Summary

We're thrilled to announce the biggest release yet of FreeTAKServer, a Open Source software for Situational Awareness that is fun to use! Our team has completely rewritten the codebase from the ground up, resulting in a software that is now safer, faster, more stable, modular, and extensible than ever before. The new version is foundational, laying the groundwork for future developments and improvements. While this release doesn't include many new features (see below), we're already experimenting with the power of the new design and adding even more exciting features, like smart emergencies and repeated cots. Get ready to experience the future of Situational Awareness with FreeTAKServer!

Installation

the suggested way to install FTS is by using our signature ZeroTouch installer
on a Ubuntu 22.04 machine type
wget -qO - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FreeTAKTeam/FreeTAKHub-Installation/up-installer-to-v2/scripts/easy_install.sh | sudo bash

1. If you want to install using Pypi
2. Use an Ubuntu 22.04 nachine
3. (optional) Install python3.11
4. pypi as follows
   pip install FreeTAKServer[UI]

New Features

• Smart emergencies: SA capacity undermined by a flood of emergencies? We've introduced smart emergencies which allow you to set a radius within which emergencies are sent to users. e.g. (Bob and Alice both have emergencies Bob is 5km away from Charlie, and Alice is 3000km away from Charlie, given the smart emergency distance is 20km Charlie will receive only Bob's emergency)
  
• Repeated COTs: Sick of having to re-broadcast essential situation information every time a new client connects? That's where repeated cots come in. Using the API you can now create a COT which, by default, is re-sent to any and all newly connected clients to ensure everyone is on the same page.
• CRL Re-Generation: we now support manual regeneration of the CRL upon expiration.

Technology Features

• SSL 2.0 socket management: allows 1000's of secure connections without breaking FTS

• Abstraction: FreeTAKServer 2.0 is based on DigitalPy
  

• Python3.11: faster code execution and Better error management, is the default supported version of python for use with FTS. Other versions of Python (3.8, 3.9, 3.10) has been tested and they works.

• Ubuntu 22.04 support: Faster boot, Supported until 2032,  LTS kernel 5.4

• Async & Scalable : High performance architecture, Scale up with the amount of available resources, Advanced networking capabilities supporting concurrency, sockets that carry whole messages across various transports (inter-process, TCP)
  

• Component Based Architecture: Easy to implement your own component, Can be generated from Model, Drop-in capability, Rule Engine, Routing system based on ZeroMQ
  

• Security Fixes: Code-base scanned every change for security, Code quality checked, Python compatibility test

• Deprecated Insecure TLS: Insecure versions of TLS have now been deprecated

Bug Fixes (including alpha)

• Fixed leaking SSL sockets!: After much debugging and community collaboration we believe we have finally fixed the errors with the SSL COT Service dying with a large number of connected clients over time. (this has been tested with artificial traffic generation but we need input from real users!)
• Fixed Emergency API Endpoint: with the introduction of smart emergencies the emergency API endpoint no longer worked and prevented the UI Connect page from displaying emergencies, this has now been fixed.
• 539 fix emergency end point by @naman108 in #541
• Add missing code by @naman108 in #544
• Add json schema impl by @naman108 in #545
• Refresh of Dockerfile by @hickey in #511
• 408 relocation of server runtime files by @naman108 in #420
• disallowed connections with insecure TLS protocols by @naman108 in #546
• linting fixes by @naman108 in #548