What’s new in Syspeace 4.3, part 4: Local network tag

Following on Syspeace 4.1 and 4.2, we have been adding new features to Syspeace at a rapid pace. This post is part of a series on what’s new in Syspeace 4.3, just released and available for download now. (Previously: Service ID, Shared IP lists and Shared blocks)

We have previously covered Shared IP lists – the ability to manually add IP addresses to a list and have that list propagated to all Syspeace services in an account – and Shared blocks – the ability for a block on one Syspeace service to similarly be mirrored to other Syspeace services in an account. But this power comes with a subtle problem.

As mentioned, these features can be very useful for Syspeace customers with multiple clients or large environments. For these customers, it is common to deal with multiple local networks/environments.

For example, maybe client A has a local network, 10.0.1.0/24. And maybe client B has another local network with the same IP range, 10.0.1.0/24. If a service in client A’s network blocks 10.0.1.50 or adds this to a blocklist or safelist, well, this would also affect the 10.0.1.50 in client B’s network. Even though the address is the same, it leads to different computers in different networks. What to do about this?

We have a solution for this. Syspeace can’t on its own know which networks are the same, but the administrator knows. It’s as simple as saying “this is network A and this is network B” and you can tell them apart. So there is now a field in each Syspeace service called the local network tag, which you can type a short name into. If you set the local network tag “a”, then Shared blocks with local IP addresses, like 10.0.1.50, are only sent to other services in network “a” and not to network “b” or other networks. And to be cautious, if you don’t enter anything, local IP addresses are not sent to any other services at all. (Shared blocks with global IP addresses are still sent everywhere.)

The local network tag is also available in the Shared IP lists. For each entry, you can set if it should be distributed regardless of local network tag, or only to a given local network tag. For Shared IP lists, this can even be entered for global IP addresses, which may come in handy.

This concludes our series on new features in Syspeace 4.3. We think these new features will make life easier for Syspeace customers with two or more servers and improve Syspeace’s effectiveness and responsiveness.