Spread 5.0.0 RC1 Released

November 22, 2016

Spread Concepts LLC is happy to announce a release candidate of a new version, 5.0.0 RC1, of The Spread Toolkit. It can be downloded here.

Spread 5 is an important release that adds support for IPv6.

Spread version 5 adds support for IPv6 in the Spread daemon, C language client library and several example and support programs (e.g. - spmonitor, spuser, spsend, sprecv, spflooder). This version of Spread supports Posix environments (e.g. - Linux) and Windows.

Spread 5 can work on IPv4-only hosts, IPv6-only hosts or dual stack hosts. However, all daemons in a Spread deployment must run using only IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. Spread 5 does not yet support configurations where some daemons use IPv4 addresses while others use IPv6 addresses, even if transition mechanisms such as network address translation (e.g. - stateless IP/ICMP translation) would allow such hosts to communicate using those addresses.

Daemons' IP addresses can be configured explicitly or by using names which will be looked up using standard system services (i.e. - DNS, /etc/hosts, etc.) in order to map them back to IP addresses. Clients can similarly specify either explicit addresses or names to connect to daemons.

For more details check the Readme.IPv6 and docs/sample.spread.conf files.

This release maintains the previous client API, so applications should be able to be relinked or recompiled with the new Spread library without changes. However, if you used functionality from libspread-util in your programs, then you will need to recompile as some header constants have changed.

The Spread 5 daemon is not backwards compatible with previous versions. Spread 4 and Spread 5 daemons will refuse to communicate with one another.

Several new syntaxes and features have been added to the configuration file. The configuration file is almost entirely backwards compatible. Please check the docs/sample.spread.conf file for details.