GroupVPN Release / IPOP Release 9

[David Isaac Wolinsky]

After an entire summer of serious work and extensive testing, I am proud
to announce that IPOP Release 9 has been completed. With this release
comes an intuitive new way to bootstrap IPOP VPNs through the use of
Groups. For now, groups management is limited to our site, but this is
a factor of time and not capability. The Group system is based upon a
portable Joomla component and will be available for redistribution in
the near future. (Note, we are currently analyzing the possibility of
getting a Verisigned certificate for the website, if this happens, all
GrouVPN configuration zip files will need to be reinstalled -- we'll
give more directions at that point in time).

With this new release of IPOP, we introduce the following features:
- IPOP now supports a VPN Router mode -- many participants in a LAN for
a single instance of IPOP
- For Security, IPOP now supports a Group model called GroupVPN
- Merged CondorIpopNode and DhtIpopNode (DNS enabled via config file)
- ARPs are only returned if there is an end point for the requested IP
- Removed Linux and Windows dependency on c-lib (no c-libraries)
- Added static address support (users can now enable Static IP support
in the config and then set an IP address statically)
- Windows and Linux service scripts
- Support for intelligent relay selection based upon physical proximity
- Windows and Linux GroupVPN processing scripts
- 64-bit drivers for Windows
- Improved timing (a greener IPOP)
- RPM and DEB packaging

Also from now on, we will change our version numbers to use the
following format:
Major.Minor, where the current release is 9.0. When a Major number is
the same, such as 9.0 and 9.1, the two binaries will be compatible.
Where as 9.5 and 10.0 will not be compatible.

More information about IPOP can be obtained from:
http://www.ipop-project.org

More information about GroupVPN can be obtained from:
http://www.grid-appliance.org/wiki/index.php/GroupVPN

(Note RPM and DEB package will not be available for immediate release).

Please post all issues here:
http://github.com/davidiw/ipop/issues

Regards,
David