System WeOS 4.29 introduces significant improvements

As of March 15th, WeOS 4.29 is released. The new version includes some major changes as compared to earlier WeOS releases, most significantly to the logging support and more powerful IGMP snooping support. To read up on all changes in this release, please refer to the release notes.

IGMP snooping improved 

WeOS 4.29.0 introduces major changes to how multicast within a LAN is handled. Multicast, as opposed to unicast, is an efficient means of communicating information to more than one receiver. Compared to broadcast, multicast can be controlled. Internet Group Membership Protocol snooping (IGMP snooping) is when switches listen to network traffic to dynamically learn about multicast traffic.

As traffic flows between devices, the switch maintains an internal list of which end devices require multicast traffic, and which do not. With WeOS 4.28 and earlier, IGMP snooping was enabled by default, sometimes causing a challenge on some networks with unknown multicast traffic being blocked by a strict filter policy. Starting with WeOS 4.29, IGMP snooping will still be enabled by default, but now allow unknown multicast to flood network. As the switch learns the location of receivers for different multicast groups, these known multicast addresses are filtered to only reach the receivers. If hardware resources prohibits the filter to be setup, that address will be treated as unknown and thus flooded. This approach provides full connectivity and high efficiency of IPv4 multicast within a LAN, but also easy configuration and transparency of non-IPv4 multicast (IPv6, GOOSE, PROFINET, etc.). Further settings are available for those who wish to fine-tune the IGMP snooping behaviour.

Extended logging support

WeOS 4.29 also introduces changes related to logging. System logs provide a detailed series of events to help identify immediate errors. Changes in WeOS 4.29 have extended the logging support to be more generic when logging local or remote targets and on to an external device connected (USB). WeOS 4.29 introduces logging sink via syslog to enable specific targets to receive messages, rather than the previous generic syslog servers. In addition, log events can now be filtered more flexibly, both based on facility (subsystem) and severity level.

Furthermore, in WeOS 4.29 a new and more compressed image format is used for WeOS 4 products on the Basis platform. For these products, upgrading to 4.29.0 or higher will require some additional steps as described further in this How-To video.

The release includes additional feature enhancements, support for Westermo’s new copper SFP (1100-0179) and many bug fixes. To find out more about the changes, please take a look at the release notes and management guide. 

Download the new version of WeOS 4