Welcome to 2019! It's full of awesome new things, including a NodePanel update. This specific update is a fun one, because it highlights SECURITY; everyone's favorite tech topic, or at least in the news. Aside from trying to stay ahead of good security practices and out of the news, we've got a ton of updates that didn't make it before the holiday code freeze.
FTP Access & Security
Improving FTP security has been on our roadmap for a while. Our previous implementation allowed you to use your nodecraft.com username/password and server IP to login, which although was extremely convenient, highlighted a security issue, especially when connecting over the insecure (and plaintext) FTP protocol. It was also really annoying for users that login via Discord or another service and never set a password. Our servers do use FTPS, which encrypts the traffic between your computer and our servers, making that less scary.
After looking at our statistics, only ~25% of our users use FTP, whilst the vast majority reply on the easy to use File Manager in NodePanel 2. To further reduce the attack surface, NodePanel no longer has FTP enabled by default. This means the other larger cohort of our customers can breath easier with the added security. If you're a power-hungry FTP user you can still create new the new secure credentials right on the overview of your server - just make sure you check the new username, password, and IP address used to connect.
As always we welcome your feedback for these changes. Let us know if you'd like to see something different, like expiring FTP credentials, WebDAV, SSH, or some other crazy feature.
Changelog:
[BACKUPS] Improved stability of backups and performance for how backups are built. Big shout out to the folks at Backblaze and Cloudflare for making this possible!
[FTPS] We've replaced the existing FTPS system with a more performant and secure system. It's more annoying to use, but that's security doing its job 🤷
[ADD] [Garry's Mod] Added Steam Workshop Collection management. Adding mods is now just as easy as managing your workshop collection on Steam!
[FIX] [7D2D] Updated our control panel to support the new output mechanisms in the a17 update.
[ADD] [Minecraft: Bedrock] Players are now tracked using the XBox Live account and xUID
[ADD] [Unturned] Added MySQL support.
[FIX] [Billing] Currency selection on the pricing/cart pages is handled a lot more gracefully now. Currencies can be swapped between in real-time up until payment.
[FIX] [Minecraft] The plugins UI no longer shows broken images and will display placeholders instead. This helps prevent the layout from yielding unexpected results.
[FIX] 7z archive file support. The file manager now handles the unarchiving of 7zip archives correctly. 😅
[FIX] When uploading files within directories, they now land in the expected folder, rather than in a single root folder.