2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.10 (2013-??-??)
11 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
12 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
13 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
14 - A new, more extensible Introducer protocol has been added, to act as the
15 basis for future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older
16 nodes is not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all
17 upgraded, the welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead
18 of the old tubid. (`#466`_)
19 - The web-API has a new move operation that supports directly moving files
20 between directories. (`#1579`_)
25 - Newly generated introducer FURLs are unguessable. This helps to control
26 membership of private grids (although it does not stop someone who knows
27 the introducer FURL from providing any number of servers). The FURL is
28 stored in ``BASEDIR/private/introducer.furl`` rather than
29 ``BASEDIR/introducer.furl`` as before. To force an introducer to generate
30 a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and restart it.
31 After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of every client
32 and server that should connect to that introducer must be updated. (`#1802`_)
33 - The Welcome page no longer reveals the secret part (swissnum) of the
34 introducer and helper FURLs. For existing guessable introducer FURLs,
35 the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a guessable
36 FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
41 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
42 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
43 eavesdropper (who observes any node connecting to the Introducer) to access
44 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
45 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
46 grid is to be told the introducer.furl by someone who already knew it. Note
47 that pre-existing introducers are not changed: to take advantage of this
48 fix for an existing grid, you must create a new introducer and distribute
49 the new ``introducer.furl`` to all of your users. (`#1802`_)
50 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
51 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
52 create gateway nodes of their own. (`#860`_)
53 - If an immutable file failed to download, e.g. due to a connection problem,
54 subsequent attempts to download the same file could also fail. (`#1679`_)
55 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
56 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
58 - Failure handling in the SFTP frontend has been improved. (`#1525`_)
59 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
61 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
62 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
63 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
64 - Error messages containing tracebacks may be slightly more readable.
66 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` counts the files being processed correctly.
68 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
69 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
70 - Improve error message when CLI tools cannot connect to a gateway. (`#974`_)
71 - Other minor changes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_
73 Performance Improvements
74 ''''''''''''''''''''''''
76 - Allow web clients to cache immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
81 - docs/helper.rst has been brought up to date. (`#1915`_)
82 - docs/convergence_secret.rst was added to document the adminstration of
83 convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
88 - The flogtool utility, used to read logs, can now be accessed as
89 ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when foolscap is not installed system-wide.
91 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
92 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool in
93 misc/operations_helpers/provisioning. Use the ``run.py`` script to access
96 Compatibility and Dependencies
97 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
99 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
100 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
102 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for ed25519)
104 Precautions when Upgrading
105 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
107 - When upgrading a grid from a recent version of trunk, follow the
108 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
109 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
110 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release.
112 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
113 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
114 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
115 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
116 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
117 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
118 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
119 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
120 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
121 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
122 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
123 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
124 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
125 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
126 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
127 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
128 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
129 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
130 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
131 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
132 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
133 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
134 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
135 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
136 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
137 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
138 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
139 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
140 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
142 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
143 --------------------------
148 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
149 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
150 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
151 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
152 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
153 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
154 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
156 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
157 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
158 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
159 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
160 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
161 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
163 Configuration/Behavior Changes
164 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
166 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
167 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
168 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
174 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
177 Compatibility and Dependencies
178 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
180 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
181 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
182 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
184 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
185 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
186 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
187 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
188 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
189 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
190 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
191 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
192 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
193 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
194 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
195 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
196 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
197 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
198 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
199 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
200 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
203 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
204 --------------------------
206 Security-related Bugfix
207 '''''''''''''''''''''''
209 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
210 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
212 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
215 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
216 --------------------------
221 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
222 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
223 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
224 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
225 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
226 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
227 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
228 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
229 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
230 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
231 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
232 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
233 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
234 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
235 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
236 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
237 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
239 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
240 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
241 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
242 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
244 Configuration/Behavior Changes
245 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
247 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
248 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
249 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
250 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
251 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
252 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
253 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
254 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
255 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
256 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
257 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
258 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
263 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
264 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
266 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
267 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
268 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
269 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
270 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
271 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
272 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
277 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
278 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
279 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
280 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
281 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
282 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
283 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
284 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
285 (any version of each):
287 * Academic Free License
288 * Apple Public Source License
289 * BitTorrent Open Source License
290 * Lucent Public License
291 * Jabber Open Source License
292 * Common Development and Distribution License
293 * Microsoft Public License
294 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
295 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
296 * Open Software License
298 Compatibility and Dependencies
299 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
301 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
302 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
303 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
304 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
305 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
306 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
307 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
309 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
310 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
315 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
317 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
318 of share files. (`#1391`_)
319 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
320 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
321 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
323 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
324 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
325 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
326 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
327 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
328 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
329 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
330 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
331 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
332 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
333 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
334 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
335 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
336 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
337 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
338 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
339 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
340 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
341 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
344 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
345 --------------------------
347 Security-related Bugfix
348 '''''''''''''''''''''''
350 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
351 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
352 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
353 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
354 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
355 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
356 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
358 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
361 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
362 --------------------------
364 Compatibility and Dependencies
365 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
367 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
368 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
369 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
370 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
371 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
372 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
373 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
374 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
380 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
382 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
383 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
384 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
386 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
387 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
388 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
389 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
390 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
391 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
392 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
394 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
395 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
396 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
397 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
398 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
399 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
402 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
403 --------------------------
405 Bugfixes and Improvements
406 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
408 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
409 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
410 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
412 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
413 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
414 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
415 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
417 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
418 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
419 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
420 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
421 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
422 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
423 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
424 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
425 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
426 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
427 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
428 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
429 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
430 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
432 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
433 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
434 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
439 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
440 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
441 platforms. (`#1262`_)
446 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
447 systems can install without having a compiler.
448 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
449 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
450 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
452 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
453 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
454 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
455 version number. (`#1233`_)
460 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
462 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
463 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
466 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
467 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
468 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
469 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
470 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
471 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
472 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
473 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
474 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
475 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
476 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
477 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
478 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
479 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
480 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
483 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
484 --------------------------
489 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
490 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
491 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
492 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
493 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
494 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
495 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
496 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
497 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
498 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
499 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
501 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
502 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
505 Bugfixes and Improvements
506 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
508 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
509 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
511 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
512 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
513 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
515 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
516 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
517 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
518 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
519 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
520 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
525 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
526 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
528 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
529 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
530 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
531 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
532 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
533 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
534 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
535 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
536 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
537 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
538 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
539 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
540 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
541 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
542 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
543 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
544 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
545 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
546 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
547 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
548 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
549 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
550 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
552 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
553 --------------------------
555 Bugfixes and Improvements
556 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
558 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
559 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
560 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
561 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
562 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
564 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
566 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
568 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
569 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
570 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
571 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
573 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
574 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
575 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
580 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
581 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
583 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
584 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
585 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
586 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
587 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
588 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
589 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
590 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
591 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
592 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
593 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
594 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
595 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
598 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
599 --------------------------
604 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
605 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
606 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
607 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
608 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
610 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
611 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
612 characters on all supported platforms:
614 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
615 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
617 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
618 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
620 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
621 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
622 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
624 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
625 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
626 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
627 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
628 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
629 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
630 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
631 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
632 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
633 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
634 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
635 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
636 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
637 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
638 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
640 Bugfixes and Improvements
641 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
643 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
644 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
645 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
647 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
648 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
649 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
650 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
652 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
654 - ImportError: No module named
655 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
656 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
657 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
658 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
659 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
660 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
661 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
662 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
663 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
664 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
665 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
666 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
668 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
674 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
675 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
681 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
682 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
686 - mock (only required by unit tests)
688 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
689 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
690 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
691 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
692 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
693 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
694 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
695 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
696 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
697 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
698 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
699 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
700 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
701 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
702 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
703 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
704 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
705 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
706 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
707 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
708 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
709 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
710 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
711 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
712 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
714 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
715 --------------------------
720 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
722 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
723 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
724 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
725 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
728 Usability Improvements
729 ''''''''''''''''''''''
731 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
733 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
734 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
735 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
736 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
738 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
739 --------------------------
744 - Immutable Directories
746 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
747 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
748 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
749 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
750 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
751 immutable directories).
753 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
754 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
755 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
756 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
757 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
758 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
759 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
761 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
762 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
763 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
764 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
765 the listing of that directory.
767 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
770 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
771 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
773 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
776 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
777 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
778 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
779 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
780 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
781 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
782 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
784 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
785 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
786 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
787 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
788 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
789 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
790 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
791 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
792 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
793 considerably. (`#606`_)
795 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
796 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
797 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
798 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
799 directories and stat() all your local files.
801 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
802 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
803 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
804 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
805 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
806 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
807 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
808 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
810 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
811 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
812 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
815 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
816 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
817 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
818 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
819 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
820 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
821 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
823 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
826 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
827 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
828 "node" process, which has several components that can be
829 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
830 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
831 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
832 future release will make it optional. There are three special
833 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
834 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
836 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
837 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
838 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
839 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
840 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
841 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
843 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
844 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
845 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
846 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
847 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
848 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
849 create-node" instead.
851 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
852 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
853 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
854 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
856 - Performance Improvements
858 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
859 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
860 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
861 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
862 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
863 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
864 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
865 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
866 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
867 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
868 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
869 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
870 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
871 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
872 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
873 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
874 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
875 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
876 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
881 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
882 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
883 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
884 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
887 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
888 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
889 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
890 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
892 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
893 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
896 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
897 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
898 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
901 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
902 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
905 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
908 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
910 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
911 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
913 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
914 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
916 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
917 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
918 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
919 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
920 additional licensing text was added.
922 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
924 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
925 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
927 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
928 has been improved. (`#773`_)
930 For other changes not mentioned here, see
931 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
932 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
933 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
935 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
936 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
937 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
938 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
939 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
940 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
941 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
942 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
943 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
944 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
945 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
946 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
947 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
948 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
949 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
950 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
951 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
952 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
953 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
954 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
955 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
956 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
957 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
958 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
959 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
960 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
961 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
962 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
963 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
964 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
965 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
967 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
968 --------------------------
973 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
974 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
976 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
977 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
978 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
980 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
981 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
982 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
983 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
984 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
986 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
987 directories. (`#705`_)
989 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
990 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
993 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
994 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
995 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
996 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
997 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
999 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
1000 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
1001 directories from the future. This should improve the user
1002 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
1003 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
1004 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
1005 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
1006 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1011 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1012 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1013 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1014 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1015 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1016 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1017 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1019 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1020 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1023 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1024 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1025 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1027 Platform/packaging changes
1028 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1030 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1031 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1033 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1034 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1035 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1036 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1037 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1038 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1040 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1041 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1042 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1043 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1045 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1047 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1048 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1049 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1051 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1052 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1053 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1060 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1061 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1062 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1066 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1067 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1068 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1069 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1070 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1071 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1072 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1073 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1074 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1076 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1077 --------------------------
1082 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1083 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1084 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1085 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1086 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1087 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1088 lease. The process is described in detail in
1089 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1091 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1092 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1093 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1095 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1096 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1097 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1098 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1099 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1100 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1101 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1103 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1104 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1106 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1107 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1108 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1109 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1110 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1112 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1113 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1114 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1115 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1116 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1117 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1118 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1123 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1124 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1125 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1126 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1127 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1129 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1130 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1131 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1134 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1135 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1136 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1137 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1138 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1139 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1140 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1141 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1144 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1145 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1146 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1148 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1149 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1150 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1151 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1152 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1153 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1154 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1159 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1160 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1161 of garbage collection.
1163 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1164 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1166 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1167 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1169 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1170 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1171 metadata) during backup.
1173 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1174 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1176 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1177 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1180 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1181 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1182 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1183 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1184 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1185 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1186 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1187 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1188 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1189 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1190 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1191 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1193 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1194 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1195 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1196 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1201 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1202 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1203 instance of RuntimeError.
1205 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1206 speeding them up considerably.
1208 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1209 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1210 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1211 with hundreds of entries.
1213 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1214 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1217 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1218 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1219 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1221 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1222 --------------------------
1224 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1225 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1227 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1228 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1229 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1230 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1231 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1232 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1233 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1234 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1235 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1238 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1239 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1240 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1241 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1242 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1243 permanent drive failure.
1245 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1246 shares. The limitations are:
1248 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1249 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1250 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1251 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1252 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1253 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1254 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1255 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1256 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1257 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1258 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1259 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1260 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1262 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1263 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1264 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1265 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1268 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1269 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1270 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1271 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1272 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1273 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1274 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1275 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1276 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1277 considered highly unusual.
1279 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1280 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1281 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1283 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1284 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1285 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1286 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1287 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1288 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1289 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1290 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1291 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1292 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1293 button will appear on the results page.
1295 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1296 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1297 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1298 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1299 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1300 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1306 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1307 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1308 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1309 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1310 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1311 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1312 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1313 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1314 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1315 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1316 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1317 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1318 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1319 to run from a daily cronjob.
1321 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1322 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1323 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1324 $target/Latest) from working.
1329 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1330 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1331 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1332 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1333 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1334 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1335 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1336 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1337 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1338 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1339 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1340 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1345 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1346 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1347 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1348 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1349 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1350 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1351 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1352 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1353 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1354 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1359 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1360 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1361 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1362 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1363 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1366 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1367 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1368 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1369 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1370 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1371 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1372 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1374 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1375 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1376 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1378 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1379 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1380 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1381 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1382 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1384 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1387 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1388 - tahoe debug dump-share
1389 - tahoe debug find-shares
1390 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1391 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1393 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1394 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1395 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1398 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1399 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1400 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1401 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1402 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1407 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1408 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1409 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1410 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1411 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1412 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1413 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1414 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1415 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1416 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1417 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1418 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1419 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1421 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1422 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1423 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1424 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1425 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1426 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1428 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1429 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1430 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1431 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1432 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1433 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1434 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1435 deep-check operations.
1437 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1438 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1439 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1440 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1441 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1444 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1445 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1446 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1447 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1448 "same-origin policy".
1450 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1451 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1452 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1453 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1454 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1455 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1456 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1457 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1458 processing by operations staff.
1460 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1461 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1462 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1463 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1464 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1465 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1467 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1468 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1469 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1470 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1471 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1472 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1473 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1475 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1476 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1477 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1478 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1479 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1480 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1481 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1482 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1484 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1485 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1486 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1487 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1488 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1489 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1490 target) of a t=rename command.
1495 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1496 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1497 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1498 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1499 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1500 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1501 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1502 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1505 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1506 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1507 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1508 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1509 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1510 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1511 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1512 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1513 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1514 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1516 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1517 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1519 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1520 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1521 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1522 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1523 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1526 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1527 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1528 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1529 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1530 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1531 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1532 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1534 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1535 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1536 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1537 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1538 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1540 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1541 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1542 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1543 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1544 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1545 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1546 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1548 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1549 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1550 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1552 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1553 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1554 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1556 Grid Management Tools
1557 '''''''''''''''''''''
1559 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1560 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1562 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1563 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1564 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1565 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1566 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1567 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1568 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1569 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1570 before the grid is completely full.
1572 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1573 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1574 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1576 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1577 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1578 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1579 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1580 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1581 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1582 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1583 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1584 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1585 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1587 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1588 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1589 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1590 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1591 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1592 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1594 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1595 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1597 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1598 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1599 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1600 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1601 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1602 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1603 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1604 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1606 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1607 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1609 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1610 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1611 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1613 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1614 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1615 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1616 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1617 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1618 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1619 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1620 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1621 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1622 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1623 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1628 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1629 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1630 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1632 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1633 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1634 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1637 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1638 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1639 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1642 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1643 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1644 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1645 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1646 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1647 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1649 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1650 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1651 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1652 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1654 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1655 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1657 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1658 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1659 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1660 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1663 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1665 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1666 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1667 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1668 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1670 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1671 --------------------------
1676 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1677 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1678 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1679 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1680 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1681 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1682 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1683 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1684 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1685 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1686 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1689 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1690 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1696 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1697 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1698 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1699 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1700 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1706 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1707 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1708 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1709 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1711 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1712 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1713 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1714 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1715 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1718 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1719 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1720 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1721 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1722 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1723 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1725 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1726 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1727 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1728 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1729 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1730 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1733 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1734 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1736 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1737 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1738 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1739 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1740 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1741 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1742 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1743 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1744 (which may take a very long time).
1746 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1748 Operations/Packaging
1749 ''''''''''''''''''''
1751 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1752 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1753 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1754 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1755 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1756 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1757 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1760 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1761 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1762 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1764 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1765 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1766 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1769 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1770 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1771 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1777 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1778 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1779 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1780 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1781 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1782 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1783 directory for a second time.
1785 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1786 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1787 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1788 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1789 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1790 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1792 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1793 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1794 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1795 from the web browser end.
1797 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1798 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1799 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1801 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1802 --------------------------
1804 CLI: new "alias" model
1805 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1807 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1808 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1809 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1811 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1812 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1814 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1815 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1816 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1817 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1819 wapi: new pages, new commands
1820 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1822 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1824 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1825 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1826 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1827 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1829 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1830 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1831 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1832 new "cp -r" command.
1834 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1836 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1837 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1839 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1842 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1844 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1845 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1847 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1848 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1850 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1853 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1854 - tahoe_estimate_files
1855 - mutable files published/retrieved
1864 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1866 New Mutable-File Code
1867 '''''''''''''''''''''
1869 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1870 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1871 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1872 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1874 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1875 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1876 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1877 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1879 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1880 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1881 published when in fact it failed.
1886 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1887 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1888 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1890 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1891 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1892 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1893 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1894 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1896 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1897 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1898 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1899 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1900 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1901 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1902 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1904 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1905 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1906 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1907 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1908 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1909 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1911 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1912 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1914 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1915 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1916 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1917 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1918 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1920 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1921 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1923 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1924 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1925 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1926 order. This has been fixed.
1928 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1929 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1930 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1931 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1932 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst