Spokes Update v1.4.4

Published at August 25, 2023 ·  2 min read

We’re pleased to announce Spokes v1.4.4. This minor release introduces small improvements to the dashboard UI and some optimizations under the hood.

Dashboard

In our last release, we added the ability to set up and use an ACME provider like ZeroSSL. This feature was only configured using environment variables during container instantiation or manually updating the configuration.

In this release, we’ve updated the Server settings page to allow an ACME provider to be set up from the UI.

The different TLS server settings can be selected using the combo box in the Domain & TLS section of server settings. We’ve removed the self-signed certificate option. These are simple enough to create using a tool like OpenSSL, and removing it also helped simplify the settings page.

This update also includes a failover to self-signed TLS certificates. If, for some reason, using Lets Encrypt or other ACME providers fails to instantiate a TLS certificate on startup, Spokes will create a self-signed certificate and an error event so that the admin can view via the dashboard and change any settings.

Improvements

One of our users reported that cascading SLOW database operation warnings were being generated in their instance. We found that events on the host, such as the network experiencing a blip or hardware failure (e.g. a cable failing), would cause a stampede of new tunnel sessions, latency, and more errors.

To help with this issue, we’ve shifted non-critical DB operations, such as those storing events, alerts, or connection metrics, to a timed-based transaction that accumulates new records before storing them in the database.

Depending on the use case, recording connection metrics was causing a lot of new records to be written constantly if the number of new connections was high. This would create latency for other database operations, and there was an indication that this caused some downstream such as network timeouts.

The prioritized database operations have helped tremendously. We’ve also tuned some options that have helped database performance as well.

This issue is thus far unique, but we’re happy that some simple fixes resolved the report issues. These changes will improve Spokes’ performance and reliability as well!

Thanks!

We appreciate the bug reports you’ve sent us! Let us know if we can focus on any new features or improvements we can add to Spokes.

Cheers!