What is new in the SNIP 3_08_00 release – released December 28th, 2022
(updating the prior release of 3_07 issued on November 3rd, 2022)

This is the next production release of SNIP following the Rev 3_07 release.  This release contains various end-of-year minor improvements in response to user requests.

This release supports both 32-bit and 64-bit installations on all Windows Platforms from Windows 7 to the current editions.  It is recommended that all Windows 32/64 SNIP installations now update to using this release.

Changes in this release include

Misc. Improvements and Changes

This release consists of a number of minor changes, bug fixes, and improvements including:

• A problem when creating new User Accounts and then immediately adding an ‘end of use date/time’ restriction to a new user has been corrected.  The prior release (Rev 3_07) produced a dangling pointer if the new user account was not saved before editing the ‘end of use date/time’ restriction, now corrected.
• The logic used to count and load Push-Out connections for larger networks (those with 70 or more Base Stations) has been corrected to allow correctly starting and loading when the number of data streams involved is near the license limit.  In prior releases, SNIP would incorrectly count the number of free slots remaining, this has been corrected.
• The support for using a valid eMail for a user account name (enabled with a check box in the Manage User Accounts dialog) has been improved to support those NTRIP Client devices that cannot make the “@” character.   Such devices can use the char string “-at-” as a replacement.  This string is not case sensitive. 
• All NTRIP Client user names are now trimmed of leading and trailing white space before being processed.  Such characters  are considered illegal as per the official NTRIP standards, but many low-end open source software project (often those based on the work of RTKLIB) incorrectly allow adding such characters in their GUI designs.
• The warming that is issued in the console log when SNIP first starts up if it detects it cannot write to the local folder has been made much more prominent to aid new deployments.  It is essential that SNIP be able to write to this folder to update various User Accounts and run time logs.  Some Windows 10 installations will set the local security settings so high that this is a problem and the folder rights then need to be adjusted.
• Corrected a problem where one data stream that pointed to another data stream in the same Caster now correctly links to the right data stream at all times.  In prior releases, during a re-connection event, the wrong data stream could sometimes be selected.  This type of self-connecting is often used when PFAT™ is being used to express a single Base Station as two different data streams, each with its own datum.  You can learn more about how to change the datum of a base station in this article.
• Found and corrected a rare race condition where periodic re-connections of a Push-In data stream, coupled with a change in the IP used by the source connections and a TCP/IP ‘half disconnect” could at times crash SNIP at the moment of re-connection.  This occurs with some deployments who have Base Stations that use cellular links to connect.  Whenever the base went offline, or at the cellular network operators whim, the source IP used was periodically reassigned to a new value by the cellular network.
• The process of reverse IP mapping has been updated to the new system as follows.  This was designed to be an additional cost features (as it costs us resources to service millions of IP reverse lookup requests to the thousands of SNIP deployments).  But for the past five years we have simply updated the “end date” with each new release to provide this service to all models of SNIP for free.  In the new system going forward the service is provided, indefinitely and at not cost, to any paid models of SNIP and for any evaluation users.   The service is not provided in the Lite (free) models.
• The Base Station connection time displayed in some reports gave the time at which the connection was first started rather than the time period for which the connection has been lost. Now corrected.
• A small performance improvement in the display of currently connected users now resizes the columns based on the current content with every fifth update.
• Added additional logic to change all Caster Table entries to show ‘B’ (for Basic authentication needed) whenever the Caster is set to require an eMail as the user account name.  Normally ‘B’ is used to indicate that an existing User Account is needed to connect, while ‘N’ (for No authentication needed) is used for ‘open Caster‘ systems.  The GUI of a least one NTRIP Client maker does not allow entering a user account name unless it finds a ‘B’ in the Caster Table entry.
• Corrected a minor logic error in the Web API Base Station search process where any inactive Raw-TCP/IP data streams would be returned as matching the search string.
• From a SNIP operator request; some additional fields are now displayed in the “view connected users with NMEA data” table.  Added additional columns with;  the current SV count, and the current Fixed/Float/Autonomous modes.
• SNIP detects and blocks NTRIP Client users who connect and send huge unwanted messages (typically several Kbytes of unwanted NMEA sentences).  These users are disconnected, but the report in the console log can be quite large so it is filtered.  The logic that handles this has been improved to NOT filter certain large system related messages, a bug which occurred in the last release.
• Improved the intrusion protection logic that detects too many “/” characters in a Base Station connection requests.  While valid NTRIP connections do use this character, invalid attempts by bad actors to probe the SNIP machine can often be detected and blocked when this is detected (bogus requests like   http://yourCaster.com/wp-includes/class-wp-scripts.php).
• In the Serial Streams tab the baud rate 4800 has been added to the combo box choices. As a general rule, faster transmission rates should be used to minimize the message latency.

How to Update…

Updates to SNIP are always free and easy.  Your Caster will be offline about 3 minutes.  From within SNIP, simply use the menu item Help ⇒ Check for Updates…   Your update will be downloaded from our secure servers and then you will be asked to allow SNIP to restart and update itself.  On some Windows 10 systems you must also manually exit the current copy of SNIP to update.  That’s all there is to it!