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Subj: Xrouter32 release notes.
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ﾍﾍ[Message No. 4490 Send on 22-02-2026 at 11:44:00 Lt by PA2SNK Danny]ﾍﾍﾍﾍﾍﾍﾍﾍ
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21st February 2026
Release notes for XRouter version 504z
######################################
Version 504z should be treated with caution. It mainly fixes some reported bugs and adds a few of my "wishlist" items. But some ancient and well-proven code has had to be completely rewritten, potentially introducing new bugs.
See the changelogs below for details of changes since the previous changelog, which was published on 20th January 2026.
This version should be a "drop-in replacement" as usual. It is recommended that you back up your current XRouter executable, and rename the new one as required. For Linux versions only, you will need to give the new file "execute" permissions using "chmod +x <filename>".
Please continue to report bugs and make suggestions for improvements.
Static Versions
===============
Variants marked "-static" are 100% self contained programs with no
external dependencies. Thus they should work on any version of Linux,
unlike the non-static versions which require specific versions of LIBC
to be present.
But one downside is that the Linux kernel resolver can not be used
from a statically linked application. Thus in order to resolve
hostnames into IP addresses (e.g. for AXUDP, node map etc) you MUST
add a DNS line into XROUTER.CFG. I suggest "DNS=8.8.8.8". This lets
XRouter use its own resolver.
The other downside is that ALSA audio cannot be compiled into static
versions either. If you want audio, or kernel-based domain resolution,
you have to use a non-static version and put up with "dependency hell".
Backwards Compatability
=======================
Generally, a version compiled on an old operating system such as Debian
"Stretch", will work on a later O/S, but not the other way around.
Windows versions don't suffer from this lunacy. An EXE file is self-contained, and just works!
Recent Changes:
===============
************************************************************************
Version 504z (21st Feb 2026)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fixed: Web interface ROUTE page crashed when displaying routes which
had zero uptime.
Fixed: Web terminal and web chat ignored hash (#) character and every
character after it.
Fixed: Web chat didn't display accented characters properly.
Fixed: On web chat, the "ESC" button caption disappeared after use.
Fixed: Negative longitudes sometimes displayed incorrectly on 64-bit
platforms.
Fixed: MMASK caused segfault if used in BOOTCMDS.SYS.
Fixed: MPORT, MFROM, MTO and MDIR commands had been disabled from
working in BOOTCMDS.SYS.
Fixed: CAPTURE command captured to wrong filename if used from
BOOTCMDS.SYS.
Fixed: Nodes learned by INP3 from non-XRouter neighbours were expiring
from the table because they weren't being confirmed often
enough.
Change: Because (X)Net neighbours send NetRom nodes broadcasts every
10 minutes with missing AX25 destination fields, it was causing
too many IDS (Intrusion Detection System) warnings about
malformed AXUDP. These warnings are now suppressed. I'm not
sure if this is a good idea or not? Does (X)Net always do this,
or is it a sign of misconfiguration? If the latter, then
suppressing the warnings is probably a bad thing. And allowing
NetRom broadcasts from (X)Net is also a bad thing because it
broadcasts ridiculously high "qualities" that it has created
from trip times. It is probably best to set the port quality
to 1 and use INP3-only for these neighbours.
Change: The interval between "scheduled" INP3 broadcasts is increased
from 10 to 60 minutes for non-XRouter peers, and for XRouter
peers running version 505 or above.
Change: Capture filenames are now "YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS_N_CAPTURE.TXT", so
that they appear in chronological order, not console order.
Change: If a level 4 connect cannot be initiated, the "connect"
command now reports an error number instead of "System Busy".
************************************************************************
Version 504y (1st Feb 2026)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fixed: AXTCP links shown on the HTML "Links" page had invalid
IP address, TCP port, and creation time information.
Change: TCP links displayed via HTML were confusing because in some
fonts, the space between the IP address and the TCP port was
insignificant. The space is now replaced with a colon.
Change: Improved the rejection of "bad" callsigns in WhitePages data,
both gleaned from passing headers and received in WP updates.
Change: Peer nodes which included a chevron ">" in their welcome text
were breaking the MBL forwarding protocol. The BBS forwarding
script now copes with this condition.
Added: Support for MAN files in more than one language, as requested.
French language MAN files will be located in MAN/FR, German
files in MAN/DE and so on. For backward compatablity, English
files will remain in the MAN directory itself.
Added: "CT" (Connect via TCP) option to BBS forwarding scripts.
I don't agree with forwarding over Telnet, but if you really
must do it, the format of the first "C" command in the script
for that BBS is "CT <ip_addr> [tcp_port]". The "tcp_port" arg
is only required if the peer's Telnet port is not 23. You
should be aware that some BBS's send "hanging" prompts for
"Callsign:" and "Password:", i.e. they are not followed by
newlines hence will not be detected.
************************************************************************
Version 504x (29th Jan 2026)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fixed: In version 504w only, the BBS could sometimes get stuck in a
forever polling loop if there were no poll entries in FWD.SYS.
A quick fix, if you don't want to upgrade to 504x, is to add
at least one "P" flag to one @BBS line in FWD.SYS.
Change: BBS mail queues are now held in ".Q" files in the PMS
directory, one queue file per peer, e.g. "GB7BBS.Q".
Added: KA (Kill by Age) command to BBS, syntax "KA <days>". e.g.
"KA 10" kills all mail whose creation or reception date is
more than 10 days in the past.
Added: KQ (Kill Queue) command to BBS, syntax "KQ <peer_callsign>".
This can be used to delete a mail forwarding queue, if for
example it contained old mail, or the peer was no longer
connectable. The form "KQ <peercall> [msgnum]" can be used to
delete a specific message from a specific queue.
Added: "MaxAgeToFwd" keyword to PMS.CFG, and a corresponding entry
field to the BBS admin web page. This specifies an upper limit
to the age of messages which are allowed to be forwarded, and
is primarily intended to prevent "old" mail from recirculating
after the message ID has been purged, or if the message was
never seen before. Such events can occur when old BBS's are
restarted after months or years off line. The argument is in
days, with a default of 60 days, and 0 meaning "no limit".
Added: RESCAN command to the BBS. This scans the mailbase, rebuilding
mail queues as necessary. It can be used if the mail queues
are deleted or lost, and might typically be used after
changing the distribution file.
************************************************************************
Version 504w (26th Jan 2026)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fixed: When PC time was not set for GMT, a bug caused the "R:" lines
to contain local time instead of GMT.
Fixed: Case normalisation of user names in CHAT was causing hyphenated
first names such as Jean-Paul to have the wrong case.
Fixed: JSON unescaping of "text" member in BLOG, PMS and WALL.
Fixed: After an incoming MBL forwarding session switched to reverse
forwarding, refusal of the first proposal was handled OK, but
the second proposal then caused XR to send "Invalid response"
and disconnect.
Fixed: MBL polling sessions were timing out after 2 minutes, depite
ongoing activity.
Fixed: The BBS command "S" (send a message to sysop) sometimes gave
unpredictable results.
Fixed: BBS "SF" (stop forwarding) command had been broken for a long
time.
Change: More tidying-up of BBS logging.
Added: BBS now has multilingual capability, but some of the
non-English texts and help files have yet to be written.
Added: Shifted Function keys are now accepted in nodes monitor,
routes monitor, session monitor, status window and IDS monitor,
for cases where the host operating system intercepts the
standard function keys.
Added: "PS" command, to view xrouter's running "processes".
Added: LANG command to BBS, for use in cases where the user connected
directly to the BBS callsign without going via the node.
Added: NL command to BBS. This allows users to set their preferred
language for the current and future sessions, instead if
having to use the LANG command on every connection.
Added: BBS "SP, "SB" and "SR" commands are now included in the list
displayed by "? *" and "? **".
************************************************************************
"XRouter - Packet's Best-Kept Secret"
73 de Danny PA2SNK
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