Rancher Desktop 1.6.0

[jandubois]

This is the 1.6.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Important Updates

Forwarding ports to external interfaces on Windows

Automatic port forwarding has been re-implemented by Rancher Desktop and no longer relies on the builtin forwarding from WSL. It is now possible to specify the interface to bind to, and binds to 0.0.0.0 (all host interfaces) by default. To keep a port bound to localhost only, you have to specify it explicitly:

docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:8081:80 nginx

Port forwarding now works the same way on macOS and Windows (Linux does not yet support binding to external ports).

Note that you will still need to open up the port in the firewall to allow other machines on the local network to access it.

New Diagnostics feature

Rancher Desktop has a new Diagnostics tab. If there are any failed tests, It will display a red badge with the number of failures in the left-hand menu. This is supposed to work like the "Check Engine" light in a car: to alert you to potential issues with Rancher Desktop or your environment. You can "mute" diagnostics that are not applicable to your situation.

In this release, we only have a handful of diagnostics related to PATH settings and the online state of the host machine. We will add more diagnostics in the future.

Experimental support for faster ingress on macOS

When running with administrative privileges, Rancher Desktop will create a bridged interface on the local network for ingress using a separate IP address from the host machine. This functionality is provided by the vde_vmnet daemon.

The new socket_vmnet daemon has supported 2 to 3 times the throughput of vde_vmnet during testing. However, we found during testing that VMNET may get locked up, and the only way to recover was to reboot the host. Therefore the new daemon must be enabled manually right now:

rdctl api --method PUT --body '{"kubernetes":{"experimental":{"socketVMNet":true}}}' settings

Please file a Github issue including log files if you test the new socket_vmnet daemon and run into any problems!

Updated Utilities

• docker-buildx has been upgraded from 0.8.2 → 0.9.1
• docker-compose has been upgraded from 2.6.1 → 2.11.1
• helm has been upgraded from 3.9.1 → 3.9.4
• nerdctl has been upgraded from 0.22.0 → 0.23.0
• trivvy has been upgraded from 0.30.0 → 0.32.0

Important bug fixes

Updated DNS resolver

There have been fixes to the DNS resolver on all platforms regarding truncated responses.

On Windows, we discovered that due to a configuration error the 1.5.x builds did not include the DNS bug fixes we had developed for it, so there a multiple other DNS related fixes in this Windows version. Please re-test if you had problems with DNS and create/update Github issues if the problems still persist!

Factory Reset on Windows no longer restarts Rancher Desktop automatically

This makes it possible to use it to remove (most of) the data files installed by Rancher Desktop without them being recreated immediately.

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.5.1, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.6.0 milestone.

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This discussion was created from the release Rancher Desktop 1.6.0.