Release notes

The desktop app is redesigned around a denser diagnostic workspace, with reorderable tabs, right-click tab management and a refreshed icon. Port scans return richer status data on every interface, probe concurrency is configurable everywhere, and the website and docs were rebuilt alongside.

The headline is the desktop app. Everything listed under it is new to anyone upgrading from 0.2.6 — the old dashboard-style GUI is gone, and what replaces it is a different application rather than a revision of that one. The rest is additive work in the core, CLI and MCP server, and a long tail of fixes. The recurring theme in that tail is code that reported success while doing nothing.

Added

• The desktop app is a diagnostic workspace. NetsCLI Desktop replaces the earlier dashboard with a native-like shell built around operation tabs. It runs the same netscli-core operations as the CLI, TUI and MCP server, so its results match the rest of the tool. What it does:
  • Operation tabs you can reorder by drag or keyboard, and close individually, to either side, or all at once from a right-click menu.
  • Sortable and filterable result tables, row detail panes, and a preview of the CLI command each run is equivalent to.
  • Save a whole workspace of results to a file and reopen it later; export CSV or JSON, whole or selection-only. Exported cells are escaped against spreadsheet formula injection, since banners and hostnames are chosen by the scanned host.
  • Light and dark themes, and a settings dialog covering probe concurrency, default and traffic interfaces, IPv4/IPv6 display preference, history and save behaviour, and notification preferences.
  • Full keyboard operation, and a refreshed icon matching the site's brand.
• Clear the ARP table, then discover. A chevron beside Run offers a cache-flushing variant on discover, sweep and the ARP tab — the tools where a stale neighbour entry changes the answer. Clearing needs administrator rights; when it fails the run is suppressed rather than quietly returning the stale entries it was meant to drop.
• Richer port scan results across every interface. Port scans now report additive status and detail fields (open, closed, filtered, error, latency, banners, HTTP metadata, TLS metadata, and raw previews where available) while keeping the older open, port, service, and error fields intact for compatibility.
• User-configurable probe concurrency. The CLI and MCP server already accepted concurrency limits; the desktop app and TUI settings now expose the same control, so probes can be reduced on fragile networks or raised within the core safety cap.

Changed

• netscli scan --json now reports every port, not just the open ones. Filtering to open ports made "all closed", "all filtered" and "every probe errored" the same empty array, so a script could not tell a clean scan from a host that refused every probe. Each entry carries open and status, so callers that want only open ports can filter for them.
• The MCP server now scans only local networks by default. This is the one surface driven by a model rather than by the person at the keyboard, so the instruction to scan a third party can arrive from a web page or a file someone else wrote — and the packets leave from your machine and your IP. RFC1918, loopback, link-local and the carrier-grade NAT range overlay networks use are allowed; set NETSCLI_MCP_ALLOW_PUBLIC_TARGETS=1 to reach past them.
• Scan results returned to a model are capped. The full probe response (raw) is no longer included and banners are truncated, both being bytes chosen by the scanned host.
• Tool failures are returned as MCP isError results rather than JSON-RPC errors, so a failed scan no longer reads to a client as a broken server.
• CLI and TUI scan output reflects the richer status data. Human output stays concise, but scanned ports can show closed, filtered and error states with latency where available, instead of only emphasising open ports.
• Windows install guidance prefers Winget for the desktop app. Winget's manifest review and installer hash verification make it the recommended Windows path; direct GitHub Windows installers remain unsigned and may show warnings until code signing is added.
• Linux/macOS install docs clarified. mDNS is the default pure-Rust capability in published builds; packet capture remains the optional workflow depending on libpcap/Npcap.
• The website and docs were rebuilt. A consistent shell, unified code and table styling, clearer search, and a layout swept across six widths and both themes. The brand accent moved from a teal-green that read blue in small text to one that reads green at any size.

Fixed

• Pinging your own machine no longer reports 100% loss. On Windows, ping 127.0.0.1 — and the machine's own LAN address — timed out while the system ping answered immediately. Raw ICMP sockets need administrator rights, so an ordinary run fell back to TCP probes on ports 80/443/22 and concluded a host was down when nothing answered; and a Windows raw socket does not observe traffic to an address the host owns. Windows now sends echoes through the IP Helper API, which needs no privileges and reaches local addresses. Discover and sweep both start from a ping sweep, so both returned nothing for any range covering this host.
• IPv6 hosts can be pinged. ping ::1 reported total loss because IPv6 had no ICMP path at all and fell through to the same TCP probe. Windows now uses Icmp6SendEcho2.
• netscli arp --clear, --add and --delete no longer claim to have changed the table when they have not. On Windows these print "The requested operation requires elevation" and then exit 0, so checking the exit status alone reported success while nothing was touched — an ordinary run printed "ARP entry added for 192.0.2.77", and "ok": true in JSON, having done nothing. All three now share one check and exit non-zero with the reason. --clear also errors on platforms where it was never implemented, instead of reporting a cleared table.
• Discover reports devices the OS already knows about. Results merge probe replies with the neighbour table, so a device that answers ARP but not ICMP is no longer missing. Each host records whether it was found by probe or by neighbour, since a stale neighbour entry can outlive the device.
• Safety limits were enforced in Ops but not in the engines. The scan, sweep, discover and inspect engines are public API re-exported at the crate root, and called directly they applied no subnet, port or concurrency cap — 0.0.0.0/0 collected 4,294,967,294 addresses into a Vec before sending a packet. Every engine now enforces its own limits. (#198)
• Safety limits that only one caller was applying. SweepEngine::sweep validates its port list instead of trusting the caller and silently returning "no open ports"; mDNS browse duration, ping -c and packet captures given a packet count but no duration all gained the core-side ceiling they were documented to have.
• Port 0 was rejected only by the MCP surface. Now rejected everywhere. (#164)
• MCP server handled one request at a time. The read loop awaited each handler before parsing the next line, so a slow scan blocked every other request on the connection, including cancellation. Handlers now run concurrently under a semaphore. (#169)
• Reading the ARP table blocked a runtime worker. On Windows and macOS it shells out to arp and waits on the child process; three callers invoked it straight from async code. With MCP handlers capped at 16 concurrent, sixteen of these could stall every worker — including the one reading stdin, so no further request could even be parsed. Moved to a blocking thread. (#196)
• Four ways an MCP client could wedge or kill the server: no overall request deadline, permits acquired after spawning rather than before, a single invalid UTF-8 byte on stdin terminating the process, and client disconnect cancelling nothing.
• The MCP server no longer says it returned everything while truncating. A capped result reported the byte count as its item count, so a 40,000-row scan that returned 11,518 rows said returned: 40000, total: 40000 beside truncated: true.
• Packet captures fetched as a background MCP job are bounded like every other result. get_pcap_capture_result was routed before the limits that strip and truncate remote text, so the one result made entirely of bytes off the wire was the one that skipped them.
• The concurrent packet-capture limit could be bypassed by calling the blocking capture tool, which never registered a job.
• discover_network with no arguments failed on a host whose interface carries a /8, because the substituted default exceeded the /16 cap.
• A database written by a newer netscli is refused rather than read. The version check treated a future schema as "already migrated", so an older build queried tables it had never seen.
• netscli trace no longer prints router-supplied hostnames unsanitised. Hop names come from PTR records controlled by whoever runs those routers, and this was the last plain-text output path without the terminal-safety pass every other one had.
• TUI mis-measured wide characters, so CJK and emoji in a remote-supplied hostname or banner pushed box borders out of alignment. (#173)
• Panic paths in the core, and silent corruption in the OUI generator. (#172)
• winget publishes the version number, not the tag. Both package manifests were passed the tag including its v, which the action only strips when the input is left empty. v0.2.2 through v0.2.6 are already in the public catalog that way, so winget show netscli reports a version this project never issued. Upgrades still work — winget normalises a leading v when comparing — and this release fixes what is displayed. The publish job now asserts MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH rather than trusting the strip, because winget-pkgs accepted all five without complaint and a merged manifest is permanent.
• AUR packages are published against a re-hashed asset. Both AUR jobs took the published .sha256 sidecar on trust rather than downloading the asset and hashing it, which is the circular check the release scripts exist to prevent; the other registries already did this correctly.
• The Windows installer verifies Npcap before running it. install.ps1 downloaded the Npcap installer from an overridable URL and launched it elevated with nothing checked; it now verifies the Authenticode signature and signer, and refuses to run an unsigned or unexpected binary.
• install.sh no longer claims success before installing libpcap. A user who asked for capture support could read "Installed successfully" and get a binary that cannot capture.

Website

• Small grey text was unreadable on card surfaces. The docs footer, built-with row and mobile section labels use --sl-color-gray-3, much of it at 12px. It had been raised once to clear 4.5:1 against the page background, but nothing checked it against the slightly darker card surface, where it sat at 4.44:1.
• Muted text, and several status colours, were below the readability bar. Eight colour tokens failed WCAG AA (4.5:1) against surfaces they are actually painted on — the mint accent failed as text on every light surface, down to 3.85:1. All 84 foreground/surface combinations now clear 4.5:1, and a check keeps them there.
• The install guide has the verification steps the landing page promises. It advertised checksums and Sigstore signatures and linked to a page with none of them on it.
• The site claimed packet capture in builds that do not ship it, and advertised a version that was never released. (#194, #208)
• The interface coverage table no longer conflates separate things. Rows that merged setup with doctor, or reading the ARP table with changing it, are split, and dashes that meant "not applicable" say which.
• The FAQ answers two questions people actually search for, from Search Console data rather than guesswork: whether there is a netscan command, and whether this replaces nmap and has a terminal UI.

Installed GUI builds now identify themselves correctly, and the Windows title-bar controls work. Also completes the CLI/TUI refactors that make future interface changes easier to review and test.

Fixed

• GUI: in-app version display was stuck at 0.1.0. A stale APP_VERSION constant in App.tsx powered both the bottom-bar version readout and the About dialog, but it never got bumped alongside package.json, tauri.conf.json, or the workspace Cargo.tomls. Caught by a Winget moderator on microsoft/winget-pkgs#368471: the v0.2.4 build correctly reported 0.2.4 to the Windows registry (Tauri pulls ProductVersion from tauri.conf.json), but users saw 0.1.0 in the GUI itself. Wired APP_VERSION to read package.json at build time via Vite's define so the in-app display auto-syncs every release going forward.
• GUI: title-bar buttons (close, minimize, maximize) didn't work on Windows. Tauri 2's deny-by-default permission system requires explicit core:window:allow-close/minimize/maximize/unmaximize/start-dragging grants; the app was missing its capabilities config entirely. Added src-tauri/capabilities/main.json. (#62)

Closes a DNS resolver security advisory. Windows subnet detection is fixed, so discovery and sweep find real LAN hosts again, and package publishing now covers GUI installers.

Security

• hickory-resolver 0.24 → 0.26 closes RUSTSEC-2026-0119: CPU exhaustion during message encoding due to O(n²) name compression in hickory-proto. The DNS lookup tab and any inspect/discover that resolves hostnames are no longer reachable through the vulnerable encoding path. The 0.26 builder pattern (TokioResolver::builder_tokio()) replaces the deprecated TokioAsyncResolver::tokio constructor; see PR #55 for the source migration. The .cargo/audit.toml ignore added in #52 was removed once the bump landed.

Fixed

• GUI: discover/sweep returned only a single host on Windows. Root cause: detect_default_ipv4_subnet iterated ipconfig::Adapter::prefixes() and grabbed the first IPv4 entry, but that list contains the host's own /32, broadcast /32, multicast /4, link-local /16, and the network /24. Windows reports the host /32 first, so the "subnet" was a single IP. New helper pick_ipv4_subnet_from_prefixes filters to network-shaped prefixes (length 1..=30, not multicast, not link-local) and truncates host bits, matching the Linux path. 5 unit tests added that run on every CI platform via cfg(any(windows, test)). (#59)
• GUI: dashboard "Recent Scans" rendered with wrong colors / not as list rows. .history-item is a <button> (for keyboard accessibility) but the CSS didn't reset user-agent button styles. WebView2 on Windows applied Win32 chrome (color: ButtonText, centered text, content-fit width, system button font), breaking the inherit chain for child labels. Explicit reset added. (#59)

Changed

• Dependencies (all transitive, no API surface impact):
  • crossterm 0.27 → 0.28 + tui-textarea 0.4 → 0.7 had to land together — tui-textarea 0.7 hardcodes crossterm = "0.28". (#58)
  • mdns-sd 0.13 → 0.19 — adapt to the new ScopedIp::to_ip_addr() accessor in netscli-core/src/mdns.rs. (#58)
  • clap 4.5.60 → 4.6.1 (#43), pcap 1.3 → 2.4 (#45), clap_mangen 0.2.33 → 0.3.0 (#46), dialoguer 0.11.0 → 0.12.0 (#48), dirs 5.0.1 → 6.0.0 (#51), tokio 1.52.1 → 1.52.2 + clap_complete 4.6.2 → 4.6.3 (#57).
• ratatui 0.29 → 0.30 deferred: tui-textarea has no version yet that supports ratatui 0.30 (latest 0.7 still pins ratatui 0.29). Tracked via @dependabot ignore on the closed PR #49.

Added

• Release pipeline GUI automation. publish.yml extended with 4 parallel jobs that publish the GUI bundles to Homebrew Cask, Scoop extras (netscli-gui.json), Winget (fstubner.netscli.gui), and AUR (netscli-gui-bin) on every tagged release. (#54, #53, #56)

v0.2.3 built the GUI installers but never attached them. Publishing is repaired here, along with the AUR deploy action that was blocking Linux packages.

Fixed

• GUI bundle path in release.yml's GUI matrix was rooted at apps/netscli-gui/src-tauri/target/${TARGET}/release/bundle/. Cargo workspaces actually use the workspace-root target/ directory regardless of which subcrate's directory cargo was invoked from, so Tauri's bundle output lives at target/${TARGET}/release/bundle/. v0.2.3 built the .deb / .dmg / .msi correctly but the collect step found an empty bundle dir and skipped everything; sigstore-sign then failed trying to sign nothing.
• AUR deploy action (KSXGitHub/github-actions-deploy-aur) was pinned to @v2.7.0 (April 2024), which has a bash: --command: invalid option regression in its container entrypoint. Bumped to @v4.1.3 (current stable, same input shape).

Notes

• CLI release shipped: 44 assets, sigstore-signed, on the v0.2.3 release page.
• Homebrew, Scoop, Winget, and crates.io all updated to 0.2.3.
• AUR is still on the previous version (failed to push).
• 0 GUI installers attached to v0.2.3 release.

GUI installer builds move again once the Tauri JavaScript and Rust versions agree, and the AUR packaging handoff is fixed. CLI packages were already usable from v0.2.2; the GUI artifacts needed these pipeline fixes.

Fixed

• Tauri version skew broke all 4 GUI installer builds in v0.2.2's release matrix. The Cargo.toml constraint tauri = "2.0.0" resolved to tauri 2.9.5, but npm @tauri-apps/api: ^2 resolved to 2.10.1. Tauri's CLI rejects same-major different-minor as a version mismatch. Loosened the Rust constraint to tauri = "2" and ran npm update --save so both sides land on the same minor (currently 2.11.0). Verified with a local npm run tauri build producing NetsCLI_0.2.3_x64_en-US.msi cleanly.
• AUR publish job in publish.yml failed on v0.2.2 with a confusing bash: --command: invalid option error from the deploy action's internals. Root cause: rendered PKGBUILD was written to /tmp/ PKGBUILD, but the KSXGitHub/github-actions-deploy-aur action runs in a Docker container that only mounts $GITHUB_WORKSPACE — files in /tmp are invisible inside the container. Render now writes to packaging/aur/PKGBUILD (workspace-relative) before handoff.

Notes

• CLI binaries shipped successfully on v0.2.2 — cargo install, brew install netscli, and scoop install netscli all give v0.2.2.
• v0.2.2 GitHub release has CLI assets but no GUI installers.
• AUR netscli-bin was last bumped to v0.2.0; it'll catch up to v0.2.3 directly.

This is a release-pipeline recovery build. It refreshes Cargo.lock so locked release builds can run reproducibly after dependency bumps, giving package-manager users a working replacement for the failed v0.2.1 artifacts.

Fixed

• Cargo.lock was out of sync with Cargo.toml at the v0.2.1 tag — tokio 1.52.1 (bumped in #17) requires socket2 >= 0.6.3 transitively, but Dependabot only regenerated the direct-dep entries in the lock. CI's lint paths use cargo build (no --locked) so this slipped through; release.yml uses --locked to guarantee reproducible builds, and all 17 release builds for v0.2.1 failed at the lockfile check.
• 0.2.2 regenerates the lockfile so socket2 0.6.3 is recorded alongside the existing 0.5.10. No application code changes.

Notes

• Released to crates.io but the GitHub release page has no attached binaries (release.yml never produced any). cargo install netscli works because cargo regenerates the lockfile per-user; downloads from the GitHub release / package managers should use 0.2.2.
• 0.2.1 is left in place as crates.io history rather than yanked.

Desktop installers and signed release assets mean you no longer need a Rust toolchain to install. Adds concurrency tuning for networks that struggle with large parallel scans.

Added

• Prebuilt desktop GUI installers attached to every release: .msi (Windows x86_64), .dmg (macOS aarch64 + x86_64), .deb and .AppImage (Linux x86_64). Each is sigstore-signed alongside the CLI binaries. macOS .dmg ships unsigned for now; right-click → Open to bypass Gatekeeper, or run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NetsCLI.app.
• --concurrency <N> (alias -j <N>) global CLI flag for tuning in-flight network operations. Default stays at 256; clamped to [1, 1024]. Useful on fragile home gateways that can't keep up with hundreds of simultaneous probes.

Changed

• Bumped pnet_packet, pnet_transport, pnet_datalink, and pnet_sys from 0.34 to 0.35.
• Bumped sysinfo from 0.30 to 0.38. New Networks::refresh(true) semantics drop hot-unplugged interfaces from the cached map rather than retaining stale RX/TX stats.

Notes

• ipnetwork stayed at 0.20 because pnet_datalink 0.35 still pins it transitively; will revisit when upstream pnet relaxes the constraint.

Turns the initial scanner into something distributable. mDNS discovery and typed core errors on the product side; shell completions, man pages, package-manager templates and signed artifacts on the shipping side.

Added

• netscli completions <bash|zsh|fish|powershell|elvish> subcommand that writes a shell-completion script to stdout. Package managers regenerate completions at install time by shelling out to the installed binary, so they never drift from the CLI surface.
• netscli man subcommand that renders the roff-format man page from the clap command tree to stdout.
• Sigstore keyless signing in .github/workflows/release.yml. Every release asset now ships with a .sig + .pem alongside the .sha256, verifiable by anyone with cosign verify-blob. No paid cert, no long-lived secrets; uses the GitHub Actions OIDC token exchanged via Fulcio for a short-lived signing cert bound to the workflow + commit + tag.
• packaging/ directory with submission templates for Homebrew (tap), Scoop (bucket), Winget (microsoft/winget-pkgs via wingetcreate), and Arch AUR (netscli-bin). Each has a README with the submission flow and VERSION_SHA256_* placeholders that get stamped with real checksums on release day.
• mDNS / DNS-SD service discovery. New netscli-core::mdns module (behind the mdns feature) with MdnsEngine::discover and discover_common on top of the pure-Rust mdns-sd crate. Browses a curated set of service types (_http._tcp, _ssh._tcp, _airplay._tcp, _googlecast._tcp, _ipp._tcp, …) in parallel and returns devices with hostname, resolved IPv4/IPv6 addresses, port, service type, and full TXT record properties.
• New CLI subcommand netscli mdns [--timeout-ms N] [-t <service_type>] with text, JSON, and YAML output. Text output is device-centric: one block per hostname with its addresses and announced services.
• New TUI slash command /mdns [--timeout <ms>].
• New MCP tool discover_mdns accepting timeout_ms (default 3000, clamped 100–30000) and optional service_types. Returns the same structured payload as the CLI --json, so agents can filter by model (properties.md), friendly name (properties.fn), or service type without an extra pass through text output.
• The netscli binary and the netscli-mcp default feature both include mdns so the capability ships by default in published artifacts.
• netscli_core::Error typed-error enum and netscli_core::Result<T> alias. Library consumers can now pattern-match on InvalidInput / Dns / Network / Timeout / Unsupported / Io / Database / Pcap / Other instead of passing around an opaque anyhow::Error. The enum is #[non_exhaustive] so new variants can land without being breaking changes.
• netscli-core feature db gating the SQLite Database type (and its sqlx + chrono deps). Default build is ~35% smaller transitive crate graph (256 → 167). The netscli binary opts in to db; library consumers can stay lean with default-features = false.
• cargo-audit CI workflow (.github/workflows/audit.yml) running on push / PR / weekly schedule, with a documented .cargo/audit.toml ignore list for transitive advisories that aren't reachable under our feature set.

Changed

• All public functions in netscli-core now return netscli_core::Result<T> with structured error variants instead of anyhow::Result<T>. Covers: common::parse_ports*, the full dns module, the Ops surface, InspectEngine, SweepEngine, NetworkManager::{get_arp_table, add_entry, delete_entry, clear_table}, PcapEngine, and Database.
• Error variant mapping by module:
  • common, ops subnet/record parsing → InvalidInput
  • dns resolver failures → Dns; timeouts → Timeout(ms)
  • ops::resolve_host_ip_with_timeout unresolved host → Dns
  • pcap unsupported (build-time or no interfaces) → Unsupported
  • arp process-exec failures and permissioned ops → Other (with the permission hint in the message; a dedicated PermissionDenied variant may land later)
  • Database (sqlx) errors → Database variant via #[from]
  • pcap runtime errors → Pcap variant via #[from]
• A few private helpers in ping.rs (ICMP round-trip internals) keep anyhow::Error because they never reach the public surface.
• Extracted section headings + leads into site.copy so the landing page is 100% data-driven; no per-project strings in components.