conntrack-tools 0.9.14 released

Hi!

The Netfilter project presents another development release of the conntrack-tools. This release includes several fixes for the command line tool and lots of improvements for the daemon. Specifically I'd like to thank Hannes Eder, Vincent Jardin and Samuel Gauthier for their suggestions and contributions.

Please, see changelog attached for more details.

I'd also like to thank 6WIND <www.6wind.com> for sponsoring the development of two new features that are included in this release: the new TCP-based state-synchronization approach and a new feature that allows to disable the internal and the external caches. They have also helped auditing the code and doing bug hunting.

Q: How stable are the conntrack-tools?
A: The daemon that allows to synchronize states between firewalls has been tested in a cluster environment composed of two stateful firewalls running Debian 5.0 (Lenny) with a Linux kernel 2.6.32, keepalived 1.1.15, using conntrackd in FT-FW mode. The test consisted of downloading the Linux kernel source code in a tarball file via HTTP and randomly (in periods of 10 seconds) unplugging cablelinks to force the fail-over between the nodes. The results has shown no hangs/closure in any TCP connection.

Q: What are the conntrack-tools?
A: The conntrack-tools are:

- The userspace daemon so-called conntrackd that covers the specific aspects of stateful Linux firewalls to enable high availability solutions. It can be used as statistics collector of the firewall use as well. The daemon is highly configurable and easily extensible.

- The command line interface (CLI) conntrack that provides an interface to add, delete and update flow entries, list current active flows in plain text/XML, current IPv4 NAT'ed flows, reset counters, and flush the complete connection tracking table among many other.

Q: Where can I download it from?
A: http://www.netfilter.org/projects/conntrack-tools/downloads.html

Q: Where can I get more information about them?
A: http://conntrack-tools.netfilter.org

Q: Where can I have a look at the user manual?
A: http://conntrack-tools.netfilter.org/manual.html

On behalf of the Netfilter Core Team,
Pablo.

Hannes Eder (3):
conntrack: fix output when no arguments are passed
conntrack: avoid error with expectations when using 'conntrack -E -e ALL ...'
conntrack: use fscanf() instead of read() for showing counter

Jan Engelhardt (1):
doc: spell fix in conntrack(8) manpage

Pablo Neira Ayuso (36):
build: update library version requirements
local: add LOCAL_RET_* return values for UNIX sockets callbacks
conntrackd: add iterators with limited steps in hash and cache types
conntrackd: rework commit not to fork a child process
conntrackd: improve handling of external messages
conntrackd: reset event limit iteration counter
conntrackd: add clause to enable ctnetlink reliable event delivery
conntrackd: add support for IPv6 kernel-space filtering via BSF
conntrackd: use conntrack ID in the cache lookup
conntrackd: fix crash for unubuffered channel on exit path
conntrackd: more robust sanity checking on synchronization messages
conntrackd: add `DisableExternalCache' clause
conntrackd: reduce the number of gettimeofday() syscalls
conntrackd: allow to remove file descriptors from set
conntrackd: add support state-replication based on TCP
conntrackd: net message memory allocation is unsafe
conntrackd: fix MTU for TCP channels
conntrackd: fix return value in notrack_local()
conntrackd: improve error handling in tcp_send
conntrackd: fix `conf' local variable in channel.c that shadows global
conntrackd: fix re-connect with multiple TCP channels
conntrackd: break lines at 80 characters in example config files
conntrackd: rate-limit the amount of connect() calls
conntrackd: add retention queue for TCP errors
conntrackd: add alive control messages to notrack mode
conntrackd: fix wrong calculation of new maxfd on unregister_fds()
conntrackd: add statistics when the external cache is disabled
conntrackd: add missing external statistics
conntrackd: add `DisableInternalCache' clause
conntrackd: use indirect call to build layer 4 protocol information
conntrackd: add ICMP support for state-synchronization
conntrackd: fix flow-state filtering for TCP
conntrackd: document internal cache disabling and TCP-based synchronization
conntrack: fix manually created TCP entries with window tracking enabled
conntrackd: document `-B' command
build: bump version to 0.9.14

Samuel Gauthier (2):
conntrackd: better parse_payload protection against corrupted packets
conntrackd: fix bad configuration file for DisableExternalCache statement