Dear SCIONLab user,
We are updating the SCIONLab infrastructure to be able to build even
more exciting applications with it.
We are notifying all SCIONLab users ahead of time to prepare for
possible outages and to update their applications.
The upgrade will happen on Wednesday, 9.12.2020 at 07:00UTC. SCIONLab
will be in maintenance mode from 8.12.2020.
The most important changes to SCION/SCIONLab include:
- Control Plane Public Key Infrastructure now based on x509 certificates
instead of the old format based on JSON web signatures.
- Control plane messaging now based on gRPC/protobuf instead of capnproto.
- Packet header redesigned to be more suitable for high speed software
or hardware router implementation. See
https://scion.docs.anapaya.net/en/latest/protocols/scion-header.html for
details.
- Detection of active interfaces now uses the Bidirectional Forwarding
Detection protocol (see RFC 5880), instead of custom keep-alive messages
between control services.
- New border router implementation with support for the new header and
BFD. Note that this does not support peering links yet.
- New SCION-IP gateway (SIG) implementation
- The tools scmp and showpaths are now subcommands of a combined binary
with a more polished interface. Usage is e.g. `scion ping <isd-as,ip>`,
`scion showpaths <isd-as>`, or `scion traceroute <isd-as,ip>`.
- Log output of the SCION services is captured by the systemd journal,
there is no file logging anymore.
- Easier tinkering with the SCIONLab configuration; the important files
are now all directly under `/etc/scion` instead of in deeply nested
directories. The scionlab-config utility is more careful to avoid
overwriting any changes that a user might have applied.
Information about the update process:
Please update the SCIONLab debian packages (apt-get update && apt-get
upgrade) in your machine or VM connected to SCIONLab after 07:00UTC on
Wednesday, 9.12.2020 -- no further action should be required.
Please contact us at scion(a)lists.inf.ethz.ch if you have any comments or
questions. To reach the SCIONLab administrators directly, send us an
email to scionlab-admins(a)sympa.ethz.ch.
Thank you and best regards,
Your SCIONLab team
