all unfortunate situation, it should not hold us back.

These days many companies need to scale their networks up to provide remote workers with access and to keep up with increased demand for network services. However, cost effectiveness is also a stronger requirement than before.

We at VyOS think it's important to collaborate with other vendors so people can do more using together our software and/or hardware. Affordable and efficient solutions needed now even more than ever.

VyOS 1.2.5 maintenance release

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 20:04:25 GMT

VyOS 1.2.5 maintenance release is finally available. Subscribers can download it from the support portal, and everyone can build it from the Crux branch and cloud images currently under marketplace reviews. It’s a rather big release, with 46 resolved issues.

As always, we are very grateful to everyone who sent us patches, reported bugs and supported us financially. Without you, the continued development of VyOS wouldn’t be possible! Thank you!

Customizing Ubiquiti USG configuration with JSON just got easier

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 19:09:52 GMT

Ubiquiti USG (Unified Security Gateway) is a router and firewall appliance that is closely related to the EdgeMax product line, even though it's marketed as a part of the UniFi product family and focused on a different market segment.

It is meant to be managed by a Unifi controller, which overwrites the settings so configuring it in the traditional way will not make the changes permanent. Since it's hardware is closely related to the EdgeMax routers and its software is derived from EdgeOS, using only the limited configuration options available from the Unifi controller GUI would leave its capabilities seriously underutilized.

VyOS Certifications - VyOS Certified Networks Engineer (VCNE)

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 18:34:00 GMT

VyOS certifications for network engineers is one of the hot topics during the last years. Not only people were asking us when certification will be available, we've been also seeing more job offers that require VyOS skills. It took us a while to prepare everything but now it’s time to officially announce the launch of the first certification: VyOS Certified Networks Engineer.

VyOS Project March 2020 Update

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 04:45:45 GMT

As usual, we’ve been busy working on the 1.2.x LTS release and on the future 1.3.0 version. One important update is that VyOS 1.2.5-epa2 (early production access) image is now available to subscribers, and everyone can build it from the Crux branch. It includes latest stable release of the FreeRangeRouting protocol stack and multiple bug fixes. We are running that image on our own routers, and if no more serious issues are discovered, we’ll make the final 1.2.5 release and keep working on 1.2.6.

VyOS team offer help for most affected by COVID-2019 outbreak

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 12:58:59 GMT

To contain the spread of the COVID-19 infection, many governments and organizations are now using unprecedented social distancing measures, such as switching entire schools to distance learning and switching entire companies to remote work.

VyOS team offer free access to software as well as hands-on help with implementation

VyOS Project 2020 February Update

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 20:37:36 GMT

We skipped January update as we were busy, but time flies fast so here it is.

February update, first in 2020 and with bunch updates!

VyOS for Australian companies

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 23:01:00 GMT

Hello!

We want to help in recovering Australia after fires.

so if you Australia-based, read below, and if not, read below anyway

VyOS Access subscriptions for documentation

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 17:26:21 GMT

Documentation, sadly, is a sour topic for many open source networking projects. Web frameworks and libraries, graphics software, sometimes even games have more detailed documentation than some of the widely used network software projects.

VyOS 1.2.4 release

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 22:56:33 GMT

Happy new year! I hope you all had a good rest while we preparing this release. It´s been a while from last 1.2.4 EPA but testing went pretty good. Thanks to all who reported issues and worked with us to solve them!

VyOS Project 2019 December Update

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 12:51:00 GMT

It's almost winter holidays time already! It's been a great year for VyOS, with many big improvements in the code, and more community contributions to the code and the documentation than ever.

There are some big changes coming too, including:

Rolling release builds based on Debian Buster
New, clearer subscription structure and pricing for corporate users.
New ways for community members to support the project on Patreon and buymeacoffee.com and get access to LTS images and a community support forum in exchange.
An official list of compatible devices to make it easier to choose hardware to run VyOS on.

For details, read on.

VyOS Project 2019 November Update

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 15:15:00 GMT

Welcome to the monthly round of VyOS project updates. What do we have in store for you?

VyOS Project 2019 October update

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 09:33:24 GMT

Everyone is probably aware that VyOS was built upon a codebase that hasn't aged well. VyOS 1.2.0 was all about a (sometimes painful) base system and codebase refresh, but the good thing is that as we get rid of the old code and replace it with modern, redesigned alternatives, new things become possible.

Software and Support Subscriptions Update

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 14:26:18 GMT

Finally we have finished updating our website (there’s still an ongoing work on improving it though, and your suggestions are welcome!) And it's time to update pricing for our services and subscriptions and also tell bit more about both

VyOS project news in September

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 20:47:41 GMT

VyOS 1.2.3 release

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 09:00:18 GMT

VyOS 1.2.3-epa1 ("early production access") release images are available for download for customers and active contributors, and everyone is welcome to build it from the latest Crux branch and test it.

VyOS Project 2019 August update

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 19:06:46 GMT

With cloud support, a simplified installation process, and a potentially much faster VPN, we can proudly say we’ve had a busy month.

What can you expect from the updates and the VyOS 1.2.3 release?

HTTP API configuration interface and future plans

For a while, the HTTP API server could only be configured and started by hand. Now everyone who wants to try it out can setup it easily:

VyOS 1.2.2 maintenance release

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 16:04:25 GMT

VyOS 1.2.2 maintenance release is now available. Our customers and active contributors who have a subscription can download the images from the support portal, and everyone can also build it from the crux branch of the vyos-build repository.

Cloud images are taking a bit longer to complete, but they also will be available in a couple of days. Images for Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure are already available.

We are also introducing VyOS on the Packet Cloud with this release.

VyOS rolling release has got an HTTP API

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 13:36:43 GMT

In short: a prototype of an HTTP API is now included in the nightly builds and available for testing. Right now it requires some manual configuration to get running, but a new “service https” CLI will also be available soon.

CVE-2019-11477 (TCP SACK panic) and an Intel i40e driver issue

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 20:18:24 GMT

Recently discovered vulnerability in the Linux kernel's TCP selective acknowledgement processing code potentially allows a remote attacker to cause a kernel panic with a specially crafted packet sequence. You can read the details in the announcement

VyOS Project 2019 - June update

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 15:40:12 GMT

The summer is often a slow news season, but we’ve got quite a few things to share. We’ve been slacking off on posting development news and keeping the community updated, so it’s time to fix it.

Support portal maintenance is over

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Sat, 04 May 2019 03:03:26 GMT

Support portal maintenance is over now, you should be able to use portal as always
Please let us know if you experiencing problems.

Support portal maintenance

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Fri, 03 May 2019 15:49:39 GMT

We will perform support portal maintenance starting from 18:00 CEST and it will take up to 5 hours, during this period short interruptions can have place

VyOS 1.2.1 release

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 04:03:23 GMT

We have just released VyOS 1.2.1. The images are available to subscribers and public clouds images submitted, and if you build an image from the Crux branch now, it will be equivalent to those images.

A number of issues have been resolved, and a small feature was added.

Google Season of Docs

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 02:16:40 GMT

Everyone knows about the Google Summer of Code program, but now there's more. Recently they announced a new program called Season of Docs. It matches technical writers with open source projects who will mentor them.

VyOS Project 2019 - March Update

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 08:00:00 GMT

Hello, Gents!

It’s been a while from the last update so I thought it’s a good time to share some news.

The team is busy as always, so much done already and much more to be done yet, sometimes it looks like the quantity of the tasks is infinite (and it is). That of course not stopping us, we like challenges and it brings lot of fun too. So here some more info below

Where is my OVA dude?

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Sun, 17 Feb 2019 17:17:30 GMT

Greetings!

As we mentioned in emails, OVA bit delayed, as always, there are reasons for that.

First one is VMWare Ready validation that we hope will finish soon.

The second one is a significant rework of OVA distribution that includes configuration via OVF environment (see T722)

Contributors, contributions and badges

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 16:00:00 GMT

Looks like there’s quite a bit of misunderstanding regarding free subscriptions for contributors, who is eligible, and how people can contribute to the VyOS Project.

VyOS 1.2 (Crux) released

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 17:10:14 GMT

VyOS 1.2.0 LTS is here. We are now merging the final bug fixes and preparing the images and cloud listings. Once the images are ready, we’ll send the download links to all subscribers, expect this during next days.

VyOS 1.2(Crux) EPA3 available to subscribers

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 07:00:00 GMT

The new VyOS 1.2.0-epa3 early is ready and available to subscribers

We are hiring!

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 14:00:00 GMT

Hey Guys! Are you an open source evangelist, love Linux and know lots about traffic routing? Check the detail of Network Engineer position if you want to become part of VyOS team.

wiki and new support portal

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 11:01:13 GMT

We making some changes to the wiki account registration process and introducing new support portal also encourage wiki/documentation contributors

VyOS 1.2(Crux)-EPA2 is here

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 07:00:00 GMT

VyOS 1.2.0-epa2 release is now available to subscribers and can be built from the crux branch.

1.2 LTS Access Subscriptions pre-order launch & VyOS 1.1.x EOL

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Wed, 26 Dec 2018 06:44:34 GMT

Early Production Access for 1.2.0 LTS binaries is here. We are upgrading our production routers as well as routers of our existing customers and partners, these images also will be used for cloud marketplaces.

We are now ready to announce pre-order for Access Subscriptions (find the discount code below) and EOL of VyOS 1.1.x

If you ever wanted support VyOS Project, now is a perfect time to do that.

VyOS 1.2.0-rc11 is available for download

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 23:20:06 GMT

VyOS 1.2.0-rc11 is available for download from https://downloads.vyos.io/?dir=testing/1.2.0-rc11.

Last RC, Early Production Access, Educational and non-profit Access Subscriptions

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 13:05:24 GMT

Hello Community!

We were busy as always doing coding and some more useful stuff, but it’s time for an update.

VyOS 1.2.0-rc10 is available for download

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 15:42:58 GMT

VyOS 1.2.0-rc10 is available for download from https://downloads.vyos.io/?dir=testing/1.2.0-rc10

Resolved issues

The following issues have been fixed:

If you save your configuration on a system booted from a livecd, you will be offered to copy it to the installed image (T1047).
EFI GRUB can now be installed in a removable location (T1023).
The "run show vpn ipsec sa" command now works correctly for SAs with non-zero traffic counters (T956).
IPsec SA in/out traffic counters are not displayed in human-readable units (T956).

Issues that need testing

We have a bunch of issues that need testing. Please tell us if the following features work for you, or help us figure out a reproducing procedure! We need to make sure they are resolved before we make a stable 1.2.0 release, but we are either unable to reproduce them because they are hardware-specific and we don't have required hardware anywhere; or we cannot reproduce them using the provided procedure, which may mean either that the procedure is incomplete, or that the bug is already fixed.

Kernel crashed under (network) load with gen5 Mellanox cards (T1014).
Broken 6rd tunnel implementation (T1000).
Problem with Intel XL710 NICs (T961).
L2TPv3 interfaces sometimes not loaded on boot (T942).
OSPF process crashing on peer reboot (T922).
BGP process doesn't start on boot (T904).

Additionally, we would like to know if DMVPN and SNMP integration with routing protocols are working well for you. If you've seen any of those issues, or, to the contrary, you can confirm that you've never seen them, please let us know.

VyOS 1.2.0-rc9 is available for download

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 20:40:14 GMT

We are getting closer and closer to the stable release. There are still bugs for a couple more release candidates, and some features we need to get in, but generally the time of spectatular updates in the 1.2.0/crux branch is almost over—all big things will be going on in the new 1.3.0/equuleus branch soon. The new release candidate is available for download from https://downloads.vyos.io/?dir=testing/1.2.0-rc9

Software updates

The kernel has been updated to the most recent 4.19.4 release. It includes multiple fixes in drivers, so tasks related to drivers like this one about Mellanox card causing a crash under load (T1014), or those about Intel cards (T986, T961) should be re-tested.

This kernel also removes the original SPECTRE vulnerability mitigation code that had a big performance impact. We'd like to hear about your experience in this regard.

We have also included the Hyper-V daemons package. If you are running VyOS on a Hyper-V host, please let us know if it works well for you.

As usual, FRR has been updated to the latest master as well.

Bugfixes

The "protocols bgp ... address-family ipv4-unicast redistribute ospf" works again (T1034).
Set-time validation rules for OSPFv3 areas does not allow decimal notation anymore, since it was never allowed by Quagga or FRR (T981).
PPPoE server help strings and autocompletion have been improved.
The ofed-scripts package (a remnant of the official Mellanox drivers) is removed from the image since we are using kernel built-in drivers now.
Package lists for the image build now correctly include aptitude which is needed for the grub-efi package fetching, so you should be able to build images yourself without problems again. Sorry it's been broken for a while!

Contributor subscriptions

Since the moment we've published the pre-registration form, we have received a number of LTS subscription requests from our veteran contributors, and people who have joined VyOS recently. We are still working on the subscriber portal, but we'll make sure to send everyone a notification when the 1.2.0 LTS release, and the portal are ready. When the portal is ready, contributors will be able to register directly.

If you have been or are contributing to VyOS, you can find the form here.

Upd

Originally the image was accidentally uploaded with broken wireguard package, but the issue is resolved now, thanks to Kroy who identified the issue and notified us quickly.

VyOS release model change

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 03:59:22 GMT

Now that we are approaching the 1.2.0 LTS release, it's time to make a big announcement. Perhaps we should have made it earlier, but we've been too busy coding.

There are two distinct categories of VyOS users. The first category is people who want the latest features even at cost of stability. These are mostly networking geeks who run it in their home networks and network labs and open source developers, though some businesses are also happy with this approach. The second category is people who need or want stability. There are of course people who want both too, but we have to accept that these goals are contradictory at least some of the time.

This is common for all software projects, but with VyOS, more people seem to belong to the second category. Every once in a while someone asks on the channels and the forum whether they can update an extremely outdated VyOS (or even Vyatta Core) version to the latest release. We also hear from people frequently that they are not going to even try 1.2.0 until it reaches the stable status.

It's quite obvious by now that the single release model is not fitting for this situation. With 1.2.0, people who contributed new features had to wait a long time for their code to appear in any non-nightly build image because other people, mainly the maintainers, have been working on tearing the codebase off of the outdated Debian release, reworking the foundations, and hunting bugs. This is frustrating for contributors and even created the appearance of the dead project at some point. It also means that new code doesn't get to people enthusiastic to test it nearly as fast as it should.

On the other hand, while we have an active community of people who send us patches and report bugs, the community is very small compared to the entire user base. The number of people who contributed patches is easy to measure so I did it out of curiosity: the largest submodule, vyatta-cfg-system, has less then 50 unique names in its commit log starting from the project start date, which means less than 50 people contributed to it in five years. The number of active testers isn't much higher. For comparison, the 1.1.8 images get thousands of downloads every month and the wiki documentation gets thousands of views too. To make it easier for people to contribute, there's a lot of work to be done: reworking the foundational libraries, getting rid of poorly written legacy code, and so on, and focused effort (which means human-hours) is required to break the cycle.

Maintaining stable releases is one of the hardest parts, but that burden falls on a disproportionately small number of people, while most of the business users who are the main consumers of stable releases do nothing to advance the project. This is not a healthy or sustainable situation. Someone needs to pay the bills.

The new release model

First, there now will be two release lines: rolling release and long-term support releases.

The rolling release images will be (roughly) monthly snapshots of the "current" branch, with all latest pull requests merged in. They will be tested to successfully boot and load a sample config. The target audience is the people who want the latest features (even if they are not working perfectly yet). People who send us pull requests can be sure their contribution will be available to themselves and willing testers in a reasonable time. Since in VyOS it's easy to revert to the previous version if something goes wrong, the rolling release should be good enough for non-critical production use, since you can always go back to a working version at the end of the maintenance window and report the findings.

The long-term support versions will be maintained for at least two years from the release date. They will undergo extensive testing by the maintainers, and receive backported bugfixes and security updates until they reach an EOL, with a possibility of receiving extended support by special agreement. It is meant for enterprises and service provider users.

Unlike the rolling release images, binary LTS images will be only available to people who help the project move forward, either by contributing their time or their money. We are not going to compromise the free software ideals: you will always be able to build LTS releases yourself.

The LTS images will be available at no cost to all people who contribute to VyOS. Every kind of contribution counts:

Writing code
Testing release candidates and rolling/nightly build and reporting bugs
Writing documentation
Promoting VyOS in blogs, social networks, and at conferences
Everyone who contributed before the release of 1.2.0 LTS version will get a perpetual subscription. People who will have joined later will need to be active within the last year to maintain their subscription (the required activity level is yet to be determined, but it will require substantial and non-trivial changes, i.e. not just typo fixes). Companies who allow their employees to work on VyOS during working hours or specifically pay their employees or contractors to work on code that is meant for the mainline VyOS or produces open source integration tools will be able to get a corporate subscription if those employees/contractors confirm it.

We are also happy to provide subscriptions to contributors of all projects that VyOS uses, such as FRR, netfilter, OpenVPN, StrongSWAN, and many others.

Companies who simply want to use stable, long-term support releases without making technical or social contributions to the project will have to purchase a binary image subscription (you pay for access to ready-made images, not software licensing as such).

All money received from the paid subscriptions will be used to fund VyOS development, including paying the salaries of the VyOS maintainers who work at Sentrium, hiring/contracting developers from the community, expanding the project infrastructure, and supporting our upstream projects.

If you have contributed to VyOS, you can register right now using this form. We will post the details of the commercial offer and pricing later, stay tuned.

P.S.

Back in 2013, I said that there will never be a "VyOS Subscription Edition". Technically I lied, but it was said from a very different perspective. At the time we hoped that now that VyOS is open for everyone's contribution, a large contributor community will form and many of the corporate users who used to use the old project will contribute to it willingly, sponsor its development, or purchase support subscriptions; in practice very few of them did. That approach didn't work, but switching our AWS Marketplace offer from free of charge to paid has become the first reliable funding source for the project and already allowed us to add support for more cloud platforms, as well as rework some of the fundamentals of VyOS to make it easier to contribute to.
I hope continuing this line and introducing the rolling release will create a model that is more beneficial for the project and more fair towards its contributors.
Just to clarify, VyOS is neither going to hide the toolchain required to build LTS releases yourself nor going open core. Those part of the original plan do and will stay the same.

VyOS 1.2.0-rc8 is available for download

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 21:29:05 GMT

A new release candidate, 1.2.0-rc8 is available for download from https://downloads.vyos.io/?dir=testing/1.2.0-rc8

As usual, it offers a few bugfixes, but also some last moment additions we wanted to make before the code freeze.

New features

PPPoE based on accel-ppp

https://accel-ppp.org/ is a high performance implementation of the PPP protocol itself and multiple protocols based on it, including PPPoE, PPTP, and L2TP that has become very popular with service providers.

To make VyOS a better option for access concentrators, we (and by "we" I mostly mean our contributor hagbard!) rewrote the PPPoE scripts to use accel-ppp instead of rp-pppoe.

No other protocols are reimplemented yet, but we are considering that option. Reimplementing PPTP can be challenging because the kernel module that accel-ppp uses for it conflicts with ip_gre (which is used for normal GRE tunnels as well as PPTP in the current implementation), but L2TPv2 should be doable.

The configuration syntax of the new PPPoE implementation is fully compatible with the old one, save for the RADIUS key option that is handled by a migration script, so your old configuration should work as expected if you used PPPoE server in older releases.

Saltstack integration

This project has existed for quite a while, and even accidentally made it to one of the earlier release candidates, but we never made it official. Now it should be stable enough to be included in an image.

Salt is a popular configuration management project. There is already VyOS support in Ansible, so why not expand our support for automation platforms?

Unlike Ansible, Salt needs an agent package on the target system. The minimal configuration required to make it work is "set service salt-minion master 192.0.2.1" (where 192.0.2.1 is the Salt master server address).

Hop limit matching in IPv6 firewalls

Thanks to a patch by Ray Patrick Soucy, it's now possible to match on hop limit in IPv6 firewall rules (T573).

The command is "set firewall ipv6-name Foo rule 10 hop-limit" and can have one of the following options: "eq $num" (equals exactly), "gt $num" (greater than) and "lt $num" (less than).

BGP interface option for link-local peer sessions

It is now possible to specify the interface to be used for a session in BGP (T941) with a command "set protocols bgp 64512 neighbor 192.0.2.10 interface eth0". This should allow using IPv6 link-local addresses for peer sessions.

Multipath routing options

New kernel versions include a few improvements in multipath routing. By default, the kernel only uses network layer information to bind connections to next hops, but now it's possible to make it also use transport layer information (e.g. TCP or UDP ports) for that decision with these commands: "set system ip multipath layer4-hashing", "set system ipv6 multipath layer4-hashing" (T992).

There's another command that is (so far at least) IPv4-specific: "set system ip multipath ignore-unreachable-nexthops". It makes the kernel exclude next hops with unreachable ARP from routing decisions.

Bug fixes

Obsolete "dynamic" option was removed from NTP (T1018).
It is now possible to restart the DHCP relay agent (T1016).
Conntrack helper is now enabled by default (T1011).
Validation rules for 6rd tunnels have been corrected, now it should be borderline usable (T1000).
Fixed dynamic DNS requests over HTTP (T983).
Fixed DNS forwarding service not listening on IPv6 address (T974).
immark module is now enabled in syslog (T940).
Console device speed option should now modify the GRUB config correctly (T969).
Is it now possible to disable the in-memory table netflow plugin (T458).
OSPF LS update sending on a flapped interface seems to have been automatically solved by migration to FRR (T409).

Bug that need verification

Some people reportes that Intel XL710 network cards do not work, but that was before we updated the kernel to 4.19 (T961). It needs re-testing on rc7 or rc8.

This kernel also needs more testing with fifth generation Mellanox cards.

VyOS 1.2.0-rc7 is available for download

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 20:24:31 GMT

Yet another release candidate, with more bug fixes and some experimental features. We are grateful to everyone who reported these bugs and sent us patches for them!

The ISO image is available for download here

New features

RADIUS client source IP in remote access VPN

It is now possible to set the source IP with a command like "set vpn l2tp remote-access authentication radius source-address 192.0.2.10".

UEFI support

Thanks to joined efforts of our contributor Kroy the Rabbit and the maintainers, VyOS has got experimental support for installation and boot on UEFI platforms.

Since UEFI-only boxes started to enter the market lately, it makes a perfect last moment addition, but as any big change, it needs testing. If you have hardware that uses UEFI, please try it out and let us know if it works well for you.

If your machine is using UEFI boot, the installer will detect it automatically and create a GPT partition table and an UEFI partition rather than MBR, so for the users this new feature should be seemless.

Bug fixes

Updates to the latest kernel and the latest FRR seem to have resolved a number of tasks automatically, namely: an issue with route-map interface close not working for all protocols (T524), packet loss in some Xen environments including AWS (T935), support for the Denverton SoC (T946).

Fixes in BGP commands

Thanks to our community, we have identified a few more BGP commands whose migration to the new "address-family ipv4-unicast" syntax was incomplete. IPv4 prefix lists should now work correctly (T968), and so should "soft-reconfiguration inbound" (T982).

FRR syntax changes

While FRR has brought us a lot of improvements, it also has a small number of incompatibilities.

A syntax change in the "as-path-exclude" route-map option made it impossible to delete the clause or entire route-map, until we fixed it (T991).

Another change is only planned, but already has deprecation warnings that are quite annoying (T964). We have fixed most of them, except in the "policy community-list" commands. The final bit is blocked by an issue in the new FRR commands that are supposed to replace the old ones, so until it's fixed you will get a warning when deleting or modifying community-lists. The warning is harmless, and we will fix it and also update op mode commands once the FRR developers fix their part.

Wireguard

A couple of issues with the wireguard CLI have been fixed. One was that you could not use whitespace inside wireguard interface descriptions (T979). The other issues would leave the VyOS CLI and the actual wireguard configuration in an incosistent state (T965). Thanks to our contributor hagbard, the issues have been resolved.

Misc

Removing a user with a "delete system login user" command now correctly deletes home directories, eliminating the possibility that the same home directory can be reassigned to a new user with a different UID and thus no write permissions for the original directory (T740).

Authentication/authorization logs should now work as expected again (T963).

The installer now allows installation on NVM Express SSD devices /dev/nvme* (T967). The patch was contributed by Brooks Swinnerton.

The "run monitor bandwidth-test initiate" command works again (T994).

The "| strip-private" pipe now correctly obscures "pre-shared-secret" options (T999).

The "hostfile-update" DHCP server option should now work again (T976).