Neubot

As stated in a previous blog post, the latest version of Neubot bears a win32 autoupdate feature, and is looking for testers.

As the autoupdate is still under testiing, the feature is still marked as "experimental", and is not enabled by default in this version. Moreover, as the digital signature system for the updates is not yet implemented, and in respect for the users who prefer only to install code that is signed, the feature shall remain disabled by default until this has been arranged.

The system is currently open to being tested by users in the outset. So far, it is known to be working stably on WIndows 7 environments. If you have Neubot installed and would like to enable this feature, you may follow these simple instructions:

Version 0.4.10 is the latest generally-available stable release of Neubot, distributed for Ubuntu >= 10.04, MacOSX >= 10.6, Windows >= XP SP3 and FreeBSD, as well as in source format.

Here's what changed in 140 characters: better M-Lab redirection, preparatory work for Win32 auto updates, cleanups, docs and fixes. Install, upgrade instructions at http://www.neubot.org/download, read on for more details.

Version 0.4.9 is the latest generally-available stable release of Neubot, distributed for Ubuntu >= 10.04, MacOSX >= 10.6, Windows >= XP SP3 and FreeBSD, as well as in source format.

If you have already installed Neubot for Ubuntu, MacOSX or FreeBSD, it should update automatically, and we just kindly ask you to verify that this is the case. As a rule of thumb, if it has not updated after a couple of weeks, that is probably a bug and you should report it.

Neubot for Windows, instead, needs manual intervention and you can find instructions here:

http://www.neubot.org/install-windows#upgrade

Instructions for installing from scratch are available here:

http://www.neubot.org/download

This release contains 142 commits. The diffstat says: 73 changed files with 3,562 additions and 1,025 deletions.

Here are the most relevant changes:

Yesterday I blogged about how to automatically follow Neubot development from MacOSX, today I will provide instructions to do that with Ubuntu, Debian and other Debian-based distributions. This is very simple, you just need to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/neubot.list file and replace the following line:

deb http://releases.neubot.org/ /

with this one:

deb http://releases.neubot.org/rc /

I merged into Neubot code for MacOSX that allows to automatically download updates from the development channel instead of from the stable channel. Basically, following this development channel you will be able to run release candidate versions and you will help me to test the code before the release.

This code will be released with 0.4.8 and this feature will be, of course, disabled by default. To enable it, you need to create the configuration file /etc/neubot/updater:

Version 0.4.6 is the latest generally-available stable release of Neubot, distributed for Ubuntu >= 10.04, MacOSX >= 10.6, Windows >= XP SP3 and FreeBSD as well as in source format (.tar.gz and .zip). The release contains 152 patches. The diffstat says: 112 files changed, with 4618 lines inserted and 1124 lines deleted.

As you probably know, between 0.4.5 and 0.4.6 Neubot has been added to Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a distributed server platform that hosts tools that, like Neubot, want to measure the quality and neutrality of Internet connections. (More on that in the press release.) So, this release contains a lot of patches that deal with "M-Lab integration" as we will see.

Here are the most relevant changes:

• Neubot added to M-Lab.

  With respect to measurement quality, there is a tremendous advantage in using M-Lab. The availability of more than 60 servers around the world allows to redirect users to the nearest server and the thing we are measuring, "speed", is roughly inversely proportional to the distance from the server. Plus, at higher distance there are much more confounding factors, for example because you have to traverse more ISPs. So, it matters A LOT to be as close as possible to the users.