Xrouter v182f - Upgrade notes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Version 182f is supplied as a model 3 executable only.  If you are not
already running v182b, you must first follow the upgrade trail and
get your system up to 182b, then simply use v182f executable in place
of the 182b executable.  No configuration changes are necessary (as a
general rule, if the version *number* is the same, the new exe will
always be a drop-in replacement).

It's not a long list of changes this time, but if you are thinking it's
not worth the bother of upgrading, I advise you to so so, because the
nodes entries were a little unstable in the last few versions.  And,
as the table is now more stable, there is a lot less INP3 traffic.


Changes since v182b
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Changes made a couple of versions ago had resulted in a small but
  noticeable delay in netrom traffic - fixed.

- Since the introduction of Time Domain Routing some node entries have
  been a little volatile, with strange effects such as obsolescence
  counts which suddenly drop to zero - fixed.

- Changes in the TCP module to minimise the chances of previously used
  sequence and port numbers being re-used after a dirty restart, i.e.
  where TCP sessions were not closed before restarting Xrouter, possibly
  leaving half-open connections on neighbours.

- Chat users who accessed via TCP port 3600 were not having their stored
  details recovered - fixed.

- TXOK now works differently.  The 0 and 1 states are backward compatible,
  but states 2 and 3 allow the RX to be disabled.  This saves having an
  RXOK command.  State 2 would typically be used to disable all traffic on
  a port, to time out troublesome connections, or to do tests.

	0 = RX ok, no TX
	1 = RX and TX ok
	2 = No TX or RX
	3 = TX ok, no RX

- L4 connection rejects were using the wrong L4 source address - fixed.

- The QUALADJUST default was broken since v182b (it was defaulting to 0).
  This caused neigbour nodes to be omitted from table if there was no
  QUALADJUST line in config - fixed.

- A zero MAXTT wasn't preventing neighours from sending INP3 - fixed.

- As a further concession to Luddites, setting a route's MAXTT to 65535
  will prevent Xrouter from sending RTT measurement frames on that route
  and allow the interlinks to time out.  I can't imagine why anyone would
  *want* links to time out, as they are not actually being metered like
  telephone calls, but there's no accounting for taste.  Like MAXTT=0,
  this prevents all INP3 activity, but it goes one step further and
  returns Xrouter to the bad old BPQ days.. Use it at your peril, as I'm
  not sure the backward emulation is perfect yet.  It wasn't just a case
  of disabling new code, I had to re-install a lot of old code that I
  had happily consigned to the rubbish bin, and try to make the old and
  new code co-exist.

- The "N +" response was listed "long" instead of "wide" - fixed.

- Added two new stats: Nodes free and possible.  The former shows how full
  the table is, and the latter shows how much bigger the table could be if
  uncapped, i.e. it gives an indication of potential table size or suitable
  MAXNODES.  It's not incredibly accurate, more of a guide to help you
  adjust your qualities, minquals, maxtt's and maxhops to get your node
  count to fit within the table size, thus preventing the node entry
  recycling algorithms from being invoked.

- TALK was still broken - it was now allowing *remote* sysops to talk, but
  not *console* sysops! - fixed.

73, Paula 1/3/02
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