The FRED team is releasing a new version of the FRED system as v2024.1. Visit the Get FRED page, you can find the latest versions of packages in the Install binaries section.

The main reason we decided to release this summary version is that we were making major changes that would have caused complications for FRED operators around the world with partial releases. Specifically, there were three groups of changes:

 

• Finalizing the rewrite of the remaining Python code from 2.7 to 3.x,
• gradually moving from CORBA to gRPC,
• changing the distribution of some components to docker containers.

 

In relation to the rewrite of CORBA services to gRPC, some of the original packages are being discontinued and removed from distribution. Switching continuously to individual sub-versions, as we did in the .CZ registry operation, would mean for FRED administrators to change the configuration and installation procedures with each such version, and in some cases to use a temporary configuration for the transitional period. We are now releasing what we consider to be another ideal upgrade milestone for existing users. Although the system architecture and individual components will continue to evolve independently, we plan to release public and supported versions several times a year.

At the same time, we are introducing a new way of versioning these public versions of the FRED system. From the original versioning, which no longer gives any specific information (historically it tried to copy the version of the core components), we are switching to a simple versioning format vYYYY.X, where YYYY is the release year of the version and X is the release sequence number in that year. Following the change in versioning, we are going to publish these versions on our public GitLab, along with a changelog and a list of versions of each component. In the future, we would automatically build a demo system image for each such version for easy testing. We will provide details later in a separate post.

For the current architecture, we have updated the component diagram of the FRED system.

In addition to these technology and architecture changes, the following application news are included in this release:

 

• The Daphne web administration interface is replaced by the FERDA application.
• The interactive command-line EPP client fred-client, whose source code was showing its age, has been replaced by the new fred-eppic, which uses a separate python library epplib. This can be used, among other things, to integrate EPP client functions into other systems.

 

For FRED users who use one of the paid support packages, there is a GlobalBlock, a domain name blocking service extension, developed this year. In the near future we will also add an extension for the domain auctions module, which has already been running for half a year in the .CZ domain.