What's New — v2.0 to v2.17.1

The feature changelog for the 2.x line. For the complete feature map see Everything OpenShield-XDP Does.

v2.17.1 — peacetime fairness: "games fine, websites dead" fix

Field report: on a box hosting both games and websites, websites stopped loading for new visitors while existing players kept playing; unloading the firewall cured it. Two kernel-side causes, both found and rig-proven:

• New-source temp-bans no longer fire in peacetime. The rotating-source flood defense used to temp-ban any source arriving while >100 new IPs/s were showing up — with no attack required. A busy website draws that organically, so real visitors ate 30-second bans while established players (never "new") were untouched. The ban now engages only after an attack declaration, or on an extreme spike (>8× the limit — rotating spoofed floods run orders of magnitude hotter than popularity). Verified on the rig: a 60-new-IPs/s visitor surge gets zero bans; a 100k+/s rotating flood still triggers ~1M bans.
• Idle legit connections survive flow-table churn. The per-flow table is an LRU; on a busy server it recycles, and a recycled connection's next packet after an idle stretch (HTTP keep-alive, game lobbies) looked "blind" to connection tracking and was dropped. The per-source established mark (only mintable by real payload after an observed handshake) now extends that freshness window to 5 minutes. Blind ACK/RST floods can't mint the mark and still drop. Verified: an established connection lives through 1.5M churn inserts plus an idle past the CT timeout.

Both fixes are in the packet path; no config changes needed.

v2.17.0 — attached-IP registry & per-tenant blackhole

Built for dedicated hosts carrying many tenant VPSes.

• Attached IPs — the firewall now learns which destination IPs are yours: wire-observed destinations auto-attach (with noise filtered out), local interface addresses are swept in, and you can add single IPs or whole subnet pools by hand. Every entry carries a last-seen timestamp; auto-detected entries idle for registry.inactive_days (default 14) clean themselves out. Browse and manage from openshield ips or the TUI's new IPs tab. Attaching never changes how traffic is handled — it's knowledge, not policy. See Attached IPs.
• Blackhole — drop everything destined to one tenant IP at the earliest point in the pipeline, until you say otherwise or a timer runs out. Established players (real TCP handshakes) keep playing; they get a 10-minute grace window when they disconnect, and they still face every other check — exemption is from the blackhole only. Your whitelist is evaluated first, so you never lock yourself out. openshield blackhole add/remove/list, or toggle per IP in the TUI. See Blackhole.
• Auto-blackhole (opt-in) — set a per-IP pps/bps magnitude and the firewall blackholes an attached IP that crosses it, extends while the attack persists, and lifts when it's over. Registry-gated so it can never touch an address you don't manage; every engage/lift posts an alert with the numbers.
• New metrics for all of it: attached counts by origin, reaped total, active blackholes with remaining time, blackhole-dropped packets, live exemption count, auto-blackhole events.
• Junk "attack" alerts are gone — an event that ends with zero bans and ~zero dropped traffic was a legitimate surge, not an attack: it no longer pages the attack-ended webhook (or lands in history) at all; its rate is fed to the baseline learner silently, so it won't even declare next time. The end embed also no longer glues a "mitigation" label onto no-ban endings, no longer shows an empty Forensics field, and renders sub-second durations as "<1s".
• Under the hood: config fields can no longer drift between the YAML writer, the TUI metadata and the docs (CI-enforced), a C↔Go struct-layout gate guards the kernel/userspace ABI, and the updater understands same-version hotfix builds.

v2.16.3 — carpet-bomb floods answered, protection that holds under churn

Found by our 23-class automated flood matrix (every flood class run against live simulated players); every fix verified on the rig before shipping.

• Carpet-bomb floods can no longer rotate past the caps — a flood that spreads across thousands of destination ports defeated every per-port defense. New aggregate per-protocol caps close it: dynamic.attack_udp_pps (default 100k/s) watches UDP as a whole, and both it and dynamic.attack_icmp_pps now engage on attack state or on an early spike over 8× the learned normal rate for that protocol — inside the first window of the burst. Protected (known-good) sources are exempt, as always.
• Short ICMP bursts no longer outrun mitigation — the aggregate ICMP cap previously waited for the userspace attack declaration; it now has the same kernel-side early trigger, so seconds-long rotating ICMP floods are capped immediately.
• Legit clients stay protected for the whole fight — the known-good source set now freezes during any engagement: existing members keep their proof fresh, new admits need an established TCP connection, and nothing expires until 90 seconds of sustained peace. Mid-flood map churn can no longer evict your real players, and flood sources can't mint themselves "protected" status mid-attack.
• Testing infrastructure: the flood matrix (23 attack classes including every common amplification shape and game-shaped floods) now asserts that Minecraft Java/Bedrock, CS2 and SFTP traffic profiles survive every single class.
• Auto-update fixed for single-activation licenses — the update download gate re-validated your key under a synthetic identity, which needed a spare activation seat; keys with exactly one seat were refused with invalid license. The updater now presents the machine identity it already owns.

v2.16.1 — blacklist action un-gated from forensics

• Fixed: on a server with forensics collection off (or halted by the disk guard), the attacks-tab blacklist action had no ips_involved.txt to read and failed with a bare stat error — zero IPs banned. The involved-IP list is now written at every attack end regardless of the forensics gate, and the block-pattern action tells you plainly when an attack has no fingerprint (payload patterns need pcap data).

v2.16.0 — auto-updates, burst-proofing, disk guardrails

• Signed auto-update channel — openshield update downloads and installs the latest release for you; licensed installs can also update unattended (updates.auto, default on). The release metadata is Ed25519-signed by the license server, the download is license-gated and short-lived, the zip is hash-verified before anything is touched, and the previous version is restored automatically if the new one fails to start. An update badge in the TUI top bar tells you when a newer release exists.
• Jumbo-packet floods can no longer sneak under the pps cap — the per-port cap and its early spike trigger now watch bytes too (dynamic.attack_port_bps), so a slow-pps flood of 1400-byte packets is throttled just the same.
• Rotating ICMP floods answered — new attack-mode aggregate ICMP cap (dynamic.attack_icmp_pps, default 1000/s) while an attack is declared. Normal ping/PMTUD traffic is tens per second and unaffected.
• Your SSH session survives the flood — dynamic.port_cap_exempt_ports (default [22]) keeps management ports out of the per-port cap forever, even when the flood aims at them.
• Players are protected from the first packet of a burst — the firewall now maintains its known-good source set continuously instead of snapshotting at attack start (the snapshot provably arrived after flood churn had erased the evidence). Real clients on capped ports no longer share the throttled pool at all.
• It learns from its false alarms — an "attack" that ends with zero bans and zero dropped packets was a legitimate surge; the baseline now gets a bounded credit to learn that rate instead of re-alerting the same busy hour every day.
• The firewall can never fill your disk again — forensics are capped at 15% of the hosting filesystem regardless of the configured limit, and collection halts outright under 512MB free (resumes when space returns).
• 4GB-tuned defaults — minimum recommended RAM moves from 2GB to 4GB; default ban map 4M entries, per-IP stats 262k, whitelist 50k. The installer warns on smaller hosts and tells you what to trim.
• CI now runs a live flood regression on every push: the firewall is loaded on a virtual link and must stop real floods while simulated players survive.

v2.15.2 — learned detection can be switched off

• New dynamic.baseline_enabled master switch (default on, applies live — no reload). Turn it off and every learned detection layer goes quiet: baseline learning, seasonal thresholds, the changepoint onset detector and behavior clustering. Attacks then declare purely on your static numbers — attack_min_pps/attack_min_bps, or the explicit attack_pps_threshold/attack_bps_threshold overrides when set. Per-IP rate limiting, suspicion scoring, bans and the attack-mode caps are static mechanisms and keep working unchanged. For servers with spiky-but-legitimate traffic that prefer fixed thresholds.

v2.15.1 — burst-flood bypass fix

• Short distributed floods can no longer outrun mitigation. Every aggregate defense (the per-port cap, per-IP attack cap) used to wait for the userspace attack declaration — a burst of a few seconds could end before it arrived. The per-port cap now also engages on a kernel-side early spike trigger: a destination port running over your attack_port_pps cap and over 8× its own learned normal rate is throttled immediately — inside the first window of the burst — while players with established connections stay exempt as before. The learned baseline only updates from calm windows, so the flood itself can't train it upward mid-attack.
• Attack-type labels are re-verified at attack end against the aggregate protocol mix — a fast first-second guess can no longer leave an ACK_FLOOD label on what became a UDP flood (or MIXED on a single-protocol flood).
• Fixed Family: <nil> appearing in alert embeds when no fingerprint family was identified.

v2.15.0 — self-managing SYN cookies, richer attack reports

• SYNPROXY companion rules, managed for you (opt-in) — the installer now offers to auto-manage the 3 netfilter rules the SYN-cookie mode needs: it verifies iptables is present (offers to install it), then live-probes the rules on your interface before you commit — if your server can't do it, you see the exact reason and choose to skip or stop. At runtime the rules appear when an attack engages the cookie path and are removed when it clears; only OpenShield's own tagged rules are ever touched. Enable via installer or dynamic.synproxy_companion_auto.
• Attack-end alerts, now in two focused messages — message 1 stays the operational summary (timeline, mitigation, traffic table, graph, forensics bundle). The new message 2, "Sources & Targets", shows which of your IPs were attacked (broadcast-looking .255/.0 entries filtered out), the targeted ports (mix when many), top attacking countries, and the offender list as a .txt grouped by ban reason.
• Honest attachments — an embed only ever says "attached as .txt" when the file really is attached; if it can't be, the top rows are inlined instead. Applies to both attack-end and ban-batch alerts. Also fixed: attack-end alerts could silently omit the country breakdown — they now say when GeoIP is off.
• Ban reasons with teeth — banned-source events now carry the actual kernel ban reason (pps_exceeded, syn_pps_exceeded, …), which is what powers the reason-grouped offender list above.
• Daily/weekly/monthly reports redesigned — a headline summary up top, the period's top 5 attacks (peak rate × type × duration), a mitigation breakdown showing which protection paths dropped what, SYN-cookie challenge/validation stats, a period-over-period attack delta, and attacker/user country lists that never overflow Discord's limits.
• Optional anonymized attack fingerprints (default OFF; the installer asks once) — after an attack you can share its shape (type, rates, duration, port classes, source count — never a single IP) to help improve the detection patterns everyone auto-fetches. telemetry.attack_share.
• xdp_mode: offload now fails with a clear explanation instead of an obscure driver error (no NIC can offload this program — use native or auto).
• Hot-patchable stage modules (freplace) are correctly wired to the split pipeline stages.
• Full CI gating on every push: build, format/vet, the entire test suite, both kernel-verifier gates, and release-package smoke tests.

v2.14.0 — SYN cookies, IPv6 parity, pinned bans

• XDP SYN cookies (dynamic.synproxy_mode: off / adaptive / always) — during SYN floods the firewall answers SYNs itself with cookie challenges; spoofed floods never reach your services while real clients connect normally. adaptive engages only above synproxy_threshold or during an active attack, so peacetime handshakes are never touched. One-time setup note: the loader prints the two sysctl/iptables companion lines if your kernel needs them.
• Faster, future-proof engine layout — the packet pipeline now runs as chained stages, which removes the "program too large" class of load failures on stricter kernels for good and leaves headroom for more detections.
• IPv6 parity — connection tracking, per-target traffic stats, and the API-endpoint guard now work on IPv6 the same as IPv4. Also fixes a bug where manually added IPv6 whitelist/ban entries could silently not match.
• Pinned bans — manual blacklist entries and heavy repeat-offender bans now live in a dedicated tier that flood churn can never evict; the TUI bans tab marks them with a PIN tag.
• UDP response-window watch (on by default) — sustained spoofed-looking "responses" from service ports (DNS/NTP-style amplification) lose their fast-pass exemption and get scored like any other attacker. Verified zero false positives on real DNS/NTP traffic.
• Per-port rate caps no longer undercount under multi-core floods.
• Five new auto-fetch L7 signatures (WS-Discovery, STUN, CoAP, mDNS, NTP mode-6) — 10 curated reflection-flood patterns total.
• Attack forensics: SYN fingerprint lines now include the sender's stack class (Linux-like / Windows-like / network-device), and suppressed junk attacks can no longer reappear in history ("duplicate attacks" fix).
• Edge mitigation: new edge: config section (your existing ovh: config keeps working unchanged); every selected IP now gets its edge firewall enabled, not just the first.
• Reliability: openshield reload no longer overwrites hand-edited config or times out on unchanged map sizes; Ctrl+C during the load prompts no longer leaves the firewall half-attached; openshield unload fails loudly instead of orphaning a running loader; license re-checks can no longer leave the interface unprotected after a transient failure.
• Optional per-customer watermarking on release packages, and scripts/bench.sh for one-command performance runs.

v2.13.1 — license enforcement hardening

• The license check's feature switch now lives inside the loaded firewall program itself (frozen at load) instead of a settings area that admin-level tools could edit — tampering with it no longer has any effect.
• Shipped program package no longer carries source-level debug info.
• License tier changes apply live with zero protection gap and no loss of learned state.

v2.13.6 — live visibility + L7 pattern feeds

• Top bar shows the version; Packets panel adds the current interval's pass/drop %; Mitigation panel adds "IPs live: X pass / Y blocked". New /metrics fields: live_pass_rate, live_drop_rate, live_ips_passed, live_ips_blocked.
• Auto-fetch L7 attack patterns (opt-in: auto_fetch.patterns_enabled + pattern_urls) — curated reflection-flood signatures (DNS amp, NTP monlist, SSDP, CLDAP, memcached-UDP) load into free L7 slots and update on the fetch interval. Chosen to never fire on game/enterprise/CDN/bulk traffic.

v2.13.5 — live map sizing

• maps.ban_max, maps.ip_stats_max, maps.whitelist_max are now real, live settings (TUI config tab / control API). Changes apply immediately with a state-preserving reload — active bans survive the resize.

v2.13.4 — self-healing config values

• A config value written by an older version could fail validation and block every openshield reload permanently. Config load now repairs out-of-range values automatically and persists the fix on the next save.

v2.13.3 — bans tab upgrade

• Search (/) by IP or ban reason, row scrolling (j/k/arrows, g/G), and instant unban — select a row, press u, confirm.

v2.13.2 — older-kernel compatibility fix

• Fixes an install failure on kernels before 6.9 ("BPF program is too large"): the newest analysis features are intensive for older kernel verifiers, so the release now ships two program builds — full on 6.9+, a lighter (fully protection-equivalent) build on 5.15–6.8 — and picks automatically at load.

v2.13.1 — license enforcement hardening

• One-click network optimization in the installer, detection-first — it probes your NIC and only applies what's missing: queue count matched to your vCPUs, larger RX/TX ring buffers for flood bursts, IRQ spread (skipped when irqbalance manages it), txqueuelen, fq_codel queueing, LRO off. You see the exact change list before saying yes.
• Safe on every host type — unsupported items are skipped per-item, so VPSes (virtio), dedicated boxes, and multi-tenant hosts all get exactly what their hardware supports and nothing breaks.
• New doctor check reports pending optimizations; the TUI nic_tuning toggle applies the same smart set.

v2.12.1 — false-attack flapping fix

• Quiet servers no longer flap — the new changepoint detector could declare attacks below your configured attack_min_pps/attack_min_bps floors, producing hundreds of 1-2s phantom attacks a day on low-traffic boxes. It now respects the floors.
• Junk-record guard — an "attack" whose traffic never crossed your own floors is suppressed entirely (no history entry, no webhook, no forensics) and counted in the log. Detector noise can never spam your attack history again.

v2.12.0 — connection-state tracking, season-aware detection, per-tenant visibility 🆕

Kernel & protection:

• Connection-state tracking — the firewall now follows every connection individually: replies to your own outbound connections (apt, curl, updates) are recognized precisely instead of heuristically, and blind ACK/RST floods are judged against the actual state of each connection. No configuration needed.
• Flood-proof offender records — repeat offenders can no longer wash out their history during a flood; ban history lives in flood-proof storage, so the escalating 1-day / 7-day tiers engage reliably even against million-source rotating floods.
• Small-packet floods now escalate to long bans — the heavy-evidence bar was unreachable for 64-byte-packet floods; extreme packet rate alone now qualifies for the escalating ban tiers.
• Established connections during attacks — peacetime behavior is unchanged (proven connections are never banned); while an attack is actively declared, a once-connected source pushing flood-grade rates now accrues suspicion gradually instead of being fully exempt.
• Rotating-source floods without slowdown — per-source counting is now lock-free, so million-source rotating floods are handled with no core slowdown.

Detection intelligence:

• Poison-resistant baselines — the 30-day baseline history is now merged with robust statistics (median + deviation), so a slow multi-day traffic ramp can't train the baseline upward. Tunable via dynamic.baseline_mad_k (default 3.5). Baseline guide
• Season-aware thresholds — the firewall learns your hour-of-day pattern and automatically relaxes the trigger band during predictably busy hours. Needs ~7 days to warm up per hour, and only ever relaxes — never tightens.
• Faster attack onset — a changepoint detector declares sharp onsets 1–2 seconds earlier than the spike trigger alone.
• Smarter attack classification — spoof-distribution, FIN-heavy, payload-shape (randomized vs structured) and port-share hints now refine the attack subtype in reports and forensics; forensics bundles show per-source TCP stack consistency.
• Per-tenant visibility on dedicated hosts — every hosted IP gets a normal / elevated / under_attack state in the TUI targets panel, attack reports, and GET /metrics/targets. Auto-detected: activates only on multi-IP dedicated hosts — single-IP VPS installs are never treated as dedicated. New knob tenant.mode (auto / on / off). Metrics API

Ops:

• Ban-storage pressure protection — if ban storage approaches full, OpenShield warns you (dashboard + webhook), reaps expired entries immediately, and as a last resort reclaims blocklist-feed entries (they re-fetch automatically). Attack-driven bans are never pressure-deleted.
• openshield doctor — one-command environment health check: kernel, BTF, XDP attach, NIC driver, config, forensics disk, and license. --json output for support tickets. CLI reference
• Generic JSON webhook — set alerter.generic_webhook_url and every event also posts a JSON envelope ({product, version, event, host, timestamp, data}) to your endpoint — same pacing and rate-limit handling as Discord; embeds and attachments stay Discord-only. Alerter docs

v2.11.0 — OVH edge-mitigation module

• Drop attacks at OVH's edge — optional module (installer opt-in, marked NEW): banned attacker IPs are pushed to OVH's network firewall (VAC) so flood traffic never reaches your NIC.
• Guided setup — API region → app credentials → one browser authorization → service auto-detection (the service routing this machine's main IPv4 is pre-marked) → pick the service's IPs to protect. Back navigation on every step.
• Two push modes — confirmed (verified-heavy / repeat offenders only, near-zero false positives) or all (every detected attacker). Blocklist-feed bans are never pushed.
• OVH limits respected — 20 rule slots per IP (worst offenders first), token-bucket API pacing with 429 backoff, all configurable. Runtime toggle in live settings; status on GET /metrics/ovh.

v2.10.0 — forensics disk guard

• Custom forensics directory (forensics.dir) and a disk cap (forensics.max_size_mb, default 30 GB) with automatic oldest-first cleanup of completed attack bundles (cleanup_percent, default 50) — whole bundles only, never half a forensics dir.
• Disk-pressure halt/resume — if a live capture alone exceeds the cap, collection pauses (pcap stops, future attacks skip forensics) and auto-resumes when space recovers. A manual forensics.collect: false is never overridden; the toggle is in live settings (TUI config tab / control API) and persisted.
• GET /metrics/forensics — dir, size vs cap, collecting/halted state, cleanup counters.

v2.9.1 — target-list hygiene

• Multicast/broadcast destinations no longer appear in Top Targeted IPs / /metrics/targets.

v2.9.0 — targeted-IP visibility

• Which VPS IP is being attacked — per-destination-IP counters at wire speed; the TUI dashboard gets a Top Targeted IPs panel (live pps/bps/share), attack-end webhook reports get a Top Targeted IPs field, and the metrics API gains GET /metrics/targets. Built for dedicated hosts with routed/bridged VMs. Deployment models

v2.8.3 — audit hardening pass

• Security: TCP doff<5 rejected (a doff=0 ACK could mint the established-connection mark without a real session); null-flag and Xmas scans now actually reach the flag validator; baseline anchor u64 wrap on busy links fixed; blind RSTs enforce the freshness window; API guard no longer drops multi-MSS request bodies or locks out IPv6 in allowlist-only mode.
• Correctness: IPv6 amp check honors extension headers; L7 runtime-promoted rules (slots 1-15) were silently inert; TUI ban countdown clock-domain mix; fetcher apply errors swallowed; config-reload RMW race; panic recovery reverting runtime edits; spike_recovery_time/baseline_update_interval validation (flap/panic paths).
• Performance: ban sweep loses ~400k syscalls/5s on feed-loaded hosts; bounded top-N map iterators; rate-limited new-source events with an exact kernel counter; async capped attacks.json persistence; no snapshot marshal with zero clients.

v2.8.2 — new-source metric fix

• New Src/s was stuck at 0 — the userspace reader queried the single-entry new-source map with a per-CPU slice lookup, which always failed silently. The kernel now keeps a monotonic total alongside the 1s windowed count; the displayed rate is exact at any poll interval. The new-source temp-ban rule itself was verified firing live (400–540k new src/s during a rotating-spoof flood).

v2.8.1 — repeat-offender hardening, all-port coverage

• Repeat-offender hardening — bans backed by verified heavy evidence (both PPS and BPS ≥ 3× threshold, no established TCP session) accrue a separate heavy-hit count: 2nd verified heavy ban = 1 day, 3rd+ = 7 days (static.repeat_ban_duration_2/3). Bulk transfers can never collect heavy marks; borderline crossers keep the normal ladder.
• All-port protection — ct_server_port_max default 65535: services on high ports (>30000) are fully covered; outbound connections (apt/curl) still work via the SYN-ACK bootstrap.
• Scoring determinism fix — an odd bpf_ktime low bit was decoded as a spurious window reset on ~half of all packets; sampling and scoring are now exact.
• Heavy-evidence measurement fix — fast floods banned on 256-packet samples now have their true arrival rate extrapolated, so hardening actually engages on real floods.
• Port-cap starvation fix — attack-capped sources accrue suspicion before the cap drop (previously throttled forever, never banned).
• Ban-expiry clock fix — bans on hosts that suspend (laptops, suspended/migrated VMs) were reaped as instantly-expired; userspace now reads the same CLOCK_MONOTONIC as the kernel.

v2.8.0 — smarter classification, XDP trace, API guard, fixed TUI chrome

• Multi-signal classifier — new types (ACK_FLOOD, SYNACK_REFLECTION, FRAG_FLOOD, CARPET_BOMB, PORT_SCAN), UDP_AMPLIFICATION revived with subtypes (dns/ntp/ssdp/…), driven by new kernel counters (TCP flags, fragments, 12-slot reflector source-port histogram). Research-backed rules (FastNetMon, CICDDoS2019, Kitsune).
• XDP decision trace — every attack's forensics dir now has xdp-trace.log: each verdict with ns-accurate timestamps, sampled 1/64 per CPU, zero peacetime cost.
• API port guard — basic L7 for the metrics/control port: TCP-only + HTTP-method payloads + its own allowlist (metrics.whitelist), synced live.
• TUI fixed chrome — status/nav pinned top, keybind footer pinned bottom, every screen scrolls in a bounded viewport with scrollbars.
• Behavior engine: port fan-out scan detection. Baseline: anomalous days auto-flagged. Whitelisted bulk traffic no longer declares attacks.

v2.7.0 — full management API + player protection hardened

• Management API — new read endpoints (/metrics/baseline, /metrics/geo, /metrics/alerter, /metrics/autofetch, /metrics/access, /metrics/schedule) and a control_enabled-gated control API: config get/set, whitelist/blacklist, geo toggle, baseline export/import/delete-day, autofetch, schedule, block-pattern, attack bulk-ban jobs. Everything the TUI does, over HTTP. API reference
• Player protection, flood-tested — the protected-source snapshot now fills in ~0.5s via batch map ops (plain iteration finished after the attack) and protects only proven pre-attack sources (established or first-seen ≥15s before declaration) — verified live: players flat through a rotating flood.

v2.6.0 — adaptive granularity, live NIC-tuning toggle, baseline day summaries

• attack_poll_divisor (default 4): polling jumps to 250ms during attacks only — zero peacetime CPU cost; poll_interval accepts fractional seconds.
• NIC tuning toggle (T in the TUI) applies/reverts instantly, with the jitter tradeoff explained in the confirmation.
• Baseline history rows show TCP/UDP splits and ▲/▼ deviation markers vs your median day.

v2.5.x — UDP player protection, geo UX, webhook health, jitter fix

• v2.5.0 — protected-source snapshot map (Bedrock/UDP players survive floods), geo tab live job progress, webhook delivery panel in the Status tab, keybind pills + segmented status bar.
• v2.5.1 — NIC tuning became opt-in (nic_tuning, default off): the coalescing it applied was the dedicated-host jitter source.

v2.4.x — baseline memory (ML tab), smart preset blending, honest reports

• 30-day baseline memory — daily snapshots merged recency-weighted with the live EMA; one weird day can't tilt detection. TUI ML tab (m): learning state, live vs merged, thresholds, full history. Guide
• Delete-a-day reconfiguration — a poisoned day (attack bypassed detection) can be deleted; the baseline reconfigures instantly. D resets today's live baseline for same-day bypasses.
• Baseline import/export — move trained baselines between servers.
• Smart multi-profile blending — multiple workload selections merge by semantics, not averages: rate ceilings = union of legit needs, scoring = strictest, FP-prone detections only where all agree.
• Preset retune — Balanced actually bans sustained 2× abuse; Hosting/Performance/Database bypass classes closed.
• Honest attack reports — median-based recovery (3s spikes no longer linger for minutes), real attacker IP counts (no more 100k phantom IPs), geo breakdown only from elevated intervals, Mbps/Kbps formatting.
• Alert pipeline overhaul — attack-end reports can't be lost, lifecycle alerts get queue priority, Discord 429 handling, embedded banner.
• Behavior engine race fixed; attack_start_mono preservation (the MC disconnect bug).

v2.3.3 — Boot autostart & crash-immunity

• openshield load -always — one flag enables auto-load on every boot via the systemd unit. Self-heals a missing unit file from the pristine copy in /opt/openshield/lib, and verifies the enable actually took.
• Admin IP protection, guaranteed — the loader binary (what systemd runs at boot) now also auto-whitelists your SSH source IP; the persisted entry is re-applied on every boot before the first packet is judged.
• Hardened systemd unit — waits for network-online.target (no more racing the interface at boot), and StartLimitIntervalSec=0 means a crash loop never puts the firewall into a permanent failed state.
• Silent-crash immunity baked into every binary — on some kernels/hypervisors the Go runtime's async preemption killed the loader instantly with no output. All binaries now self-apply the documented workaround (GODEBUG=asyncpreemptoff=1) via a transparent re-exec, so manual runs are as safe as the systemd unit.

v2.3.2 — CLI help system & TUI bugfix sweep

• Per-command help pages — openshield help <command> / --help anywhere, driven by one registry so overall and per-command help can never drift.
• 18 TUI fixes — geo-tab crash on empty search, never-block input digit handling, traffic screen wraps below 140 columns, typed config_update replies (live config edits no longer look lost), confirm dialogs honor Ctrl+C, uptime-based health badges, narrow-terminal layout, scrollable help overlay, complete keybind docs, input validation, and more.

v2.3.1 — Self-traffic exclusion & startup warmup

• Your own downloads no longer fake attacks — replies to the server's outbound connections (GeoIP updates, blocklist fetches, apt) are excluded from attack-detection and baseline-learning rates. Root-caused: the global counters ran before every exemption. How it works
• attack_warmup_sec (default 20) — no attack declaration in the first seconds after loader start; per-IP mitigation unaffected.

v2.3.0 — Smarter feeds, bigger maps

• Auto-fetch vps / dedicated modes — dedicated mode skips known cloud/hosting provider ranges (Cloudflare, AWS, GCP live lists + offline fallback) so customer nodes on a dedicated box are never feed-banned.
• List hygiene — whitelabel (never-block) syncing with the whitelist, blacklist↔whitelist conflict resolution.
• 2M-entry ban maps (IPv4) — million-IP botnets fit with headroom (~1 GB).

v2.2.x — Geo blocking & alert quality

• Geo country blocking — one keypress blocks a country; ranges resolve from MaxMind GeoLite2 into permanent subnet bans, with persisted records and one-keypress unblock. Geo analytics (top attacking countries with flags, IPs, PPS, Gbps, share %) in attack-end reports and daily/weekly/monthly reports.
• Ban notes — optional notes on every ban; geo blocks use them for surgical unblocking.
• Alert cadence rework — growing-interval progress updates, guaranteed end-of-attack delivery with the full report, oversized-forensics fallback message.
• Port-cap player protection — established and pre-attack sources exempt from the per-port attack cap.

v2.1.x — Metrics, obfuscation, rotation-proof caps

• Metrics HTTP API — optional endpoint with everything the TUI shows; API key (yours or auto-generated), rate limits, allowlist.
• Obfuscated prebuilt releases — garble-built binaries, zero source in the production zip; dual packaging (bin + src).
• Attack per-port aggregate cap — the rotation-proof answer to spoofed floods.
• New-source temp bans — replaces drop-only handling of source bursts.
• Forensics config evidence — every attack bundle includes the config (with change timestamps) active during it.
• Runtime config edits persist — TUI/live edits write through to the YAML.

v2.0.0 — The SFTP fix

• Established-connection exemption (A2) — proven TCP connections (handshake + real data) are exempt from rate scoring. Bulk transfers — SFTP uploads, backups, replication — never get banned again. The full story
• Per-port threshold overrides (C) — custom PPS/BPS limits for specific ports or port ranges, replacing both normal and attack-mode thresholds on those ports only.