FS2NetD will be unavailable late Thursday night for a period of about 30 minutes. I know that there are people who play on Thursday nights, but this change will happen at some point after 2am GMT, and I'll try and time it for a period that no one is playing.
Given the scope of the changes there are bound to be a few hiccups though. So please check everything over early Friday so that any fixes can be put into place before you guys need everything working smoothly on Saturday night.
The new upgrade is just one step in a rather drawn out process to add a bunch of new capabilities to FS2NetD on the server side. This first step is to consolidate the code so that the v.1 server for 3.6.9 and the v.2 server for 3.6.10 can exist in the same package. They now share the same config file setup, based on XML, and they also live in the same location on the server (before they had to be kept separate). There is also a new helper app that can be used to start and stop all of the daemons, display the status of each and whether it's running properly or not, and refresh the daemons to get config changes and to restart any dead daemons without having to restart them all.
The v.2 daemon for 3.6.10 builds has had a bunch of changes, with everything to bug fixes to new features. It should now work far more reliably for everyone and should also be a bit faster, particularly with slower connections. New security measures are also in place now to help with reliability as well.
The v.1 daemon for 3.6.9 has seen a major upgrade as well, though it's protocol remains the same. Much of the code is the same between the two now, but the v.1 daemon can't take advantage of all the improvements for bandwidth reduction and faster connections. It should, however, be a bit more reliable and slightly faster than it was previously.