RONIN Release: Tuesday 17th October 2023

Features

RONIN LINK - Rebuilt from the ground up

• RONIN LINK has been totally rebuilt from scratch - introducing RONIN LINK 3.0
• Enhanced security features such as context bridging and sandboxing - no more root permissions required - ever!
• All RONIN LINK functionality is now compatible with ED25519 keys, enabling support for all of the latest OSs
• RONIN LINK can now perform GPU / non GPU driver installation and configuration automatically based on the selected instance type when installing NICE DCV, making the virtual desktop experience even more performant
• Jupyter script has been updated to leverage Conda and Pip for more reliable installation of the latest version
• RStudio script has been updated to include the latest versions of R and RStudio
• Netdata installation has been enabled across more operating systems
• A machine search option has been added to RONIN LINK
• Rebuilt the DNS functionality to use both internal and external DNS servers for maximum compatibility
• When a port is unavailable, RONIN LINK will ask to choose a port on your behalf
• Added the ability to specify both a local and remote port when performing SSH tunnelling to applications running on your machine
• RONIN LINK is now compatible as an appimage, for enhanced sandboxing security on linux

Coming soon - automatic updates, AMD drivers, one click AI tools

Transition to ED25519 Keys

• Some of the latest operating systems (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04 and Linux 2023) require the Ed25519 SSH key type, instead of the previous standard RSA key type. The Ed25519 keys are more secure and performant than RSA keys, so the Ed25519 key type will now be the default key type that is generated when creating an SSH key in RONIN moving forward.
• It is recommended that old RSA keys are deleted and new Ed25519 keys are generated. This is made clear to users via a clickable alert icon during the key selection screen.

Note: The current RSA key type is not considered insecure, just less secure and less performant than Ed25519 keys. For this reason, existing RSA keys will not be deleted and can continue to be used if desired.

• The creation date for each SSH key is now displayed in the key selection screen so that old keys can easily be identified and deleted when necessary

Other Minor Features

• "WBS code" has now been renamed to "Billing Code" in project settings to be more consistent with the RONIN tagging structure
• A refresh button has been added to package lists when searching for packages to add to the RONIN package catalogues
• Users can now filter instance types by the number of GPUs
• Unattached root drives can now be resized and a warning message is now displayed when root drives are attached as standard drives to let the user know they will no longer be able to be used as a root drive
• Users can now access the "Packages" screen
• RONIN will now launch RONIN LINK directly, rather than via the RONIN blog site
• RONIN launch scripts now check whether key packages are already installed on the machine as part of the AMI (e.g. the amazon cloudwatch agent) and if so, will skip the installation of these packages

Bug Fixes

• Package Name, Description and Avatar of existing packages is no longer overridden when updating an AMI ID
• Fixed a bug where the machine type card would disappear when changing an OS after it had already been selected on the machine creation screen
• Fixed a bug where the user "Member since" date and machine "Created by" date were showing incorrectly