2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.9.2a1 (2012-06-23)
7 ----------------------------
12 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`, `#1670`), writing
13 (`#1749`), verifying (`#1628`) and repairing (`#1655`, `#1669`, `#1676`,
14 `#1689`) mutable files have been fixed.
15 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
16 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`)
17 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
18 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
20 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
21 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
22 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`)
23 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`)
25 Configuration/Behaviour Changes
26 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
28 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
29 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
30 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
36 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
38 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`, `#1574`)
40 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
41 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
42 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
43 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
44 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
45 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
46 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
47 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
48 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
49 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
50 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
51 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
52 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
53 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
54 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
57 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
58 --------------------------
60 Security-related Bugfix
61 '''''''''''''''''''''''
63 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
64 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
66 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
69 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
70 --------------------------
75 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
76 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
77 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
78 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
79 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
80 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
81 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
82 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
83 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`_ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
84 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
85 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
86 `<docs/configuration.rst>`_ for more details. (`#1425`_)
87 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
88 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
89 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
90 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
91 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`_ for documentation.
93 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
94 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
95 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
96 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
98 Configuration/Behavior Changes
99 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
101 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
102 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
103 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
104 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
105 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
106 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
107 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
108 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
109 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
110 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
111 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
112 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
117 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
118 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
120 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
121 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
122 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
123 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
124 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
125 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
126 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
131 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
132 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
133 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
134 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
135 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
136 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
137 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
138 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
139 (any version of each):
141 * Academic Free License
142 * Apple Public Source License
143 * BitTorrent Open Source License
144 * Lucent Public License
145 * Jabber Open Source License
146 * Common Development and Distribution License
147 * Microsoft Public License
148 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
149 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
150 * Open Software License
152 Compatibility and Dependencies
153 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
155 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
156 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
157 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
158 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
159 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
160 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
161 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
163 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
164 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
169 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
171 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
172 of share files. (`#1391`_)
173 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
174 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
175 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
177 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
178 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
179 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
180 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
181 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
182 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
183 .. _`#1355`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1355
184 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
185 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
186 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
187 .. _`#1388`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1388
188 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
189 .. _`#1392`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1392
190 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
191 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
192 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
193 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
194 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
195 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
196 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
197 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
198 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
201 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
202 --------------------------
204 Security-related Bugfix
205 '''''''''''''''''''''''
207 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
208 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
209 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
210 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
211 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
212 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
213 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
215 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
218 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
219 --------------------------
221 Compatibility and Dependencies
222 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
224 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
225 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
226 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
227 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
228 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
229 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
230 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
231 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
237 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
239 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
240 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
241 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
243 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
244 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
245 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
246 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
247 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
248 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
249 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
251 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
252 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
253 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
254 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
255 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
256 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
257 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
260 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
261 --------------------------
263 Bugfixes and Improvements
264 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
266 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
267 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
268 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
270 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
271 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
272 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
273 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
275 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
276 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
277 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
278 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
279 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
280 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
281 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
282 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
283 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
284 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
285 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
286 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
287 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
288 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
290 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
291 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
292 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
297 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
298 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
299 platforms. (`#1262`_)
304 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
305 systems can install without having a compiler.
306 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
307 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
308 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
310 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
311 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
312 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
313 version number. (`#1233`_)
318 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
320 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
321 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
324 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
325 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
326 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
327 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
328 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
329 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
330 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
331 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
332 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
333 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
334 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
335 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
336 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
337 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
338 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
341 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
342 --------------------------
347 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
348 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
349 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
350 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
351 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
352 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
353 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
354 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
355 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
356 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
357 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
359 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
360 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
363 Bugfixes and Improvements
364 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
366 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
367 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
369 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
370 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
371 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
373 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
374 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
375 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
376 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
377 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
378 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
383 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
384 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
386 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
387 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
388 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
389 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
390 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
391 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
392 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
393 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
394 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
395 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
396 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
397 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
398 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
399 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
400 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
401 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
402 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
403 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
404 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
405 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
406 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
407 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
408 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
409 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
411 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
412 --------------------------
414 Bugfixes and Improvements
415 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
417 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
418 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
419 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
420 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
421 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
423 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
425 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
427 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
428 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
429 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
430 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
432 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
433 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
434 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
439 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
440 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
442 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
443 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
444 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
445 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
446 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
447 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
448 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
449 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
450 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
451 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
452 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
453 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
454 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
457 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
458 --------------------------
463 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
464 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
465 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
466 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
467 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
469 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
470 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
471 characters on all supported platforms:
473 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
474 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
476 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
477 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
479 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
480 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
481 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
483 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
484 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
485 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
486 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
487 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
488 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
489 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
490 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
491 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
492 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
493 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
494 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
495 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
496 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
497 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
499 Bugfixes and Improvements
500 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
502 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
503 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
504 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
506 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
507 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
508 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
509 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
511 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
513 - ImportError: No module named
514 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
515 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
516 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
517 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
518 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
519 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
520 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
521 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
522 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
523 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
524 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
525 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
527 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
533 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
534 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
540 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
541 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
545 - mock (only required by unit tests)
547 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
548 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
549 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
550 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
551 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
552 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
553 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
554 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
555 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
556 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
557 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
558 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
559 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
560 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
561 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
562 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
563 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
564 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
565 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
566 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
567 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
568 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
569 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
570 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
571 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
573 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
574 --------------------------
579 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
581 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
582 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
583 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
584 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
587 Usability Improvements
588 ''''''''''''''''''''''
590 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
592 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
593 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
594 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
595 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
597 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
598 --------------------------
603 - Immutable Directories
605 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
606 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
607 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
608 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
609 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
610 immutable directories).
612 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
613 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
614 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
615 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
616 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
617 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
618 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
620 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
621 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
622 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
623 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
624 the listing of that directory.
626 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
629 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
630 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
632 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
635 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
636 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
637 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
638 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
639 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
640 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
641 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
643 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
644 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
645 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
646 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
647 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
648 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
649 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
650 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
651 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
652 considerably. (`#606`_)
654 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
655 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
656 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
657 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
658 directories and stat() all your local files.
660 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
661 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
662 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
663 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
664 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
665 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
666 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
667 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
669 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
670 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
671 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
674 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
675 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
676 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
677 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
678 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
679 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
680 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
682 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
685 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
686 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
687 "node" process, which has several components that can be
688 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
689 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
690 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
691 future release will make it optional. There are three special
692 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
693 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
695 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
696 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
697 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
698 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
699 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
700 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
702 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
703 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
704 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
705 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
706 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
707 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
708 create-node" instead.
710 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
711 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
712 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
713 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
715 - Performance Improvements
717 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
718 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
719 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
720 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
721 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
722 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
723 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
724 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
725 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
726 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
727 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
728 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
729 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
730 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
731 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
732 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
733 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
734 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
735 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
740 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
741 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
742 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
743 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
746 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
747 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
748 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
749 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
751 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
752 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
755 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
756 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
757 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
760 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
761 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
764 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
767 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
769 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
770 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
772 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
773 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
775 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
776 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
777 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
778 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
779 additional licensing text was added.
781 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
783 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
784 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
786 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
787 has been improved. (`#773`_)
789 For other changes not mentioned here, see
790 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
791 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
792 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
794 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
795 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
796 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
797 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
798 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
799 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
800 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
801 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
802 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
803 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
804 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
805 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
806 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
807 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
808 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
809 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
810 .. _`#768`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
811 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
812 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
813 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
814 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
815 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
816 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
817 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
818 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
819 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
820 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
821 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
822 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
823 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
824 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
825 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
827 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
828 --------------------------
833 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
834 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
836 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
837 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
838 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
840 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
841 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
842 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
843 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
844 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
846 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
847 directories. (`#705`_)
849 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
850 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
853 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
854 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
855 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
856 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
857 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
859 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
860 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
861 directories from the future. This should improve the user
862 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
863 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
864 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
865 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
866 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
871 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
872 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
873 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
874 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
875 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
876 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
877 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
879 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
880 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
883 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
884 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
885 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
887 Platform/packaging changes
888 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
890 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
891 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
893 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
894 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
895 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
896 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
897 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
898 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
900 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
901 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
902 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
903 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
905 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
907 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
908 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
909 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
911 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
912 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
913 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
920 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
921 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
922 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
926 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
927 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
928 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
929 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
930 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
931 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
932 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
933 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
934 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
936 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
937 --------------------------
942 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
943 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
944 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
945 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
946 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
947 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
948 lease. The process is described in detail in
949 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
951 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
952 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
953 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
955 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
956 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
957 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
958 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
959 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
960 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
961 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
963 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
964 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
966 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
967 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
968 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
969 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
970 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
972 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
973 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
974 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
975 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
976 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
977 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
978 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
983 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
984 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
985 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
986 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
987 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
989 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
990 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
991 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
994 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
995 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
996 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
997 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
998 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
999 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1000 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1001 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1004 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1005 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1006 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1008 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1009 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1010 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1011 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1012 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1013 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1014 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1019 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1020 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1021 of garbage collection.
1023 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1024 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1026 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1027 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1029 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1030 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1031 metadata) during backup.
1033 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1034 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1036 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1037 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1040 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1041 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1042 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1043 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1044 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1045 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1046 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1047 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1048 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1049 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1050 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1051 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1053 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1054 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1055 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1056 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1061 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1062 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1063 instance of RuntimeError.
1065 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1066 speeding them up considerably.
1068 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1069 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1070 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1071 with hundreds of entries.
1073 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1074 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1077 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1078 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1079 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1081 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1082 --------------------------
1084 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1085 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1087 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1088 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1089 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1090 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1091 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1092 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1093 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1094 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1095 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1098 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1099 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1100 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1101 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1102 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1103 permanent drive failure.
1105 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1106 shares. The limitations are:
1108 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1109 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1110 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1111 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1112 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1113 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1114 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1115 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1116 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1117 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1118 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1119 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1120 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1122 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1123 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1124 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1125 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1128 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1129 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1130 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1131 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1132 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1133 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1134 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1135 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1136 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1137 considered highly unusual.
1139 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1140 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1141 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1143 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1144 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1145 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1146 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1147 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1148 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1149 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1150 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1151 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1152 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1153 button will appear on the results page.
1155 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1156 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1157 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1158 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1159 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1160 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1166 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1167 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1168 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1169 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1170 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1171 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1172 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1173 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1174 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1175 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1176 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1177 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1178 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1179 to run from a daily cronjob.
1181 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1182 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1183 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1184 $target/Latest) from working.
1189 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1190 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1191 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1192 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1193 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1194 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1195 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1196 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1197 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1198 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1199 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1200 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1205 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1206 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1207 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1208 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1209 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1210 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1211 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1212 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1213 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1214 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1219 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1220 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1221 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1222 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1223 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1226 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1227 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1228 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1229 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1230 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1231 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1232 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1234 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1235 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1236 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1238 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1239 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1240 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1241 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1242 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1244 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1247 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1248 - tahoe debug dump-share
1249 - tahoe debug find-shares
1250 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1251 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1253 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1254 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1255 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1258 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1259 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1260 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1261 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1262 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1267 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1268 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1269 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1270 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1271 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1272 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1273 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1274 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1275 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1276 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1277 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1278 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1279 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1281 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1282 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1283 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1284 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1285 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1286 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1288 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1289 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1290 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1291 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1292 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1293 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1294 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1295 deep-check operations.
1297 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1298 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1299 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1300 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1301 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1304 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1305 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1306 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1307 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1308 "same-origin policy".
1310 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1311 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1312 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1313 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1314 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1315 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1316 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1317 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1318 processing by operations staff.
1320 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1321 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1322 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1323 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1324 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1325 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1327 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1328 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1329 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1330 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1331 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1332 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1333 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1335 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1336 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1337 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1338 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1339 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1340 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1341 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1342 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1344 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1345 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1346 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1347 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1348 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1349 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1350 target) of a t=rename command.
1355 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1356 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1357 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1358 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1359 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1360 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1361 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1362 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1365 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1366 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1367 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1368 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1369 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1370 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1371 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1372 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1373 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1374 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1376 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1377 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1379 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1380 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1381 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1382 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1383 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1386 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1387 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1388 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1389 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1390 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1391 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1392 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1394 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1395 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1396 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1397 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1398 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1400 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1401 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1402 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1403 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1404 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1405 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1406 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1408 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1409 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1410 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1412 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1413 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1414 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1416 Grid Management Tools
1417 '''''''''''''''''''''
1419 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1420 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1422 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1423 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1424 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1425 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1426 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1427 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1428 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1429 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1430 before the grid is completely full.
1432 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1433 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1434 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1436 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1437 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1438 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1439 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1440 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1441 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1442 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1443 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1444 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1445 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1447 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1448 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1449 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1450 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1451 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1452 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1454 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1455 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1457 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1458 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1459 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1460 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1461 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1462 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1463 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1464 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1466 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1467 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1469 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1470 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1471 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1473 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1474 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1475 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1476 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1477 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1478 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1479 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1480 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1481 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1482 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1483 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1488 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1489 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1490 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1492 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1493 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1494 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1497 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1498 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1499 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1502 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1503 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1504 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1505 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1506 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1507 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1509 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1510 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1511 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1512 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1514 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1515 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1517 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1518 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1519 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1520 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1523 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1525 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1526 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1527 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1528 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1530 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1531 --------------------------
1536 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1537 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1538 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1539 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1540 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1541 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1542 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1543 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1544 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1545 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1546 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1549 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1550 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1556 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1557 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1558 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1559 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1560 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1566 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1567 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1568 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1569 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1571 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1572 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1573 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1574 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1575 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1578 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1579 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1580 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1581 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1582 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1583 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1585 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1586 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1587 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1588 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1589 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1590 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1593 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1594 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1596 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1597 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1598 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1599 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1600 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1601 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1602 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1603 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1604 (which may take a very long time).
1606 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1608 Operations/Packaging
1609 ''''''''''''''''''''
1611 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1612 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1613 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1614 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1615 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1616 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1617 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1620 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1621 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1622 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1624 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1625 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1626 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1629 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1630 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1631 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1637 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1638 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1639 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1640 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1641 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1642 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1643 directory for a second time.
1645 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1646 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1647 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1648 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1649 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1650 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1652 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1653 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1654 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1655 from the web browser end.
1657 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1658 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1659 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1661 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1662 --------------------------
1664 CLI: new "alias" model
1665 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1667 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1668 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1669 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1671 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1672 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1674 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1675 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1676 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1677 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1679 wapi: new pages, new commands
1680 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1682 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1684 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1685 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1686 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1687 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1689 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1690 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1691 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1692 new "cp -r" command.
1694 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1696 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1697 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1699 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1702 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1704 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1705 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1707 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1708 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1710 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1713 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1714 - tahoe_estimate_files
1715 - mutable files published/retrieved
1724 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1726 New Mutable-File Code
1727 '''''''''''''''''''''
1729 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1730 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1731 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1732 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1734 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1735 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1736 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1737 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1739 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1740 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1741 published when in fact it failed.
1746 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1747 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1748 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1750 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1751 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1752 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1753 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1754 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1756 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1757 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1758 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1759 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1760 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1761 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1762 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1764 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1765 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1766 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1767 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1768 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1769 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1771 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1772 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1774 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1775 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1776 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1777 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1778 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1780 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1781 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1783 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1784 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1785 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1786 order. This has been fixed.
1788 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1789 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1790 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1791 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1792 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst