This release is up to date with the code that is in production with REMATCH right now

Latest release after supporting SLOCLAP launch with Network Next.

(This is a preview release only because I'll spending some time updating the documentation over the next month, otherwise this release is exactly the same code that is deployed in REMATCH).

Unity/Multiplay have been unable to provide their customers with the datacenter a game server is running in for 7+ years.

This is a huge problem for a network accelerator like Network Next because we need to accelerate game traffic to the correct datacenter that the game server is actually located in, not some random datacenter in the same city.

Thus, because of Unity's general incompetence, rely only on them to provide us with the city name: "unity.saopaulo" and then run a custom whois implementation on the game server, parsing the whois output to match various tags like "i3d", "maxihost", "gcore" to identify the actual server hosting company, and then update the datacenter name accordingly. For example: "unity.saopaulo" -> "i3d.saopaulo"

sigh

Previous releases relied on curl being available on the command line to perform cloud datacenter auto detection, for example, which google cloud or AWS datacenter your server is running in.

Now you can override the curl-based http requests with your own function that perform the http/https requests used for autodetection. See next_autodetect_http_request_function in the source for details.

Building on top of this functionality, the Unreal Engine plugin now performs auto detection using Unreal's HTTP module, removing the dependency on curl.

This release contains a production ready UE5 plugin, fixes for the XDP relay so it works across Google Cloud, AWS, Akamai and bare metal, as well as some small fixes to the portal.

The relay now uses uses kernel bypass technology to process and forward packets more efficiently than the previous relay implementation. This lets you accelerate many more sessions through a relay than you previously could.

The new license is based on the Redis Source Available License v2.

In short, you can use Network Next with your game FOR FREE, but you cannot use the source code to create a commercial product that is licensed to 3rd parties, for example a hosted version of Network Next as SaaS.

Added a detailed, worked example of how to customize your installation of Network Next to get acceleration to a test server running in São Paulo, Brasil, plus many small workflow improvements, bug fixes and enhancements to support this worked example.

Previous code tested to see if the Linux kernel was up to date on relays by checking if uname -r output contained the string "6.5".

Now there are kernel versions in production above 6.5 on Akamai, so the "next setup" relay command would get stuck trying to update the Linux kernel, and then checking for "6.5" in uname -r and never finding it because the updated kernel version was 6.8 for example.

The fix is to extract the kernel version major and minor numbers from uname -r output and then properly test if the major, minor version numbers are older than 6.5, and only then upgrade the Linux kernel.

This release contains small fixes discovered while working with a customer.

• Fix an instance of '~secrets/' to '~/secrets/' in setup documentation
• Fix company name not getting updated in scripts/setup_relay.sh on "next config"
• Fix cloudflare_zone_id not getting copied across from config to terraform scripts on "next config"
• Make apt run in non-interactive mode in terraform scripts via DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
• Update maxmind.com ip2location download to the new method required by maxmind: https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/updating-databases#directly-downloading-databases
• Strip any leading or trailing newlines in ~/secrets/terraform-akamai.txt and ~/secrets/terraform-cloudflare.txt before using them in terraform
• Don't use default google networks in terraform dev relay and prod relay projects. Some enterprise google cloud orgs don't allow creation of default networks in projects, and this breaks setup until the default network is manually created: https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Infrastructure-Compute-Storage/Is-there-a-default-netwok-in-a-new-provisioned-project/m-p/428917