[SCION] [SCIONLab] SCIONLab update on 9.12.2020

[Matthias Frei]

Dear SCIONLab user,


We are updating the SCIONLab infrastructure to be able to build even 
more exciting applications with it.

We are notifying all SCIONLab users ahead of time to prepare for 
possible outages and to update their applications.
The upgrade will happen on Wednesday, 9.12.2020 at 07:00UTC. SCIONLab 
will be in maintenance mode from 8.12.2020.

The most important changes to SCION/SCIONLab include:
- Control Plane Public Key Infrastructure now based on x509 certificates 
instead of the old format based on JSON web signatures.
- Control plane messaging now based on gRPC/protobuf instead of capnproto.
- Packet header redesigned to be more suitable for high speed software 
or hardware router implementation. See 
https://scion.docs.anapaya.net/en/latest/protocols/scion-header.html for 
details.
- Detection of active interfaces now uses the Bidirectional Forwarding 
Detection protocol (see RFC 5880), instead of custom keep-alive messages 
between control services.
- New border router implementation with support for the new header and 
BFD. Note that this does not support peering links yet.
- New SCION-IP gateway (SIG) implementation
- The tools scmp and showpaths are now subcommands of a combined binary 
with a more polished interface. Usage is e.g. `scion ping <isd-as,ip>`, 
`scion showpaths <isd-as>`, or `scion traceroute <isd-as,ip>`.
- Log output of the SCION services is captured by the systemd journal, 
there is no file logging anymore.
- Easier tinkering with the SCIONLab configuration; the important files 
are now all directly under `/etc/scion` instead of in deeply nested 
directories. The scionlab-config utility is more careful to avoid 
overwriting any changes that a user might have applied.

Information about the update process:
Please update the SCIONLab debian packages (apt-get update && apt-get 
upgrade) in your machine or VM connected to SCIONLab after 07:00UTC on 
Wednesday, 9.12.2020 -- no further action should be required.

Please contact us at scion at lists.inf.ethz.ch if you have any comments or 
questions. To reach the SCIONLab administrators directly, send us an 
email to scionlab-admins at sympa.ethz.ch.

Thank you and best regards,
Your SCIONLab team