2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.10.0c1 (2012-03-19)
11 - Redesigned Welcome page. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
12 - Extendable Introducer protocol. (`#466`_)
13 - Added move feature to web-API. (`#1579`_)
18 - If an immutable file failed to download, e.g. due to a connection problem,
19 subsequent attempts to download the same file could also fail. (`#1679`_)
20 - The SFTP frontend works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
21 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
23 - Failure handling in the SFTP frontend has been improved. (`#1525`_)
24 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
26 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
27 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
28 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
29 - Error messages containing tracebacks may be slightly more readable.
31 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` counts the files being processed correctly.
33 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
34 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
36 Performance Improvements
37 ''''''''''''''''''''''''
39 - Allow web clients to cache immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
50 - The flogtool utility, used to read logs, can now be accessed as
51 ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when foolscap is not installed system-wide.
54 Compatibility and Dependencies
55 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
57 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
58 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
62 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
63 --------------------------
68 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
69 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
70 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
71 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
72 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
73 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
74 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
76 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
77 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
78 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
79 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
80 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
81 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
83 Configuration/Behavior Changes
84 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
86 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
87 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
88 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
94 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
97 Compatibility and Dependencies
98 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
100 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
101 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
102 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
104 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
105 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
106 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
107 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
108 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
109 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
110 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
111 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
112 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
113 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
114 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
115 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
116 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
117 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
118 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
119 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
120 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
123 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
124 --------------------------
126 Security-related Bugfix
127 '''''''''''''''''''''''
129 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
130 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
132 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
135 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
136 --------------------------
141 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
142 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
143 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
144 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
145 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
146 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
147 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
148 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
149 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
150 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
151 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
152 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
153 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
154 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
155 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
156 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
157 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
159 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
160 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
161 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
162 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
164 Configuration/Behavior Changes
165 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
167 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
168 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
169 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
170 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
171 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
172 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
173 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
174 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
175 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
176 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
177 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
178 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
183 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
184 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
186 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
187 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
188 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
189 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
190 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
191 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
192 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
197 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
198 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
199 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
200 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
201 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
202 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
203 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
204 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
205 (any version of each):
207 * Academic Free License
208 * Apple Public Source License
209 * BitTorrent Open Source License
210 * Lucent Public License
211 * Jabber Open Source License
212 * Common Development and Distribution License
213 * Microsoft Public License
214 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
215 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
216 * Open Software License
218 Compatibility and Dependencies
219 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
221 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
222 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
223 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
224 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
225 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
226 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
227 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
229 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
230 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
235 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
237 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
238 of share files. (`#1391`_)
239 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
240 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
241 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
243 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
244 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
245 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
246 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
247 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
248 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
249 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
250 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
251 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
252 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
253 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
254 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
255 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
256 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
257 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
258 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
259 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
260 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
261 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
264 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
265 --------------------------
267 Security-related Bugfix
268 '''''''''''''''''''''''
270 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
271 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
272 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
273 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
274 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
275 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
276 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
278 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
281 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
282 --------------------------
284 Compatibility and Dependencies
285 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
287 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
288 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
289 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
290 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
291 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
292 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
293 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
294 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
300 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
302 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
303 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
304 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
306 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
307 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
308 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
309 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
310 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
311 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
312 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
314 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
315 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
316 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
317 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
318 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
319 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
322 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
323 --------------------------
325 Bugfixes and Improvements
326 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
328 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
329 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
330 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
332 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
333 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
334 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
335 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
337 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
338 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
339 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
340 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
341 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
342 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
343 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
344 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
345 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
346 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
347 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
348 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
349 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
350 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
352 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
353 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
354 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
359 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
360 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
361 platforms. (`#1262`_)
366 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
367 systems can install without having a compiler.
368 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
369 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
370 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
372 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
373 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
374 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
375 version number. (`#1233`_)
380 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
382 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
383 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
386 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
387 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
388 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
389 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
390 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
391 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
392 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
393 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
394 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
395 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
396 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
397 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
398 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
399 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
400 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
403 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
404 --------------------------
409 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
410 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
411 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
412 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
413 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
414 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
415 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
416 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
417 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
418 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
419 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
421 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
422 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
425 Bugfixes and Improvements
426 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
428 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
429 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
431 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
432 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
433 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
435 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
436 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
437 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
438 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
439 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
440 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
445 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
446 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
448 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
449 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
450 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
451 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
452 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
453 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
454 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
455 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
456 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
457 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
458 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
459 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
460 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
461 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
462 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
463 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
464 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
465 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
466 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
467 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
468 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
469 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
470 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
472 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
473 --------------------------
475 Bugfixes and Improvements
476 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
478 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
479 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
480 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
481 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
482 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
484 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
486 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
488 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
489 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
490 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
491 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
493 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
494 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
495 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
500 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
501 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
503 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
504 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
505 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
506 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
507 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
508 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
509 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
510 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
511 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
512 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
513 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
514 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
515 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
518 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
519 --------------------------
524 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
525 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
526 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
527 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
528 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
530 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
531 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
532 characters on all supported platforms:
534 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
535 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
537 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
538 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
540 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
541 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
542 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
544 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
545 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
546 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
547 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
548 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
549 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
550 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
551 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
552 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
553 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
554 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
555 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
556 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
557 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
558 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
560 Bugfixes and Improvements
561 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
563 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
564 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
565 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
567 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
568 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
569 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
570 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
572 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
574 - ImportError: No module named
575 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
576 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
577 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
578 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
579 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
580 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
581 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
582 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
583 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
584 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
585 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
586 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
588 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
594 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
595 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
601 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
602 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
606 - mock (only required by unit tests)
608 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
609 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
610 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
611 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
612 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
613 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
614 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
615 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
616 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
617 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
618 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
619 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
620 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
621 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
622 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
623 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
624 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
625 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
626 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
627 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
628 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
629 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
630 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
631 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
632 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
634 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
635 --------------------------
640 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
642 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
643 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
644 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
645 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
648 Usability Improvements
649 ''''''''''''''''''''''
651 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
653 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
654 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
655 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
656 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
658 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
659 --------------------------
664 - Immutable Directories
666 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
667 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
668 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
669 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
670 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
671 immutable directories).
673 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
674 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
675 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
676 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
677 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
678 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
679 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
681 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
682 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
683 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
684 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
685 the listing of that directory.
687 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
690 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
691 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
693 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
696 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
697 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
698 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
699 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
700 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
701 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
702 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
704 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
705 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
706 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
707 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
708 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
709 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
710 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
711 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
712 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
713 considerably. (`#606`_)
715 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
716 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
717 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
718 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
719 directories and stat() all your local files.
721 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
722 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
723 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
724 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
725 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
726 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
727 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
728 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
730 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
731 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
732 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
735 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
736 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
737 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
738 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
739 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
740 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
741 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
743 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
746 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
747 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
748 "node" process, which has several components that can be
749 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
750 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
751 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
752 future release will make it optional. There are three special
753 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
754 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
756 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
757 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
758 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
759 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
760 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
761 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
763 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
764 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
765 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
766 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
767 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
768 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
769 create-node" instead.
771 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
772 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
773 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
774 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
776 - Performance Improvements
778 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
779 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
780 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
781 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
782 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
783 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
784 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
785 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
786 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
787 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
788 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
789 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
790 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
791 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
792 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
793 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
794 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
795 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
796 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
801 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
802 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
803 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
804 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
807 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
808 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
809 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
810 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
812 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
813 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
816 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
817 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
818 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
821 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
822 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
825 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
828 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
830 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
831 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
833 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
834 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
836 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
837 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
838 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
839 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
840 additional licensing text was added.
842 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
844 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
845 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
847 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
848 has been improved. (`#773`_)
850 For other changes not mentioned here, see
851 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
852 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
853 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
855 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
856 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
857 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
858 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
859 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
860 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
861 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
862 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
863 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
864 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
865 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
866 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
867 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
868 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
869 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
870 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
871 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
872 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
873 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
874 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
875 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
876 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
877 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
878 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
879 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
880 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
881 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
882 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
883 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
884 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
885 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
887 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
888 --------------------------
893 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
894 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
896 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
897 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
898 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
900 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
901 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
902 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
903 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
904 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
906 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
907 directories. (`#705`_)
909 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
910 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
913 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
914 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
915 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
916 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
917 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
919 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
920 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
921 directories from the future. This should improve the user
922 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
923 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
924 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
925 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
926 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
931 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
932 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
933 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
934 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
935 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
936 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
937 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
939 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
940 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
943 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
944 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
945 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
947 Platform/packaging changes
948 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
950 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
951 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
953 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
954 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
955 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
956 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
957 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
958 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
960 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
961 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
962 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
963 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
965 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
967 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
968 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
969 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
971 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
972 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
973 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
980 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
981 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
982 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
986 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
987 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
988 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
989 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
990 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
991 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
992 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
993 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
994 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
996 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
997 --------------------------
1002 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1003 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1004 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1005 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1006 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1007 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1008 lease. The process is described in detail in
1009 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1011 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1012 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1013 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1015 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1016 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1017 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1018 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1019 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1020 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1021 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1023 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1024 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1026 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1027 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1028 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1029 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1030 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1032 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1033 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1034 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1035 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1036 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1037 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1038 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1043 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1044 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1045 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1046 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1047 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1049 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1050 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1051 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1054 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1055 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1056 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1057 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1058 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1059 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1060 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1061 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1064 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1065 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1066 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1068 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1069 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1070 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1071 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1072 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1073 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1074 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1079 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1080 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1081 of garbage collection.
1083 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1084 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1086 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1087 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1089 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1090 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1091 metadata) during backup.
1093 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1094 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1096 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1097 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1100 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1101 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1102 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1103 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1104 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1105 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1106 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1107 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1108 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1109 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1110 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1111 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1113 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1114 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1115 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1116 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1121 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1122 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1123 instance of RuntimeError.
1125 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1126 speeding them up considerably.
1128 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1129 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1130 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1131 with hundreds of entries.
1133 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1134 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1137 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1138 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1139 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1141 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1142 --------------------------
1144 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1145 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1147 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1148 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1149 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1150 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1151 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1152 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1153 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1154 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1155 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1158 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1159 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1160 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1161 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1162 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1163 permanent drive failure.
1165 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1166 shares. The limitations are:
1168 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1169 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1170 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1171 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1172 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1173 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1174 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1175 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1176 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1177 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1178 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1179 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1180 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1182 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1183 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1184 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1185 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1188 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1189 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1190 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1191 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1192 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1193 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1194 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1195 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1196 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1197 considered highly unusual.
1199 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1200 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1201 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1203 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1204 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1205 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1206 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1207 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1208 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1209 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1210 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1211 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1212 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1213 button will appear on the results page.
1215 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1216 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1217 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1218 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1219 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1220 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1226 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1227 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1228 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1229 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1230 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1231 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1232 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1233 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1234 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1235 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1236 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1237 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1238 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1239 to run from a daily cronjob.
1241 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1242 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1243 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1244 $target/Latest) from working.
1249 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1250 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1251 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1252 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1253 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1254 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1255 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1256 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1257 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1258 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1259 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1260 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1265 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1266 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1267 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1268 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1269 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1270 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1271 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1272 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1273 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1274 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1279 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1280 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1281 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1282 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1283 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1286 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1287 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1288 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1289 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1290 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1291 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1292 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1294 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1295 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1296 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1298 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1299 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1300 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1301 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1302 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1304 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1307 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1308 - tahoe debug dump-share
1309 - tahoe debug find-shares
1310 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1311 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1313 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1314 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1315 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1318 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1319 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1320 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1321 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1322 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1327 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1328 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1329 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1330 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1331 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1332 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1333 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1334 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1335 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1336 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1337 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1338 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1339 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1341 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1342 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1343 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1344 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1345 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1346 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1348 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1349 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1350 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1351 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1352 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1353 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1354 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1355 deep-check operations.
1357 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1358 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1359 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1360 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1361 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1364 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1365 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1366 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1367 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1368 "same-origin policy".
1370 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1371 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1372 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1373 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1374 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1375 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1376 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1377 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1378 processing by operations staff.
1380 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1381 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1382 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1383 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1384 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1385 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1387 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1388 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1389 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1390 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1391 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1392 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1393 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1395 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1396 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1397 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1398 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1399 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1400 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1401 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1402 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1404 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1405 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1406 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1407 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1408 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1409 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1410 target) of a t=rename command.
1415 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1416 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1417 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1418 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1419 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1420 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1421 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1422 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1425 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1426 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1427 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1428 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1429 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1430 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1431 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1432 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1433 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1434 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1436 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1437 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1439 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1440 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1441 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1442 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1443 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1446 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1447 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1448 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1449 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1450 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1451 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1452 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1454 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1455 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1456 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1457 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1458 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1460 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1461 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1462 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1463 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1464 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1465 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1466 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1468 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1469 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1470 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1472 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1473 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1474 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1476 Grid Management Tools
1477 '''''''''''''''''''''
1479 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1480 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1482 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1483 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1484 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1485 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1486 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1487 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1488 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1489 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1490 before the grid is completely full.
1492 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1493 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1494 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1496 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1497 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1498 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1499 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1500 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1501 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1502 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1503 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1504 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1505 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1507 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1508 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1509 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1510 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1511 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1512 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1514 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1515 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1517 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1518 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1519 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1520 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1521 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1522 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1523 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1524 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1526 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1527 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1529 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1530 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1531 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1533 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1534 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1535 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1536 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1537 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1538 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1539 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1540 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1541 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1542 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1543 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1548 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1549 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1550 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1552 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1553 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1554 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1557 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1558 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1559 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1562 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1563 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1564 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1565 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1566 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1567 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1569 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1570 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1571 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1572 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1574 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1575 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1577 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1578 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1579 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1580 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1583 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1585 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1586 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1587 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1588 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1590 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1591 --------------------------
1596 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1597 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1598 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1599 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1600 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1601 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1602 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1603 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1604 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1605 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1606 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1609 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1610 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1616 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1617 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1618 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1619 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1620 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1626 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1627 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1628 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1629 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1631 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1632 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1633 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1634 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1635 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1638 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1639 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1640 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1641 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1642 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1643 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1645 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1646 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1647 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1648 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1649 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1650 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1653 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1654 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1656 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1657 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1658 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1659 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1660 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1661 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1662 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1663 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1664 (which may take a very long time).
1666 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1668 Operations/Packaging
1669 ''''''''''''''''''''
1671 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1672 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1673 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1674 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1675 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1676 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1677 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1680 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1681 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1682 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1684 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1685 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1686 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1689 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1690 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1691 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1697 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1698 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1699 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1700 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1701 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1702 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1703 directory for a second time.
1705 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1706 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1707 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1708 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1709 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1710 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1712 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1713 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1714 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1715 from the web browser end.
1717 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1718 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1719 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1721 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1722 --------------------------
1724 CLI: new "alias" model
1725 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1727 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1728 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1729 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1731 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1732 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1734 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1735 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1736 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1737 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1739 wapi: new pages, new commands
1740 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1742 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1744 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1745 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1746 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1747 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1749 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1750 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1751 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1752 new "cp -r" command.
1754 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1756 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1757 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1759 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1762 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1764 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1765 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1767 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1768 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1770 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1773 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1774 - tahoe_estimate_files
1775 - mutable files published/retrieved
1784 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1786 New Mutable-File Code
1787 '''''''''''''''''''''
1789 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1790 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1791 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1792 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1794 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1795 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1796 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1797 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1799 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1800 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1801 published when in fact it failed.
1806 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1807 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1808 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1810 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1811 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1812 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1813 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1814 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1816 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1817 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1818 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1819 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1820 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1821 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1822 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1824 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1825 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1826 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1827 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1828 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1829 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1831 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1832 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1834 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1835 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1836 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1837 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1838 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1840 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1841 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1843 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1844 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1845 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1846 order. This has been fixed.
1848 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1849 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1850 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1851 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1852 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst