OpenRiot v7.9.59 — The Machine Knows When the Tunnel Is Dead

“The icon turned green. The router said connected. The tunnel was up. But Mullvad had run out of credits, so the packets were sailing into a wall. The machine knew. It just never told you. It hung in its own handshake while the green light glowed and the network quietly died. Worse, every time you toggled the tunnel it wrote one more startup line into rc.local, until the file held a hundred and forty-five copies of the same command. We fixed all of it. Now the machine checks. Now the machine waits. Now it tells you when the tunnel is dead instead of standing there with a green light and a straight face. The Turing Police would call it ‘failure detection and idempotent configuration.’ We call it the machine finally telling the truth.” — The OpenRiot Crew, v7.9.59

Release Overview

WireGuard was lying in two ways. Every toggle-on appended another autostart line to /etc/rc.local — 145 copies by the end. And when Mullvad ran out of credits, the tunnel came up dead with a green icon and silence, because the server lookup hung on a blackholed connection with no timeout. Both are fixed, and the machine now says the words out loud when it cannot actually connect. The crypto table got wider columns for bigger numbers, and the lock screen set picked up its final frames plus a background refresh.

Total changes: WireGuard reliability, crypto alignment, lock screens.

🔒 WireGuard: No More Pretending

Three fixes in source/wireguard/wireguard.go.

Autostart no longer duplicates itself. The boot-persistence helper stripped only its marker comment, never the actual wg-quick command, so every toggle-on left an orphaned line behind. It now strips both, so /etc/rc.local holds exactly one entry and disabling autostart actually removes it.

No more silent hang. Finding the Mullvad server name used ftp with no timeout. When credits expired, the tunnel blackholed the lookup and Start() never returned. It now uses an HTTP client with a five-second timeout, so a dead tunnel fails fast instead of hanging.

The machine tells you when it’s dead. Start() waits two seconds for a handshake, then checks real Mullvad egress via mullvad_exit_ip. If the tunnel did not actually connect, you get a critical notification: “Failed to connect. Mullvad account may be expired or out of credits.” No more green icon lying over a dead network.

🖼️ Lock Screens: Final Frames

Ten new lock screens joined the set (frames 33 through 42), and several existing backgrounds were refreshed. A stray hidden file was also removed.

🔢 Crypto: Numbers That Line Up

The holdings display now uses a shared width formatter, so larger balances stop breaking column alignment. The header, totals row, and stablecoin columns all got matching spacing.

🧾 Files Changed

File	Change
`source/wireguard/wireguard.go`	`setBootPersistence()` strips
	marker and command line;
	`GetServerName()` uses timeout’d
	HTTP; added `IsConnected()`;
	`Start()` warns on a dead tunnel.
`README.md`	WireGuard setup: `chmod 600`
	and `PersistentKeepalive = 25`.
`source/crypto/crypto.go`	Shared width formatter, aligned
	holdings and stablecoin columns.
`Locked/33.webp`–`Locked/42.webp`	NEW — final ten lock screens.
`Locked/*.webp`	UPDATED — background refresh;
	stray removed.
`install/openriot`	Rebuilt binary.

🗣️ Final Words

“A VPN that goes dark without a word is just a very complicated way to break your own network. The old machine would hang there, green and silent, while your traffic went nowhere and your startup file filled up like a hoarder’s basement. Now it checks, it waits, and it tells you the truth. The Turing Police would call it a bug fix. We call it the machine learning to say the words ‘you’re cut off.’“ — The OpenRiot Crew, v7.9.59