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Netgate® Releases TNSR® High Performance Router Version 21.07

Netgate® Releases TNSR® High Performance Router Version 21.07

Our latest version of TNSR® software, Release 21.07, is now available. Most of our readers are well familiar with TNSR. But for those who may be new to our blog, TNSR is a vRouter solution that integrates Linux Networking Foundation FD.io Vector Packet Processing (VPP), Free Range Routing (FRR), Clixon, and other open-source projects into a production-ready, secure networking solution capable of addressing the high-performance edge routing, cloud connectivity, and robust IPsec site-to-site VPN needs of businesses and service providers. TNSR saves organizations from expending the needed internal expertise, time, and cost required to convert open-source software into commercial solutions.

Since our last release in March, the product's user base has grown 43% to over 2,500 entities. Customer growth and production-environment deployment expansion continues to drive development focus on improved configuration flexibility, operational management, and system resilience.

Key improvements to TNSR software added or improved in TNSR Software Release 21.07 include:

  • CLI

    • Fixes for command generation for several modules, including: ACLs, FRR, NAT, BGP, VRRP, DNS, GRE, VXLAN, and IPv6

  • DHCP Server

    • Improvements to ongoing lease management and issuance
  • Dataplane
    • Added support for Intel 2.5G (igc) Ethernet interfaces
    • Netlink socket processing is more stable and reliable.  Netlink message processing will now continue if an overflow occurs
  • Configuration history management via git
    • Added the ability for users to optionally maintain configuration database change history in a local git repo.  This history can be used in either a manual or automated manner, depending on user preference. Stored versions can be manually loaded to roll back to earlier configurations as needed.
  • Interfaces
    • Added TCP MSS Clamping. When a host initiates a TCP session with a server, it negotiates the IP segment size by using the MSS option field in a TCP SYN packet.  The default MSS field is determined by the MTU for the endpoints.  TCP MSS clamping can be used to set a maximum value for TCP MSS on a per-interface basis.
    • Added ability to configure the maximum number of fragments to be reassembled per packet for IP reassembly
  • NAT
    • Added support for forwarding inbound packets which do not match a translation in endpoint-independent mode
    • The NAT forwarding option now uses the correct source address when multiple worker threads are used in endpoint-dependent mode.
  • Routing
    • The default output of ‘show route’ commands now omits broadcast and other special automatic route table entries
  • SNMP / IPFIX / Prometheus
    • SNMP subagent startup time is now significantly faster
  • Software module updates
    • VPP (updated from upstream)
    • FRR 7.5.1
    • strongSwan 5.9.2

During this development period, we also began the effort to move the underlying OS base from CentOS to Ubuntu. Given the recently announced shift from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream, we feel that this effort is what our customers need. We expect to finish this effort, and to have it be commercially ready for users in November. 

For more information including a full rundown of adds and changes for Release 21.07, see our release notes here. Want to learn more about TNSR? Click here. Want to jump right to it and get started with a no charge Home + Lab instance? Click here.