Upgrades to VATSIM Infrastructure

[Gunnar Lindahl]

 

Upgrades to VATSIM infrastructure

 

Over the past week you may have noticed some changes to the server list you see when you connect to VATSIM: the number of FSD servers (the server you connect to in order to access the network) has been reduced from 11 to 7. This is part of a huge infrastructure overhaul led by Matt Cianfarani and his team to modernise our infrastructure and make it more secure - they have written a blog post with some more detail here. Thanks to Matt and team for their excellent work in continuing the journey to make VATSIM's technology fit for the future!

 

If you are having issues connecting to VATSIM since the changes, you should check that you have the latest version of your pilot client or controller client as older versions will not correctly download an up-to-date server list. Please note in particular that if you use VRC, you need to be using version 1.2.6 and Squawkbox users must have version 4.0.0.

 

We are aware of an issue with the UK-1 and GERMANY-1 servers not correctly downloading VATSIM weather data at this time - the team are aware and looking at a fix. All other servers are correctly downloading weather data, so we'd recommend switching to another server, particularly if you are a controller or a pilot not using third party weather. The recent upgrades to our servers means that latency should not be an issue regardless of which global server you connect to. And - as a general reminder - every server is inter-connected so you will still see all traffic on VATSIM!

 

Future proofing your VATSIM experience

 

In preparation for the launch of Audio for VATSIM, VATSIM will shortly cease support for some older clients which are no longer actively maintained by their original developers. The reason for this is that the architecture being used to build our new voice technology requires changes to be made to our pilot and controller clients, and this is not possible with some older clients. The clients which will be removed at some point in the near future include SquawkBox, SquawkBox747, SquawkBox for Fly!, XConnect and FSInn. Please note that xSquawkbox continues to be supported. If you still use these clients, we'll shortly be posting a guide on your more modern alternatives.

 

We'll shortly be launching a one-stop shop page for all things Audio for VATSIM, with a guide for what VATSIM members need to do to prepare for the launch.