1 .. -*- coding: utf-8-with-signature -*-
3 ==================================
4 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
5 ==================================
7 Release 1.10.1 (XXXX-XX-XX)
8 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
10 Unedited list of all changes after 1.10 and before 0d935e8 06-Jan-2015. This
11 list is not yet limited to user-visible ones. It *should* include all tickets
12 closed during this time, even minor non-user-visible ones.
14 - show git branch in version output #1953
15 - packaging fixes #1969 #1960
16 - mutable/retrieve: raise NotEnoughSharesError earlier when the sharemap says
17 it's useless, and improve the error message #1742
18 - improve user feedback when filing an Incident Report #1974
19 - add page-rendering timestamp to WUI #1972
20 - improve what-is-my-ipv4 on windows/cygwin #1381
21 - remove unused 'human encoding' URI methods #1807
22 - check/deep-check learned to accept multiple location args #740
23 - tests warn if tree is dirty #1992
24 - Travis-CI turned on #2249
25 - py2.6 is now unsupported on windows
26 - add 'distclean', don't remove egg-info during 'make clean' #2092
27 - add "UTF-8 BOM" to all docs #1948
28 - various docs cleanups/improvements
29 - improve safety of timing_safe_compare() #2165
30 - checker reports: remove needs-rebalancing, add count-happiness #1784 #2105
31 - improve packaging under pip #2209
32 - remove old darcs tooling
33 - minor comments #1874 #2086
34 - switch to unminified d3/jquery JS files #2208
36 - reject furlfiles with "#" #2128
37 - rename exit-trigger/self-destruct test feature #1336
38 - add coverage.io test-coverage reporting #623
39 - hush warnings during dep-checking, stop complaining about missing
40 "service_identity" dep #2248
41 - dedup license info in about.rst/README.txt #2067
42 - 'tahoe cp -r' copies the top-level directory into new dir #712
43 - log roothash in base32 not binary #1800
44 - improve welcome page CSS for narrow windows #1931
45 - redesign WUI directory pages #1966
46 - improve upload tests #2008
47 - remove obsolete debian packaging tools #2282
48 - add --coverage to setup.py test #1698, remove old coverage uploaders
49 - remove trialcoverage plugin #2281
50 - tolerate disk-space-used=0 for travis boxes #2290
51 - tolerate python subprocess bug #2023
52 - remove old build_helpers tools #2305
53 - fix "Download" button on welcome page #1901
55 - hack windows/OpenSSL deps on windows #2249 #2193
56 - WAPI: do not report 'size' metadata when unknown #1634
57 - new OS-X packaging #182
58 - stop using contents of .tac files #1159
59 - improve version-number reporting #2340
60 - add per-server "(space) Available" column to welcome page #648
61 - add public-key auth to SFTP server #1411
64 all tickets noted as closed: 1953 1960 1974 1972 1717 1381 898 1707 1918 1807
65 740 1842 1992 2165 1847 2086 2208 2048 2128 2245 1336 2248 2067 712 1800 1966
66 2008 2282 2281 2290 2023 2121? 2305 1901 2249 2193 1634 1159 2340 1146 648
69 all tickets referenced (fixed? not fixed?): 1834 1969 1742 1988 982 1064 1536
70 1935 666 1784 2105 2209 2280 623 2249 1931 1698 2028 2005 1258 182
72 PRs noted as closed: 62 48 57 61 62 63 64 69 73 81 82 84 85 87 91 94 95 96
73 103 56 32 50 107 109 114 112 120 122 125 126 133
77 Release 1.10.0 (2013-05-01)
78 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
83 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
84 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
85 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
86 - A new extensible Introducer protocol has been added, as the basis for
87 future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older nodes is
88 not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all upgraded, the
89 welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead of the old
90 tubid. See `<docs/nodekeys.rst>`__ for details. (`#466`_)
91 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
92 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
97 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
98 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
99 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
100 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
101 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
102 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
103 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
104 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
105 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
106 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
107 updated. Note that other users of a shared machine may be able to read
108 ``introducer.furl`` from your ``tahoe.cfg`` file unless you configure the
109 file permissions to prevent them. (`#1802`_)
110 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
111 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
112 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
113 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
114 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
116 Command-line Syntax Changes
117 ---------------------------
119 - Global options to ``tahoe``, such as ``-d``/``--node-directory``, must now
120 come before rather than after the command name (for example,
121 ``tahoe -d BASEDIR cp -r foo: bar:`` ). (`#166`_)
126 - In earlier versions, if a connection problem caused a download failure for
127 an immutable file, subsequent attempts to download the same file could also
128 fail. This is now fixed. (`#1679`_)
129 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
130 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
131 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
132 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
133 exception. (`#1758`_)
134 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
135 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
137 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` now counts the files being processed correctly.
139 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
140 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
141 - The error message displayed when a CLI tool cannot connect to a gateway has
142 been improved. (`#974`_)
143 - Other minor fixes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_, `#1915`_, `#1484`_, `#1525`_
145 Compatibility and Dependencies
146 ------------------------------
148 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
149 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
150 - mock >= 0.8 (for unit tests)
151 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for Ed25519 signatures)
152 - zope.interface >= 3.6.0 (except 3.6.3 or 3.6.4)
157 - The ``flogtool`` utility, used to read detailed event logs, can now be
158 accessed as ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when Foolscap is not installed
159 system-wide. (`#1693`_)
160 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
161 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool. Use the ``run.py``
162 script in ``misc/operations_helpers/provisioning/`` to access them.
163 - Web clients can now cache (ETag) immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
164 - `<docs/convergence_secret.rst>`__ was added to document the adminstration
165 of convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
167 Precautions when Upgrading
168 --------------------------
170 - When upgrading a grid from a recent revision of trunk, follow the
171 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
172 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
173 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release like 1.9.2.
175 .. _`#166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/166
176 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
177 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
178 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
179 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
180 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
181 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
182 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
183 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
184 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
185 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
186 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
187 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
188 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
189 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
190 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
191 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
192 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
193 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
194 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
195 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
196 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
197 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
198 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
199 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
200 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
201 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
202 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
203 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
204 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
207 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
208 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
213 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
214 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
215 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
216 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
217 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
218 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
219 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
221 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
222 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
223 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
224 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
225 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
226 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
228 Configuration/Behavior Changes
229 ------------------------------
231 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
232 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
233 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
239 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
242 Compatibility and Dependencies
243 ------------------------------
245 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
246 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
247 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
249 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
250 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
251 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
252 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
253 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
254 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
255 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
256 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
257 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
258 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
259 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
260 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
261 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
262 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
263 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
264 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
265 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
268 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
269 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
271 Security-related Bugfix
272 -----------------------
274 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
275 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
277 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
280 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
281 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
286 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
287 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
288 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
289 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
290 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
291 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
292 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
293 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
294 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
295 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
296 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
297 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
298 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
299 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
300 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
301 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
302 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
304 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
305 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
306 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
307 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
309 Configuration/Behavior Changes
310 ------------------------------
312 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
313 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
314 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
315 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
316 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
317 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
318 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
319 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
320 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
321 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
322 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
323 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
328 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
329 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
331 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
332 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
333 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
334 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
335 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
336 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
337 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
342 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
343 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
344 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
345 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
346 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
347 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
348 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
349 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
350 (any version of each):
352 * Academic Free License
353 * Apple Public Source License
354 * BitTorrent Open Source License
355 * Lucent Public License
356 * Jabber Open Source License
357 * Common Development and Distribution License
358 * Microsoft Public License
359 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
360 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
361 * Open Software License
363 Compatibility and Dependencies
364 ------------------------------
366 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
367 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
368 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
369 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
370 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
371 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
372 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
374 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
375 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
380 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
382 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
383 of share files. (`#1391`_)
384 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
385 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
386 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
388 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
389 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
390 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
391 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
392 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
393 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
394 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
395 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
396 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
397 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
398 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
399 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
400 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
401 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
402 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
403 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
404 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
405 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
406 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
409 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
410 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
412 Security-related Bugfix
413 -----------------------
415 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
416 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
417 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
418 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
419 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
420 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
421 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
423 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
426 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
427 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
429 Compatibility and Dependencies
430 ------------------------------
432 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
433 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
434 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
435 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
436 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
437 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
438 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
439 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
445 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
447 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
448 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
449 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
451 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
452 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
453 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
454 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
455 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
456 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
457 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
459 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
460 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
461 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
462 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
463 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
464 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
467 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
468 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
470 Bugfixes and Improvements
471 -------------------------
473 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
474 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
475 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
477 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
478 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
479 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
480 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
482 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
483 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
484 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
485 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
486 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
487 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
488 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
489 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
490 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
491 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
492 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
493 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
494 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
495 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
497 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
498 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
499 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
504 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
505 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
506 platforms. (`#1262`_)
511 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
512 systems can install without having a compiler.
513 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
514 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
515 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
517 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
518 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
519 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
520 version number. (`#1233`_)
525 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
527 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
528 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
531 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
532 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
533 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
534 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
535 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
536 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
537 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
538 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
539 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
540 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
541 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
542 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
543 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
544 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
545 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
548 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
549 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
554 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
555 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
556 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
557 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
558 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
559 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
560 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
561 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
562 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
563 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
564 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
566 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
567 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
570 Bugfixes and Improvements
571 -------------------------
573 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
574 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
576 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
577 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
578 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
580 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
581 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
582 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
583 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
584 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
585 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
590 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
591 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
593 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
594 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
595 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
596 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
597 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
598 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
599 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
600 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
601 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
602 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
603 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
604 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
605 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
606 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
607 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
608 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
609 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
610 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
611 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
612 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
613 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
614 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
615 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
617 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
618 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
620 Bugfixes and Improvements
621 -------------------------
623 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
624 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
625 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
626 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
627 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
629 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
631 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
633 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
634 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
635 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
636 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
638 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
639 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
640 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
645 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
646 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
648 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
649 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
650 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
651 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
652 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
653 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
654 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
655 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
656 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
657 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
658 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
659 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
660 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
663 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
664 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
669 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
670 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
671 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
672 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
673 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
675 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
676 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
677 characters on all supported platforms:
679 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
680 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
682 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
683 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
685 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
686 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
687 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
689 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
690 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
691 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
692 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
693 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
694 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
695 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
696 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
697 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
698 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
699 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
700 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
701 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
702 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
703 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
705 Bugfixes and Improvements
706 -------------------------
708 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
709 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
710 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
712 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
713 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
714 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
715 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
717 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
719 - ImportError: No module named
720 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
721 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
722 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
723 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
724 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
725 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
726 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
727 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
728 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
729 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
730 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
731 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
733 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
739 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
740 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
746 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
747 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
751 - mock (only required by unit tests)
753 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
754 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
755 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
756 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
757 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
758 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
759 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
760 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
761 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
762 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
763 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
764 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
765 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
766 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
767 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
768 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
769 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
770 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
771 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
772 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
773 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
774 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
775 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
776 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
777 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
779 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
780 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
785 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
787 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
788 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
789 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
790 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
793 Usability Improvements
794 ----------------------
796 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
798 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
799 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
800 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
801 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
803 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
804 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
809 - Immutable Directories
811 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
812 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
813 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
814 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
815 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
816 immutable directories).
818 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
819 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
820 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
821 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
822 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
823 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
824 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
826 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
827 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
828 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
829 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
830 the listing of that directory.
832 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
835 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
836 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
838 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
841 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
842 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
843 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
844 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
845 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
846 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
847 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
849 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
850 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
851 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
852 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
853 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
854 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
855 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
856 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
857 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
858 considerably. (`#606`_)
860 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
861 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
862 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
863 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
864 directories and stat() all your local files.
866 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
867 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
868 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
869 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
870 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
871 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
872 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
873 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
875 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
876 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
877 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
880 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
881 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
882 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
883 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
884 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
885 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
886 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
888 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
891 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
892 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
893 "node" process, which has several components that can be
894 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
895 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
896 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
897 future release will make it optional. There are three special
898 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
899 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
901 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
902 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
903 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
904 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
905 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
906 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
908 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
909 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
910 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
911 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
912 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
913 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
914 create-node" instead.
916 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
917 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
918 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
919 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
921 - Performance Improvements
923 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
924 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
925 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
926 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
927 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
928 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
929 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
930 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
931 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
932 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
933 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
934 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
935 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
936 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
937 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
938 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
939 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
940 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
941 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
946 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
947 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
948 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
949 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
952 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
953 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
954 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
955 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
957 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
958 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
961 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
962 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
963 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
966 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
967 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
970 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
973 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
975 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
976 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
978 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
979 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
981 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
982 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
983 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
984 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
985 additional licensing text was added.
987 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
989 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
990 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
992 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
993 has been improved. (`#773`_)
995 For other changes not mentioned here, see
996 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
997 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
998 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
1000 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
1001 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
1002 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
1003 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
1004 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
1005 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
1006 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
1007 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
1008 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
1009 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
1010 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
1011 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
1012 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
1013 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
1014 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
1015 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
1016 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
1017 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
1018 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
1019 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
1020 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
1021 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
1022 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
1023 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
1024 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
1025 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
1026 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
1027 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
1028 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
1029 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
1030 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
1032 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
1033 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1038 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
1039 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
1041 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
1042 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
1043 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
1045 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
1046 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
1047 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
1048 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
1049 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
1051 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
1052 directories. (`#705`_)
1054 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
1055 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
1058 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
1059 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
1060 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
1061 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
1062 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
1064 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
1065 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
1066 directories from the future. This should improve the user
1067 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
1068 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
1069 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
1070 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
1071 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1076 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1077 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1078 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1079 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1080 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1081 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1082 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1084 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1085 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1088 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1089 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1090 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1092 Platform/packaging changes
1093 --------------------------
1095 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1096 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1098 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1099 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1100 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1101 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1102 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1103 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1105 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1106 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1107 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1108 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1110 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1112 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1113 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1114 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1116 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1117 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1118 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1125 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1126 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1127 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1131 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1132 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1133 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1134 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1135 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1136 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1137 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1138 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1139 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1141 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1142 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1147 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1148 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1149 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1150 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1151 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1152 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1153 lease. The process is described in detail in
1154 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1156 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1157 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1158 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1160 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1161 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1162 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1163 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1164 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1165 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1166 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1168 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1169 ---------------------------------
1171 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1172 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1173 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1174 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1175 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1177 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1178 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1179 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1180 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1181 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1182 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1183 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1188 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1189 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1190 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1191 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1192 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1194 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1195 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1196 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1199 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1200 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1201 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1202 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1203 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1204 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1205 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1206 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1209 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1210 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1211 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1213 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1214 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1215 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1216 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1217 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1218 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1219 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1224 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1225 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1226 of garbage collection.
1228 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1229 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1231 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1232 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1234 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1235 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1236 metadata) during backup.
1238 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1239 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1241 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1242 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1245 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1246 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1247 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1248 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1249 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1250 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1251 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1252 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1253 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1254 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1255 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1256 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1258 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1259 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1260 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1261 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1266 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1267 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1268 instance of RuntimeError.
1270 - Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1271 speeding them up considerably.
1273 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1274 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1275 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1276 with hundreds of entries.
1278 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1279 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1282 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1283 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1284 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1286 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1287 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1289 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1290 -------------------------
1292 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1293 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1294 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1295 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1296 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1297 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1298 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1299 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1300 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1303 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1304 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1305 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1306 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1307 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1308 permanent drive failure.
1310 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1311 shares. The limitations are:
1313 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1314 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1315 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1316 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1317 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1318 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1319 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1320 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1321 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1322 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1323 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1324 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1325 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1327 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1328 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1329 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1330 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1333 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1334 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1335 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1336 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1337 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1338 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1339 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1340 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1341 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1342 considered highly unusual.
1344 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1345 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1346 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1348 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1349 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1350 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1351 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1352 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1353 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1354 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1355 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1356 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1357 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1358 button will appear on the results page.
1360 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1361 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1362 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1363 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1364 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1365 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1371 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1372 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1373 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1374 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1375 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1376 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1377 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1378 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1379 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1380 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1381 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1382 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1383 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1384 to run from a daily cronjob.
1386 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1387 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1388 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1389 $target/Latest) from working.
1394 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1395 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1396 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1397 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1398 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1399 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1400 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1401 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1402 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1403 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1404 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1405 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1410 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1411 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1412 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1413 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1414 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1415 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1416 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1417 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1418 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1419 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1424 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1425 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1426 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1427 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1428 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1431 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1432 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1433 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1434 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1435 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1436 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1437 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1439 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1440 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1441 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1443 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1444 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1445 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1446 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1447 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1449 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1452 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1453 - tahoe debug dump-share
1454 - tahoe debug find-shares
1455 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1456 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1458 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1459 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1460 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1463 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1464 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1465 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1466 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1467 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1472 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1473 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1474 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1475 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1476 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1477 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1478 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1479 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1480 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1481 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1482 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1483 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1484 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1486 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1487 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1488 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1489 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1490 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1491 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1493 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1494 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1495 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1496 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1497 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1498 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1499 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1500 deep-check operations.
1502 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1503 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1504 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1505 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1506 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1509 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1510 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1511 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1512 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1513 "same-origin policy".
1515 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1516 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1517 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1518 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1519 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1520 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1521 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1522 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1523 processing by operations staff.
1525 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1526 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1527 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1528 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1529 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1530 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1532 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1533 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1534 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1535 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1536 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1537 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1538 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1540 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1541 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1542 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1543 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1544 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1545 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1546 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1547 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1549 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1550 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1551 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1552 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1553 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1554 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1555 target) of a t=rename command.
1560 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1561 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1562 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1563 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1564 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1565 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1566 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1567 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1570 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1571 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1572 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1573 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1574 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1575 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1576 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1577 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1578 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1579 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1581 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1582 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1584 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1585 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1586 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1587 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1588 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1591 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1592 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1593 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1594 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1595 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1596 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1597 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1599 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1600 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1601 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1602 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1603 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1605 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1606 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1607 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1608 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1609 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1610 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1611 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1613 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1614 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1615 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1617 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1618 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1619 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1621 Grid Management Tools
1622 ---------------------
1624 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1625 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1627 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1628 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1629 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1630 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1631 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1632 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1633 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1634 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1635 before the grid is completely full.
1637 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1638 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1639 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1641 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1642 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1643 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1644 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1645 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1646 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1647 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1648 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1649 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1650 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1652 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1653 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1654 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1655 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1656 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1657 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1659 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1660 -------------------------------------------------------
1662 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1663 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1664 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1665 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1666 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1667 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1668 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1669 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1671 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1672 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1674 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1675 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1676 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1678 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1679 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1680 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1681 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1682 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1683 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1684 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1685 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1686 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1687 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1688 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1693 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1694 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1695 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1697 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1698 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1699 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1702 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1703 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1704 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1707 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1708 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1709 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1710 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1711 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1712 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1714 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1715 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1716 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1717 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1719 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1720 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1722 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1723 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1724 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1725 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1728 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1730 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1731 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1732 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1733 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1735 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1736 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1741 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1742 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1743 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1744 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1745 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1746 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1747 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1748 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1749 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1750 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1751 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1754 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1755 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1761 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1762 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1763 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1764 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1765 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1771 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1772 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1773 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1774 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1776 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1777 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1778 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1779 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1780 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1783 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1784 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1785 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1786 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1787 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1788 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1790 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1791 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1792 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1793 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1794 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1795 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1798 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1799 -------------------------
1801 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1802 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1803 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1804 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1805 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1806 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1807 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1808 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1809 (which may take a very long time).
1811 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1813 Operations/Packaging
1814 --------------------
1816 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1817 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1818 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1819 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1820 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1821 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1822 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1825 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1826 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1827 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1829 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1830 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1831 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1834 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1835 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1836 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1842 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1843 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1844 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1845 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1846 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1847 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1848 directory for a second time.
1850 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1851 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1852 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1853 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1854 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1855 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1857 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1858 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1859 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1860 from the web browser end.
1862 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1863 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1864 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1866 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1867 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1869 CLI: new "alias" model
1870 ----------------------
1872 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1873 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1874 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1876 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1877 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1879 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1880 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1881 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1882 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1884 wapi: new pages, new commands
1885 -----------------------------
1887 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1889 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1890 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1891 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1892 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1894 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1895 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1896 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1897 new "cp -r" command.
1899 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1901 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1902 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1904 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1907 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1909 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1910 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1912 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1913 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1915 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1918 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1919 - tahoe_estimate_files
1920 - mutable files published/retrieved
1929 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1931 New Mutable-File Code
1932 ---------------------
1934 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1935 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1936 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1937 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1939 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1940 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1941 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1942 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1944 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1945 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1946 published when in fact it failed.
1951 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1952 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1953 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1955 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1956 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1957 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1958 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1959 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1961 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1962 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1963 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1964 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1965 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1966 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1967 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1969 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1970 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1971 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1972 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1973 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1974 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1976 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1977 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1979 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1980 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1981 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1982 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1983 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1985 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1986 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1988 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1989 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1990 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1991 order. This has been fixed.
1993 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1994 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1995 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1996 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1997 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst