Upcoming mandatory service node upgrade

We are releasing a mandatory Service Node upgrade tomorrow in order to resolve an issue with the storage server which is impacting many Session users. By updating your node quickly, you can help to smoothly resolve this issue for those users.

The current version of the storage server (in the 10.4 service node upgrade) added support for accepting client requests via QUIC (using our https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-libquic library) which Session iOS recently started using instead of HTTP to communicate with our network.

While the release included in the storage server has undergone extensive testing (and is also the basis for the ongoing Lokinet development change), once it was released into the wild Session iOS's QUIC connections uncovered previously unforeseen cases that could cause a crash.

These were fixed for the most recent Session iOS release, but unfortunately the issues also affect the other side of the QUIC connection, the oxen-storage-server.

These crashes have been impacting Session in recent days (even for non-iOS Session users) because any sort of crash along your onion path interrupts your connection, causing timeouts or errors.

This mandatory Service Node upgrade brings an update to the storage server with the oxen-libquic fixes to resolve the crashes and fix the recent Session network instability.

Although there are several days before the network starts enforcing the upgrade, we strongly encourage service node operators to upgrade as soon as possible: the more service nodes that upgrade, the more the Session network stability will improve.

There will be an 11 day period during which to upgrade, after which nodes will be decommissioned. The network will start enforcing the upgrade at block 1634624, scheduled for:

- Mon Jul 22 23:30:00 2024 UTC - Tue Jul 23 09:30:00 2024 Australia/Melbourne - Mon Jul 22 19:30:00 2024 US/Eastern

Note also that, as we previously announced in the 10.4.0 upgrade, we are no longer providing packages for Ubuntu 18.04 or Debian 10 with this update; if your service node is still on such a version we strongly encourage upgrading.

We fully support Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, and the recently released 24.04, as well as Debian 11 and 12 releases.