Today, Netgate® announced the availability of TNSR® Release 20.10, the company’s eleventh TNSR release since inception in early 2018. Following 20.08 just two short months ago, the release is primarily focused on fixes, but also contains important adds, changes and updates.

First, recall that on September 10, we announced an overhaul of TNSR pricing, and also introduced a free version, called TNSR Home+Lab. TNSR Home+Lab has created exactly the response we envisioned. In a little over a month, there have been nearly 800 user accounts created! We’ve received a load of positive responses from our user community - both around the popularity of the new commercial terms and the robustness of the software router itself.

As well, some users mentioned they’d like to see us remove the year-end timer. We listened. Release 20.10 Home+Lab edition has no expiration timer. Run it forever, if you’d like, as long as you abide by the EULA. As newer releases are made available via Home+Lab path, you’ll need to re-register for those. It’s a simple process of filling out a form, receiving an email with a download link, and away you go. There is also a documented path here to migrate most configuration settings from the prior release. As noted on our subscription page, the software upgrade process for paid subscriptions is seamless.

Now, on to Release 20.10 features and fixes:

  • IPFIX Exporter - TNSR can send UDP IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) data to an external flow collector, in accordance with RFC 7011. Initially, this allows for monitoring of NAT sessions, i.e., TNSR sends out NAT data in IPFIX so a collector can log NAT translations. Pre-NAT and post-NAT connection properties, such as IP addresses and ports - useful for tracking down abuse reports to an internal host, or fulfilling legal requirement support in certain environments, e.g. lawful intercept can be exported.
  • Support for operation over unicast and asynchronous VRRP events - both of which enable support for running VRRP in a cloud environment. Beyond cloud deployments, some of the asynchronous event support enables calls to an external (user-supplied) script/program that can adjust the networking environment at will, e.g., a script can interact with AWS APIs to adjust VPC routing tables on failover. Users can write their own scripts, but we intend to provide one soon at github.com/Netgate.
  • The Prometheus Exporter now works for either management or dataplane interfaces, exposing the following counters: inPackets, outPackets, inBytes, outBytes, ipv4Packets, ipv6Packets, outErrorPackets, dropPackets, inMissPackets, inNobufPackets and puntPackets
  • More sophisticated customers may appreciate that the API and RESTCONF commands that achieve the equivalent of “vppctl show trace” can now be run from the TNSR CLI
  • VPP has been updated to Release 20.09
  • A number of adds, changes, and fixes contribute to the overall robustness and usability of CLI, DHCP Server, Dataplane, Host Netfilter, Interfaces, Memif, NACM, NAT, NTP, RESTCONF, Routing, SNMP / IPFIX / Prometheus, Tunnel Protocols, VRRP, YANG, and clixon

For more information, check out our 20.10 release notes, or the full product coverage in TNSR documentation.

Ready to start using TNSR with no obligation? Download our no charge TNSR Home+Lab edition here.

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