LORIX OS 1.0.0

Release date: 15 Jun 2020 

Announcement

At the end of last year, after a year of hard work for developing the new foundations of our operating system, we release a preview version (0.4.0) of our system to get your feedback about the lot of new ideas we had.

Many of you tried it out and gave us very valuable feedback that allowed us to make this new system even better. We'd like to thank you all for your participation in the development that allows us today to say:

We're pleased to announce the v1.0.0 release of the LORIX OS! 

Many points of your feedback have been integrated, so this release both consolidates what was proposed at the end of last year and brings some new features. You can find below a description of the improvements of this version. Despite some changes, the systems are compatible and you can update your gateways running the preview version with the update system! Please read the upgrade notice if you do so.

How to upgrade

If you have the preview version installed (0.4.0), you can upgrade from the Manager UI, in the System > Update section after having read the upgrade notice.

Otherwise, you can follow the Setup guide. The system images are available in the Download area.

What does 1.0.0 mean

As indicated by the version number, this is now a stable version. This means the integrated tools will stay there until the next major release and that the system will not break compatibility. Our version notation respects Semantic versioning:

• Patch increment (1.0.1) : bug fixes that are backward compatible
• Minor increment (1.1.0) : new features that are backward compatible
• Major increment (2.0.0) : breaking changes

We highly encourage you to make updates frequently as it's done only with a few clicks. The update system is also compatible with mender, allowing you to update a whole fleet in a few clicks!

What comes next

We aim to provide regular updates (with no breaking changes) starting from now. These updates will bring security updates and new features to your gateway. They will be available directly from the Manager update system and you'll find a release note like this one for all those releases. You'll find soon a roadmap showing the main steps of these future updates.

Your contributions are welcome

We are always open to feedback, and are glad to hear from you and what you think about the LORIX OS. If you have any suggestions regarding the system, please contact us at support@iot.wifx.net or through the online contact form.

Thanks for you attention and enjoy!

Essential improvements

The full changelog is available below.

Please read the upgrade notice if you do a system upgrade with the manager.

Basic Station

Semtech's Basic Station packet forwarder is now available!

The Basic Station is a second generation packet forwarder providing secure and reliable connection. It is supported by some Network Server providers such as The Things Industries and should come to TTN within the end of this year.

Packet forwarder logs

Live log of the packet forwarder is now available on the forwarder pages.

The forwarders generally just have a few options to configure, but when it doesn't work, the reason can be tricky to figure out. To simplify the setup of your forwarder, we provide the live log of the application directly on the configuration page, right next to the configuration. Setting your gateway up has never been that easy!

Packet forwarder statistics

The UDP Packet Forwarder has now a summary of the packet forwarding statistics available on the status page.

This allows you to see in a glimpse if the gateway is in range of your end nodes and how much it's used.

New dashboard widgets

The dashboard has now three additional widgets: system information, disk usage and system updates. We will add more widgets in the next releases, stay tuned!

Simple networking configuration

The networking page has been reworked to be simpler yet more complete.

You have now access to many details to check if the networking is configured correctly. When changing the IP configuration, you also now have a new "Safe update" feature that ensures you don't lose access to your remote gateway.

Firewall

IPTables is now enabled by default allowing only essential applications.

Security is an important concern when talking about networking. We aim to provide a secure-capable system by providing a simple way to update the system with the last security fixes. But security is also hard to configure, that's why we decided to enable by default the iptables firewall to help you operate a secured gateway easily.

UDP Packet Forwarder

Wifx Packet Forwarder was renamed to UDP Packet Forwarder.

The Semtech UDP Packet Forwarder fork we integrated in the gateway was called "Wifx Packet Forwarder". Your where many to report that it would be more intuitive to keep the name nearer to the original one. This software was not developed initially by Wifx and is here for legacy compatibility purpose, therefore we prefer to keep the name simple and representative, that's why it has been renamed to "UDP Packet Forwarder".

Autoquit threshold

We introduced by default the autoquit threshold configuration. The UDP Packet Forwarder does not detect when it gets disconnected from the server. With autoquit_threshold, it will automatically reconnect after 3 unacknowledged messages sent to the server.

SNMP server

An integrated SNMP server is now available to monitor your gateways on the network.

For the gateways with 512 MB of memory, an SNMP server is now installed by default. You can enable it by just a few lines. SNMP is a protocol for network devices monitoring that allows you to monitor the status of your gateways easily.

We'll add soon a section in the documentation that will explain how to enable this.

Upgrade notice

When upgrading, from 0.4.0-rc.*, please be aware of the following

• Update with the Manager UI
  • After the reboot, refresh the Manager UI without the cache (CTRL-F5), or clean the cache in your browser settings and refresh the page.
  • If you rollback, refresh the Manager UI without the cache again.
  • Future update will not need this anymore as the new UI contain a mechanism to ensure refresh.
• The manager configuration is now in a folder and split into multiple files. If you manually changed the manager config file, your configuration will not be persisted through the update. However, you'll still find your old config in /etc/manager/config.yaml.old. Please migrate it into /etc/manager/conf.d and TOML syntax.
• There is no more static fallback IP addressing (if no DHCP lease is received). This change has been done to avoid unexpected disconnection of production gateways on DHCP timeout.

Changelog