8.0

This major release brings several new feature and a couple of notable changes.

New feature:

• The DNS daemon can now serve custom records. This allows hosting a personal web domain without paying for DNS hosting.
• The system maintenance daemon can now collect network IO, files, and disk activities both process-wide and system-wide, and present them to prometheus metrics handler.

Notable changes:

• The system maintenance daemon now discards old systemd journal to conserve disk space. The discard threshold is configurable.
• X (formerly known as Twitter) integration has been removed.

7.2

Bug fixes:

• Fix numerous issues with the DNS server’s authoritative responses.

Notable enhancements:

• The shell command app now restricts available commands to a hard-coded set by default.
• All log sources now discard excessive messages according to a hard-coded threshold to reduce output.
• The package manager for installing and updating Windows software has been switched from chocolatey to winget.

7.1

The minor release contains a number of improvements for the TCP-over-DNS tunnel.

Enhancements:

• Support using TXT queries as data carrier for the TCP-over-DNS tunnel, this improves the tunnel throughput to 10KB/s.
• Allow customising upstream and downstream segment length individually.

Bug fixes:

• Close both sides of HTTP proxy connections when one peer closes the connection in a TCP-over-DNS client-side (web proxy) tunnel.
• Fix stale ACK number lingering in the TCP-over-DNS segment buffer.

7.0

This major release brings a couple of new features:

• You can now host laitos for an apex domain without using a separate DNS hosting provider (e.g. AWS Route 53 / Azure DNS). The DNS daemon now automatically serves SOA, NS, MX, and their related address records (pointing to the server itself).
• The DNS daemon is now able to proxy TCP connections (TCP-over-DNS). For the clients, laitos provides built-in local HTTP(S) and DNS proxy servers.

6.0

The new major release is copyrighted by Google - the invention committee explicitly demanded to retain the copyright of laitos while I am employed by Google. Can you believe it - Google copyrighted a chindogu! Anyways, here are the new features:

• The ad-blocking DNS server can now handle IPv6 address queries.
• The HTTP (with and without TLS) server can now automatically install an index page handler serving the content of environment variable LAITOS_INDEX_PAGE, this enables starting laitos web server using a one-liner command.
• The LoRaWAN tracker integration has been improved to work with hzgl-lora-communicator - an open-source, battery-powered, two-way messaging device with GPS tracking and ambient condition sensors.
• Capture the latest incoming HTTP requests for inspection by using the request logger web service.

Notable enhancements:

• Multiple unlikely race conditions were resolved.
• Improve handling of plain text mails in the mail app command processor.
• The Linux kernel parameter tuning function now turns on multiple kernel security features (e.g. kernel.kptr_restrict and kernel.yama.ptrace_scope).
• The system maintenance scripts (for Windows and Linux hosts) are now executed toward the end of system maintenance routine rather than at the start.
• The system maintenance routine now automatically purges/deletes old systemd journal and only retains the most recent 2GB of journal overall.
• The remote browser services based on PhantomJS and SlimmerJS have been removed as both projects are no longer actively maintained.
• The serialport deamon has been removed as it was not poorly implemented at the start and I have found little practical purpose for it.

5.0

The major release brings several new features:

• Use the brand new general purpose web proxy server for a safer, ad-free web experience in home network.
• Take advantage of prometheus metrics exporter to gain insights of program performance and optionally analyse web proxy usage.
• Take advantage of AWS services (x-ray, SQS, SNS, etc) to extend various program components with cloud-native capabilities. Discover more about these points of integration in Cloud Tips.
• Use the brand new system process explorer to inspect resource usage and health of a running program.
• laitos can run on ARMv6 processor architecture (file name laitos.arm), notably on Raspberry Pi Zero W.

Notable enhancements:

• The mail server automatically filters incoming mails through popular blocklists to reduce spam.
• Components capable of running app commands are now able to accept more than one passwords to authorise command execution.
• The web server's middleware now logs the processing statistics of a request, such as time-to-first byte, total processing duration, and response size. These stats are also optionally exported to prometheus.
• laitos will find its program configuration in environment variable LAITOS_CONFIG if it is present.

4.1

The minor version brings several new features:

• laitos got a cool looking terminal UI - check out laitos terminal. It is incredibly bandwidth efficient that it even works over a 2400 bits/sec satellite Internet modem!

And notable enhancements:

• Avoid double-escaping special XML characters in a Twilio SMS response
• Enhance DNS daemon ad-blocking capability with four new default blacklists.
• Automatically remove several popular domain names that blacklists often mistakenly include.

4.0

The new major version brings the following new features:

• laitos can now run as an AWS lambda function. In combination with AWS API gateway, you can run laitos web server using the latest & flashiest "serverless" cloud computing feature.
• New daemon phone home telemetry sends system information and resource usage to your own laitos servers for telemetry keeping. Optionally, your laitos servers may remotely control a monitored system by running a password-protected app command on it.
• In addition to collecting telemetry information from computer systems, laitos server also integrates with LoRa - The Things Network to collect telemetry location data from your IoT devices. Optionally, your IoT device may remotely control your server by running a password-protected app command on it.

Notable enhancements:

• Allow app user to use one-time-password to enter a password PIN, this is especially useful for transmitting the password PIN over less secure channels such as SMS and telephone calls.
• For routine automated operations that require reading laitos server's public IP address, the address is now cached for couple of minutes to allow for reuse.
• If an incoming Email demands strong DMARC validation to be performed by Email clients, then alter the Email's From address before forwarding it, to ensure a much higher likelihood of delivery.

Notable bug fixes:

• Fix rare crashes in common UDP server routines.
• Remove default RSS sources and default public DNS resolvers that have gone offline since last release.

3.4

New features:

• Introduce a new web service - desktop on a page (virtual machine) that offers a computer desktop with productivity suites, controlled from a single web page.
• laitos container images are now available on docker hub. Compiled binaries will remain with releases on GitHub.
• The system maintenance daemon is now compatible with yum wrapper provided by CentOS 8.
• The system maintenance report is saved to laitos-latest-maintenance-report.txt underneath OS temporary files directory in addition to its usual channel of delivery, such as Email and program output.

Enhancements:

• Should a daemon's startup or loop routine fail - both of which are unlikely, the daemon will restart after a short interval. This further improves reliability by complimenting the built-in supervisor that automatically recovers daemons from unlikely crashes.
• Improve extraction of WolframAlpha text response for better readability.
• Introduce AdGuard Public DNS and Neustar Public DNS servers to the list of default forwarders used by the DNS daemon.

Notable bug fixes:

• Improved external process management better responds to process time-out anomaly and will terminate them more reliably.

3.3

This release brings two new features and other important improvements.

New features:

• Serial port communicator daemon enables serial port devices to run toolbox commands by physically connecting to laitos server computer.
• File storage web service helps user to store files of any type for unlimited retrieval within 24 hours.

Notable enhancements:

• System maintenance routine now cleans up expired temporary file system-wide, defragments all disks, and performs SSD TRIM.
• Multiple rate-limit warnings across a short span of interval are aggregated together, reducing program log output.