Hello NetBird Community!
This month Control Center gets a real Draft mode, and Light Mode finally lands on the desktop app. There's also a DNS security fix on Windows, a new home server guide, and NetBird is heading to San Francisco for the Vultr Agent Arena Hackathon. Let's get into it.
Control Center Draft Mode: Plan Your Access Changes Before They Go Live
Control Center has always been great for seeing who can reach what, but if you wanted to change something, you were editing live against your actual network. With NetBird dashboard v2.92.0, Control Center gets a proper Draft mode: switch the canvas into a scratch space, build out groups, policies, networks, and even placeholder peers for machines you haven't racked yet, and nothing touches your account until you review the exact API calls as a diff and hit deploy.
The best part is the placeholder peers. Drop a "Server" template on the canvas, wire up its groups and policies, generate a setup key right from the card, and when the real machine registers, the placeholder swaps itself out and inherits everything you connected. It's built for standing up a new environment or restructuring access without touching anything live until you're ready.
Learn more: Knowledge Hub article
Light Mode Lands on the Desktop App (v0.79)
The desktop client has been dark-only since the rebuild, and it was the most requested thing in Slack and GitHub issues by a wide margin. As of v0.79, Settings > General has a Theme picker with System, Light, and Dark. System follows your OS appearance, and whichever you pick syncs across every open NetBird window, with no flash of the wrong theme on launch.
Under the hood the whole color scale now resolves through CSS variables instead of being hard-coded, so most of the UI followed along automatically rather than needing a pass over every component. Windows also gets a matching native title bar for whichever theme is active.
One known gap: theme switching is unreliable on some Linux GTK builds right now, that's a Wails limitation we're tracking upstream. Dashboard light mode is in the works too, but it's a separate piece that hasn't shipped yet.
Grab v0.79 and flip it on: Release notes
Also Shipped: v0.77 and v0.78
A couple of client releases landed between last month's update and this one, and two things are worth calling out directly:
- Windows DNS leak closed. v0.78 adds a catch-all NRPT rule when NetBird is your primary resolver, closing a window where DNS queries could leak to or get poisoned by system resolvers outside the tunnel. If you need the previous behavior for some reason, brings it back.
- Rosenpass now works through the reverse proxy. Previously, peers with Rosenpass enabled would fail to establish through the proxy on a PSK mismatch, an incompatibility that was never actually documented. The proxy now runs Rosenpass in permissive mode, so it connects to both Rosenpass and non-Rosenpass peers the same as before.
v0.78 also brings a local Prometheus metrics endpoint on the client and moves the whole stack to Go 1.26. Full details in the release notes: v0.77.0 · v0.78.0
Home Server Starter Guide: Hardware, OS, and What to Run
Running your own server at home costs less than most people expect, and a lot of you already have hardware sitting around that would work. This one walks through matching hardware to what you actually want to run, since a media library, a few VMs, and a network ad blocker all have very different storage, RAM, and CPU needs. It covers mini PCs, used business desktops, OS choices, and a handful of services worth running once it's up, all reachable securely over NetBird instead of opened ports.
Learn more: Knowledge Hub article
Join Us at the Vultr Agent Arena Hackathon
NetBird is a track partner at The Agent Arena Hackathon, hosted by Vultr in San Francisco on September 26-27. It's a fully in-person build weekend focused on what production infrastructure for agents actually looks like once they stop talking and start acting: VM backends, serverless inference, and the compute layer underneath. Teams of up to four are competing for more than $10,000 across cash and credits.
Attendance requires an approved application, and an application doesn't guarantee a seat, so don't wait if you want in.
Apply: The Agent Arena Hackathon
Thank You!
Thank you for being part of the NetBird community. Your feedback, GitHub issues, and ideas keep shaping what we build, so do keep them coming. And if you haven't already, come hang out with us on Slack or star us on GitHub .
Team NetBird
Check out the changelog to stay on top of all the product releases. Follow NetBird on LinkedIn !