2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.10 (2013-??-??)
11 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
12 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
13 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
14 - A new, more extensible Introducer protocol has been added, to act as the
15 basis for future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older
16 nodes is not affected. (`#466`_)
17 - The web-API has a new move operation that supports directly moving files
18 between directories. (`#1579`_)
23 - If an immutable file failed to download, e.g. due to a connection problem,
24 subsequent attempts to download the same file could also fail. (`#1679`_)
25 - The SFTP frontend works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
26 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
28 - Failure handling in the SFTP frontend has been improved. (`#1525`_)
29 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
31 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
32 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
33 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
34 - Error messages containing tracebacks may be slightly more readable.
36 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` counts the files being processed correctly.
38 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
39 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
41 Performance Improvements
42 ''''''''''''''''''''''''
44 - Allow web clients to cache immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
49 - docs/helper.rst has been brought up to date. (`#1915`_)
50 - docs/convergence_secret.rst was added to document the adminstration of
51 convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
56 - The flogtool utility, used to read logs, can now be accessed as
57 ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when foolscap is not installed system-wide.
60 Compatibility and Dependencies
61 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
63 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
64 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
67 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
68 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
69 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
70 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
71 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
72 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
73 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
74 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
75 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
76 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
77 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
78 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
79 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
80 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
81 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
82 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
83 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
84 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
85 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
86 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
87 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
88 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
91 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
92 --------------------------
97 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
98 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
99 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
100 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
101 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
102 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
103 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
105 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
106 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
107 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
108 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
109 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
110 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
112 Configuration/Behavior Changes
113 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
115 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
116 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
117 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
123 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
126 Compatibility and Dependencies
127 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
129 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
130 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
131 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
133 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
134 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
135 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
136 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
137 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
138 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
139 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
140 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
141 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
142 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
143 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
144 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
145 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
146 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
147 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
148 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
149 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
152 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
153 --------------------------
155 Security-related Bugfix
156 '''''''''''''''''''''''
158 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
159 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
161 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
164 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
165 --------------------------
170 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
171 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
172 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
173 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
174 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
175 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
176 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
177 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
178 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
179 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
180 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
181 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
182 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
183 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
184 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
185 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
186 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
188 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
189 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
190 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
191 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
193 Configuration/Behavior Changes
194 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
196 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
197 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
198 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
199 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
200 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
201 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
202 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
203 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
204 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
205 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
206 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
207 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
212 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
213 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
215 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
216 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
217 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
218 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
219 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
220 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
221 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
226 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
227 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
228 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
229 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
230 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
231 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
232 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
233 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
234 (any version of each):
236 * Academic Free License
237 * Apple Public Source License
238 * BitTorrent Open Source License
239 * Lucent Public License
240 * Jabber Open Source License
241 * Common Development and Distribution License
242 * Microsoft Public License
243 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
244 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
245 * Open Software License
247 Compatibility and Dependencies
248 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
250 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
251 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
252 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
253 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
254 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
255 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
256 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
258 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
259 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
264 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
266 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
267 of share files. (`#1391`_)
268 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
269 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
270 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
272 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
273 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
274 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
275 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
276 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
277 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
278 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
279 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
280 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
281 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
282 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
283 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
284 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
285 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
286 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
287 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
288 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
289 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
290 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
293 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
294 --------------------------
296 Security-related Bugfix
297 '''''''''''''''''''''''
299 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
300 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
301 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
302 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
303 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
304 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
305 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
307 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
310 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
311 --------------------------
313 Compatibility and Dependencies
314 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
316 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
317 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
318 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
319 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
320 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
321 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
322 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
323 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
329 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
331 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
332 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
333 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
335 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
336 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
337 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
338 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
339 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
340 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
341 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
343 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
344 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
345 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
346 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
347 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
348 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
351 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
352 --------------------------
354 Bugfixes and Improvements
355 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
357 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
358 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
359 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
361 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
362 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
363 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
364 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
366 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
367 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
368 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
369 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
370 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
371 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
372 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
373 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
374 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
375 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
376 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
377 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
378 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
379 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
381 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
382 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
383 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
388 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
389 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
390 platforms. (`#1262`_)
395 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
396 systems can install without having a compiler.
397 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
398 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
399 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
401 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
402 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
403 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
404 version number. (`#1233`_)
409 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
411 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
412 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
415 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
416 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
417 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
418 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
419 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
420 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
421 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
422 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
423 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
424 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
425 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
426 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
427 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
428 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
429 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
432 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
433 --------------------------
438 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
439 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
440 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
441 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
442 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
443 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
444 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
445 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
446 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
447 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
448 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
450 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
451 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
454 Bugfixes and Improvements
455 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
457 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
458 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
460 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
461 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
462 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
464 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
465 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
466 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
467 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
468 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
469 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
474 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
475 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
477 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
478 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
479 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
480 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
481 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
482 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
483 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
484 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
485 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
486 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
487 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
488 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
489 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
490 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
491 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
492 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
493 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
494 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
495 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
496 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
497 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
498 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
499 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
501 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
502 --------------------------
504 Bugfixes and Improvements
505 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
507 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
508 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
509 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
510 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
511 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
513 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
515 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
517 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
518 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
519 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
520 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
522 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
523 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
524 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
529 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
530 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
532 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
533 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
534 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
535 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
536 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
537 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
538 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
539 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
540 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
541 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
542 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
543 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
544 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
547 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
548 --------------------------
553 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
554 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
555 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
556 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
557 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
559 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
560 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
561 characters on all supported platforms:
563 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
564 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
566 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
567 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
569 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
570 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
571 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
573 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
574 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
575 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
576 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
577 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
578 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
579 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
580 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
581 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
582 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
583 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
584 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
585 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
586 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
587 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
589 Bugfixes and Improvements
590 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
592 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
593 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
594 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
596 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
597 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
598 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
599 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
601 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
603 - ImportError: No module named
604 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
605 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
606 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
607 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
608 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
609 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
610 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
611 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
612 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
613 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
614 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
615 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
617 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
623 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
624 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
630 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
631 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
635 - mock (only required by unit tests)
637 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
638 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
639 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
640 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
641 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
642 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
643 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
644 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
645 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
646 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
647 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
648 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
649 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
650 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
651 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
652 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
653 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
654 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
655 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
656 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
657 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
658 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
659 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
660 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
661 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
663 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
664 --------------------------
669 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
671 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
672 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
673 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
674 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
677 Usability Improvements
678 ''''''''''''''''''''''
680 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
682 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
683 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
684 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
685 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
687 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
688 --------------------------
693 - Immutable Directories
695 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
696 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
697 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
698 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
699 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
700 immutable directories).
702 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
703 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
704 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
705 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
706 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
707 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
708 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
710 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
711 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
712 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
713 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
714 the listing of that directory.
716 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
719 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
720 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
722 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
725 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
726 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
727 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
728 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
729 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
730 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
731 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
733 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
734 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
735 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
736 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
737 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
738 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
739 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
740 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
741 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
742 considerably. (`#606`_)
744 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
745 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
746 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
747 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
748 directories and stat() all your local files.
750 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
751 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
752 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
753 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
754 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
755 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
756 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
757 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
759 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
760 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
761 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
764 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
765 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
766 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
767 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
768 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
769 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
770 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
772 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
775 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
776 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
777 "node" process, which has several components that can be
778 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
779 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
780 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
781 future release will make it optional. There are three special
782 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
783 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
785 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
786 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
787 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
788 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
789 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
790 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
792 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
793 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
794 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
795 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
796 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
797 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
798 create-node" instead.
800 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
801 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
802 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
803 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
805 - Performance Improvements
807 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
808 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
809 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
810 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
811 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
812 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
813 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
814 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
815 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
816 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
817 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
818 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
819 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
820 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
821 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
822 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
823 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
824 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
825 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
830 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
831 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
832 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
833 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
836 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
837 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
838 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
839 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
841 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
842 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
845 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
846 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
847 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
850 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
851 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
854 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
857 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
859 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
860 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
862 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
863 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
865 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
866 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
867 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
868 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
869 additional licensing text was added.
871 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
873 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
874 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
876 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
877 has been improved. (`#773`_)
879 For other changes not mentioned here, see
880 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
881 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
882 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
884 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
885 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
886 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
887 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
888 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
889 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
890 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
891 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
892 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
893 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
894 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
895 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
896 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
897 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
898 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
899 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
900 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
901 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
902 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
903 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
904 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
905 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
906 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
907 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
908 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
909 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
910 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
911 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
912 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
913 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
914 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
916 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
917 --------------------------
922 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
923 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
925 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
926 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
927 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
929 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
930 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
931 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
932 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
933 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
935 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
936 directories. (`#705`_)
938 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
939 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
942 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
943 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
944 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
945 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
946 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
948 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
949 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
950 directories from the future. This should improve the user
951 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
952 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
953 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
954 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
955 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
960 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
961 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
962 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
963 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
964 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
965 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
966 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
968 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
969 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
972 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
973 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
974 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
976 Platform/packaging changes
977 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
979 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
980 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
982 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
983 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
984 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
985 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
986 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
987 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
989 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
990 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
991 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
992 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
994 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
996 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
997 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
998 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1000 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1001 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1002 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1009 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1010 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1011 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1015 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1016 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1017 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1018 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1019 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1020 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1021 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1022 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1023 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1025 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1026 --------------------------
1031 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1032 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1033 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1034 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1035 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1036 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1037 lease. The process is described in detail in
1038 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1040 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1041 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1042 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1044 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1045 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1046 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1047 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1048 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1049 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1050 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1052 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1053 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1055 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1056 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1057 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1058 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1059 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1061 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1062 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1063 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1064 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1065 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1066 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1067 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1072 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1073 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1074 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1075 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1076 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1078 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1079 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1080 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1083 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1084 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1085 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1086 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1087 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1088 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1089 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1090 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1093 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1094 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1095 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1097 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1098 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1099 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1100 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1101 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1102 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1103 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1108 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1109 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1110 of garbage collection.
1112 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1113 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1115 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1116 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1118 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1119 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1120 metadata) during backup.
1122 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1123 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1125 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1126 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1129 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1130 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1131 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1132 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1133 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1134 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1135 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1136 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1137 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1138 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1139 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1140 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1142 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1143 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1144 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1145 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1150 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1151 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1152 instance of RuntimeError.
1154 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1155 speeding them up considerably.
1157 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1158 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1159 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1160 with hundreds of entries.
1162 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1163 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1166 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1167 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1168 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1170 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1171 --------------------------
1173 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1174 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1176 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1177 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1178 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1179 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1180 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1181 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1182 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1183 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1184 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1187 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1188 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1189 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1190 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1191 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1192 permanent drive failure.
1194 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1195 shares. The limitations are:
1197 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1198 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1199 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1200 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1201 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1202 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1203 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1204 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1205 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1206 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1207 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1208 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1209 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1211 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1212 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1213 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1214 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1217 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1218 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1219 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1220 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1221 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1222 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1223 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1224 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1225 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1226 considered highly unusual.
1228 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1229 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1230 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1232 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1233 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1234 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1235 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1236 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1237 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1238 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1239 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1240 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1241 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1242 button will appear on the results page.
1244 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1245 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1246 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1247 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1248 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1249 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1255 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1256 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1257 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1258 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1259 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1260 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1261 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1262 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1263 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1264 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1265 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1266 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1267 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1268 to run from a daily cronjob.
1270 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1271 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1272 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1273 $target/Latest) from working.
1278 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1279 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1280 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1281 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1282 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1283 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1284 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1285 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1286 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1287 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1288 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1289 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1294 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1295 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1296 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1297 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1298 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1299 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1300 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1301 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1302 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1303 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1308 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1309 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1310 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1311 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1312 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1315 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1316 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1317 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1318 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1319 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1320 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1321 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1323 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1324 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1325 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1327 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1328 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1329 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1330 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1331 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1333 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1336 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1337 - tahoe debug dump-share
1338 - tahoe debug find-shares
1339 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1340 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1342 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1343 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1344 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1347 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1348 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1349 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1350 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1351 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1356 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1357 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1358 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1359 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1360 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1361 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1362 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1363 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1364 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1365 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1366 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1367 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1368 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1370 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1371 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1372 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1373 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1374 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1375 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1377 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1378 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1379 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1380 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1381 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1382 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1383 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1384 deep-check operations.
1386 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1387 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1388 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1389 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1390 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1393 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1394 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1395 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1396 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1397 "same-origin policy".
1399 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1400 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1401 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1402 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1403 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1404 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1405 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1406 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1407 processing by operations staff.
1409 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1410 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1411 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1412 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1413 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1414 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1416 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1417 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1418 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1419 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1420 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1421 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1422 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1424 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1425 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1426 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1427 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1428 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1429 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1430 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1431 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1433 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1434 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1435 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1436 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1437 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1438 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1439 target) of a t=rename command.
1444 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1445 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1446 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1447 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1448 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1449 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1450 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1451 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1454 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1455 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1456 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1457 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1458 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1459 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1460 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1461 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1462 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1463 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1465 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1466 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1468 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1469 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1470 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1471 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1472 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1475 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1476 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1477 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1478 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1479 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1480 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1481 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1483 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1484 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1485 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1486 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1487 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1489 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1490 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1491 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1492 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1493 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1494 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1495 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1497 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1498 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1499 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1501 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1502 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1503 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1505 Grid Management Tools
1506 '''''''''''''''''''''
1508 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1509 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1511 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1512 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1513 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1514 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1515 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1516 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1517 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1518 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1519 before the grid is completely full.
1521 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1522 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1523 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1525 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1526 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1527 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1528 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1529 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1530 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1531 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1532 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1533 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1534 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1536 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1537 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1538 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1539 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1540 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1541 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1543 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1544 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1546 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1547 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1548 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1549 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1550 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1551 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1552 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1553 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1555 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1556 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1558 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1559 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1560 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1562 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1563 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1564 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1565 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1566 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1567 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1568 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1569 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1570 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1571 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1572 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1577 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1578 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1579 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1581 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1582 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1583 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1586 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1587 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1588 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1591 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1592 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1593 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1594 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1595 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1596 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1598 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1599 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1600 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1601 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1603 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1604 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1606 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1607 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1608 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1609 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1612 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1614 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1615 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1616 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1617 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1619 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1620 --------------------------
1625 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1626 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1627 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1628 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1629 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1630 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1631 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1632 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1633 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1634 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1635 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1638 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1639 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1645 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1646 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1647 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1648 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1649 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1655 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1656 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1657 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1658 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1660 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1661 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1662 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1663 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1664 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1667 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1668 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1669 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1670 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1671 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1672 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1674 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1675 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1676 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1677 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1678 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1679 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1682 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1683 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1685 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1686 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1687 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1688 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1689 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1690 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1691 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1692 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1693 (which may take a very long time).
1695 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1697 Operations/Packaging
1698 ''''''''''''''''''''
1700 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1701 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1702 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1703 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1704 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1705 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1706 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1709 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1710 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1711 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1713 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1714 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1715 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1718 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1719 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1720 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1726 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1727 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1728 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1729 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1730 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1731 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1732 directory for a second time.
1734 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1735 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1736 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1737 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1738 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1739 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1741 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1742 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1743 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1744 from the web browser end.
1746 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1747 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1748 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1750 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1751 --------------------------
1753 CLI: new "alias" model
1754 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1756 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1757 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1758 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1760 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1761 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1763 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1764 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1765 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1766 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1768 wapi: new pages, new commands
1769 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1771 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1773 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1774 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1775 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1776 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1778 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1779 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1780 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1781 new "cp -r" command.
1783 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1785 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1786 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1788 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1791 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1793 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1794 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1796 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1797 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1799 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1802 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1803 - tahoe_estimate_files
1804 - mutable files published/retrieved
1813 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1815 New Mutable-File Code
1816 '''''''''''''''''''''
1818 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1819 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1820 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1821 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1823 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1824 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1825 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1826 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1828 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1829 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1830 published when in fact it failed.
1835 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1836 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1837 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1839 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1840 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1841 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1842 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1843 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1845 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1846 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1847 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1848 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1849 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1850 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1851 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1853 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1854 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1855 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1856 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1857 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1858 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1860 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1861 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1863 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1864 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1865 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1866 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1867 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1869 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1870 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1872 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1873 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1874 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1875 order. This has been fixed.
1877 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1878 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1879 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1880 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1881 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst