1 .. -*- coding: utf-8-with-signature -*-
3 ==================================
4 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
5 ==================================
7 Release 1.10.1 (XXXX-XX-XX)
8 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
10 Unedited list of all changes after 1.10.0 and before 0d935e8 06-Jan-2015.
11 This list is not yet limited to user-visible ones. It *should* include all
12 tickets closed during this time, even minor non-user-visible ones.
14 - show git branch in version output #1953
15 - packaging fixes #1969 #1960
16 - mutable/retrieve: raise NotEnoughSharesError earlier when the sharemap says
17 it's useless, and improve the error message #1742
18 - improve user feedback when filing an Incident Report #1974
19 - add page-rendering timestamp to WUI #1972
20 - improve what-is-my-ipv4 on windows/cygwin #1381
21 - remove unused 'human encoding' URI methods #1807
22 - check/deep-check learned to accept multiple location args #740
23 - tests warn if tree is dirty #1992
24 - Travis-CI turned on #2249
25 - py2.6 is now unsupported on windows
26 - add 'distclean', don't remove egg-info during 'make clean' #2092
27 - add "UTF-8 BOM" to all docs #1948
28 - various docs cleanups/improvements
29 - improve safety of timing_safe_compare() #2165
30 - checker reports: remove needs-rebalancing, add count-happiness #1784 #2105
31 - improve packaging under pip #2209
32 - remove old darcs tooling
33 - minor comments #1874 #2086
34 - switch to unminified d3/jquery JS files #2208
36 - reject furlfiles with "#" #2128
37 - rename exit-trigger/self-destruct test feature #1336
38 - add coverage.io test-coverage reporting #623
39 - hush warnings during dep-checking, stop complaining about missing
40 "service_identity" dep #2248
41 - dedup license info in about.rst/README.txt #2067
42 - 'tahoe cp -r' copies the top-level directory into new dir #712
43 - log roothash in base32 not binary #1800
44 - improve welcome page CSS for narrow windows #1931
45 - redesign WUI directory pages #1966
46 - improve upload tests #2008
47 - remove obsolete debian packaging tools #2282
48 - add --coverage to setup.py test #1698, remove old coverage uploaders
49 - remove trialcoverage plugin #2281
50 - tolerate disk-space-used=0 for travis boxes #2290
51 - tolerate python subprocess bug #2023
52 - remove old build_helpers tools #2305
53 - fix "Download" button on welcome page #1901
55 - hack windows/OpenSSL deps on windows #2249 #2193
56 - WAPI: do not report 'size' metadata when unknown #1634
57 - new OS-X packaging #182
58 - stop using contents of .tac files #1159
59 - improve version-number reporting #2340
60 - add per-server "(space) Available" column to welcome page #648
61 - add public-key auth to SFTP server #1411
62 - `tahoe cp -r` changes w.r.t. unnamed directories #2329
64 all tickets noted as closed: 1953 1960 1974 1972 1717 1381 898 1707 1918 1807
65 740 1842 1992 2165 1847 2086 2208 2048 2128 2245 1336 2248 2067 712 1800 1966
66 2008 2282 2281 2290 2023 2121? 2305 1901 2249 2193 1634 1159 2340 1146 648
69 all tickets referenced (fixed? not fixed?): 1834 1969 1742 1988 982 1064 1536
70 1935 666 1784 2105 2209 2280 623 2249 1931 1698 2028 2005 1258 182
72 PRs noted as closed: 62 48 57 61 62 63 64 69 73 81 82 84 85 87 91 94 95 96
73 103 56 32 50 107 109 114 112 120 122 125 126 133
77 There are many "cp"-like tools in the unix world (POSIX /bin/cp, the "scp"
78 provided by SSH, rsync). They each behave slightly differently in unusual
79 circumstances, generally dealing with copying whole directories at a time,
80 into a target which may or may not exist already. The usual question is
81 whether the user is referring to the source directory as a whole, or to its
82 contents. For example, should "cp -r foodir bardir" create a new directory
83 named "bardir/foodir"? Or should it behave more like "cp -r foodir/* bardir"?
84 Some tools use the presence of a trailing slash to indicate which behavior
85 you want. Others ignore trailing slashes.
87 "tahoe cp" is no exception to having exceptional cases. This release fixes
88 some bad behavior and attempts to establish a consistent rationale for its
93 - If the thing being copied is a directory, and it has a name (e.g. it's not
94 a raw tahoe directorycap), then you are referring to the directory itself.
95 - If the thing being copied is an unnamed directory (e.g. raw dircap or
96 alias), then you are referring to the contents.
97 - Trailing slashes do not affect the behavior of the copy (although putting a
98 trailing slash on a file-like target is an error).
99 - The "-r" (--recursive) flag does not affect the behavior of the copy
100 (although omitting -r when the source is a directory is an error).
101 - If the target refers to something that does not yet exist:
102 - and if the source is a single file, then create a new file;
103 - otherwise, create a directory.
105 There are two main cases where the behavior of tahoe-1.10.1 differs from that
106 of the 1.10.0 release:
108 - "cp DIRCAP/file.txt ./local/missing" , where "./local" is a directory but
109 "./local/missing" does not exist. The implication is that you want tahoe to
110 create a new file named "./local/missing" and fill it with the contents of
111 the tahoe-side DIRCAP/file.txt. In 1.10.0, a plain "cp" would do just this,
112 but "cp -r" would do "mkdir ./local/missing" and then create a file named
113 "./local/missing/file.txt". In 1.10.1, both "cp" and "cp -r" create a file
114 named "./local/missing".
115 - "cp -r PARENTCAP/dir ./local/missing", where PARENTCAP/dir/ contains
116 "file.txt", and again "./local" is a directory but "./local/missing" does
117 not exist. In both 1.10.0 and 1.10.1, this first does "mkdir
118 ./local/missing". In 1.10.0, it would then copy the contents of the source
119 directory into the new directory, resulting in "./local/missing/file.txt".
120 In 1.10.1, following the new rule of "a named directory source refers to
121 the directory itself", the tool creates "./local/missing/dir/file.txt".
125 Release 1.10.0 (2013-05-01)
126 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
131 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
132 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
133 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
134 - A new extensible Introducer protocol has been added, as the basis for
135 future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older nodes is
136 not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all upgraded, the
137 welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead of the old
138 tubid. See `<docs/nodekeys.rst>`__ for details. (`#466`_)
139 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
140 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
142 Security Improvements
143 ---------------------
145 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
146 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
147 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
148 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
149 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
150 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
151 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
152 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
153 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
154 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
155 updated. Note that other users of a shared machine may be able to read
156 ``introducer.furl`` from your ``tahoe.cfg`` file unless you configure the
157 file permissions to prevent them. (`#1802`_)
158 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
159 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
160 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
161 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
162 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
164 Command-line Syntax Changes
165 ---------------------------
167 - Global options to ``tahoe``, such as ``-d``/``--node-directory``, must now
168 come before rather than after the command name (for example,
169 ``tahoe -d BASEDIR cp -r foo: bar:`` ). (`#166`_)
174 - In earlier versions, if a connection problem caused a download failure for
175 an immutable file, subsequent attempts to download the same file could also
176 fail. This is now fixed. (`#1679`_)
177 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
178 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
179 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
180 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
181 exception. (`#1758`_)
182 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
183 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
185 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` now counts the files being processed correctly.
187 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
188 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
189 - The error message displayed when a CLI tool cannot connect to a gateway has
190 been improved. (`#974`_)
191 - Other minor fixes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_, `#1915`_, `#1484`_, `#1525`_
193 Compatibility and Dependencies
194 ------------------------------
196 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
197 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
198 - mock >= 0.8 (for unit tests)
199 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for Ed25519 signatures)
200 - zope.interface >= 3.6.0 (except 3.6.3 or 3.6.4)
205 - The ``flogtool`` utility, used to read detailed event logs, can now be
206 accessed as ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when Foolscap is not installed
207 system-wide. (`#1693`_)
208 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
209 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool. Use the ``run.py``
210 script in ``misc/operations_helpers/provisioning/`` to access them.
211 - Web clients can now cache (ETag) immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
212 - `<docs/convergence_secret.rst>`__ was added to document the adminstration
213 of convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
215 Precautions when Upgrading
216 --------------------------
218 - When upgrading a grid from a recent revision of trunk, follow the
219 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
220 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
221 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release like 1.9.2.
223 .. _`#166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/166
224 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
225 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
226 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
227 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
228 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
229 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
230 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
231 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
232 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
233 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
234 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
235 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
236 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
237 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
238 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
239 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
240 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
241 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
242 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
243 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
244 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
245 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
246 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
247 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
248 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
249 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
250 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
251 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
252 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
255 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
256 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
261 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
262 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
263 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
264 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
265 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
266 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
267 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
269 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
270 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
271 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
272 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
273 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
274 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
276 Configuration/Behavior Changes
277 ------------------------------
279 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
280 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
281 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
287 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
290 Compatibility and Dependencies
291 ------------------------------
293 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
294 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
295 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
297 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
298 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
299 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
300 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
301 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
302 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
303 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
304 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
305 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
306 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
307 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
308 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
309 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
310 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
311 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
312 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
313 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
316 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
317 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
319 Security-related Bugfix
320 -----------------------
322 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
323 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
325 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
328 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
329 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
334 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
335 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
336 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
337 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
338 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
339 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
340 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
341 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
342 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
343 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
344 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
345 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
346 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
347 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
348 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
349 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
350 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
352 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
353 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
354 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
355 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
357 Configuration/Behavior Changes
358 ------------------------------
360 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
361 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
362 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
363 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
364 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
365 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
366 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
367 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
368 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
369 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
370 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
371 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
376 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
377 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
379 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
380 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
381 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
382 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
383 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
384 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
385 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
390 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
391 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
392 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
393 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
394 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
395 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
396 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
397 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
398 (any version of each):
400 * Academic Free License
401 * Apple Public Source License
402 * BitTorrent Open Source License
403 * Lucent Public License
404 * Jabber Open Source License
405 * Common Development and Distribution License
406 * Microsoft Public License
407 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
408 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
409 * Open Software License
411 Compatibility and Dependencies
412 ------------------------------
414 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
415 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
416 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
417 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
418 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
419 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
420 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
422 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
423 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
428 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
430 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
431 of share files. (`#1391`_)
432 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
433 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
434 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
436 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
437 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
438 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
439 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
440 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
441 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
442 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
443 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
444 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
445 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
446 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
447 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
448 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
449 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
450 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
451 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
452 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
453 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
454 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
457 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
458 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
460 Security-related Bugfix
461 -----------------------
463 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
464 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
465 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
466 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
467 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
468 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
469 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
471 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
474 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
475 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
477 Compatibility and Dependencies
478 ------------------------------
480 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
481 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
482 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
483 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
484 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
485 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
486 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
487 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
493 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
495 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
496 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
497 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
499 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
500 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
501 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
502 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
503 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
504 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
505 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
507 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
508 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
509 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
510 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
511 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
512 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
515 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
516 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
518 Bugfixes and Improvements
519 -------------------------
521 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
522 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
523 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
525 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
526 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
527 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
528 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
530 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
531 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
532 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
533 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
534 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
535 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
536 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
537 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
538 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
539 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
540 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
541 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
542 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
543 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
545 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
546 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
547 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
552 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
553 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
554 platforms. (`#1262`_)
559 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
560 systems can install without having a compiler.
561 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
562 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
563 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
565 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
566 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
567 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
568 version number. (`#1233`_)
573 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
575 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
576 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
579 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
580 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
581 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
582 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
583 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
584 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
585 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
586 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
587 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
588 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
589 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
590 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
591 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
592 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
593 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
596 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
597 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
602 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
603 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
604 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
605 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
606 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
607 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
608 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
609 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
610 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
611 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
612 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
614 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
615 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
618 Bugfixes and Improvements
619 -------------------------
621 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
622 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
624 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
625 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
626 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
628 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
629 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
630 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
631 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
632 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
633 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
638 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
639 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
641 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
642 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
643 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
644 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
645 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
646 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
647 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
648 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
649 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
650 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
651 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
652 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
653 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
654 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
655 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
656 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
657 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
658 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
659 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
660 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
661 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
662 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
663 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
665 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
666 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
668 Bugfixes and Improvements
669 -------------------------
671 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
672 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
673 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
674 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
675 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
677 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
679 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
681 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
682 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
683 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
684 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
686 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
687 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
688 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
693 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
694 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
696 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
697 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
698 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
699 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
700 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
701 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
702 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
703 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
704 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
705 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
706 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
707 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
708 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
711 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
712 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
717 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
718 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
719 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
720 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
721 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
723 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
724 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
725 characters on all supported platforms:
727 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
728 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
730 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
731 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
733 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
734 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
735 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
737 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
738 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
739 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
740 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
741 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
742 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
743 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
744 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
745 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
746 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
747 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
748 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
749 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
750 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
751 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
753 Bugfixes and Improvements
754 -------------------------
756 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
757 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
758 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
760 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
761 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
762 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
763 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
765 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
767 - ImportError: No module named
768 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
769 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
770 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
771 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
772 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
773 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
774 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
775 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
776 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
777 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
778 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
779 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
781 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
787 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
788 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
794 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
795 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
799 - mock (only required by unit tests)
801 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
802 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
803 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
804 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
805 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
806 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
807 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
808 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
809 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
810 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
811 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
812 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
813 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
814 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
815 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
816 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
817 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
818 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
819 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
820 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
821 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
822 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
823 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
824 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
825 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
827 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
828 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
833 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
835 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
836 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
837 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
838 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
841 Usability Improvements
842 ----------------------
844 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
846 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
847 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
848 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
849 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
851 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
852 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
857 - Immutable Directories
859 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
860 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
861 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
862 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
863 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
864 immutable directories).
866 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
867 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
868 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
869 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
870 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
871 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
872 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
874 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
875 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
876 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
877 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
878 the listing of that directory.
880 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
883 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
884 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
886 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
889 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
890 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
891 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
892 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
893 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
894 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
895 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
897 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
898 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
899 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
900 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
901 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
902 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
903 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
904 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
905 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
906 considerably. (`#606`_)
908 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
909 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
910 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
911 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
912 directories and stat() all your local files.
914 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
915 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
916 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
917 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
918 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
919 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
920 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
921 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
923 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
924 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
925 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
928 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
929 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
930 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
931 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
932 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
933 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
934 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
936 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
939 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
940 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
941 "node" process, which has several components that can be
942 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
943 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
944 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
945 future release will make it optional. There are three special
946 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
947 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
949 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
950 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
951 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
952 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
953 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
954 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
956 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
957 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
958 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
959 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
960 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
961 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
962 create-node" instead.
964 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
965 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
966 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
967 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
969 - Performance Improvements
971 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
972 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
973 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
974 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
975 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
976 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
977 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
978 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
979 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
980 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
981 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
982 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
983 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
984 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
985 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
986 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
987 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
988 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
989 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
994 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
995 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
996 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
997 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
1000 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
1001 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
1002 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
1003 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
1005 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
1006 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
1009 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
1010 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
1011 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
1014 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
1015 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
1018 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
1021 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
1023 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
1024 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
1026 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
1027 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
1029 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
1030 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
1031 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
1032 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
1033 additional licensing text was added.
1035 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
1037 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
1038 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
1040 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
1041 has been improved. (`#773`_)
1043 For other changes not mentioned here, see
1044 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
1045 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
1046 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
1048 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
1049 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
1050 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
1051 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
1052 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
1053 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
1054 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
1055 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
1056 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
1057 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
1058 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
1059 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
1060 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
1061 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
1062 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
1063 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
1064 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
1065 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
1066 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
1067 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
1068 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
1069 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
1070 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
1071 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
1072 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
1073 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
1074 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
1075 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
1076 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
1077 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
1078 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
1080 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
1081 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1086 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
1087 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
1089 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
1090 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
1091 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
1093 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
1094 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
1095 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
1096 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
1097 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
1099 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
1100 directories. (`#705`_)
1102 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
1103 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
1106 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
1107 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
1108 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
1109 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
1110 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
1112 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
1113 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
1114 directories from the future. This should improve the user
1115 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
1116 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
1117 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
1118 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
1119 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1124 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1125 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1126 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1127 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1128 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1129 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1130 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1132 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1133 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1136 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1137 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1138 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1140 Platform/packaging changes
1141 --------------------------
1143 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1144 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1146 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1147 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1148 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1149 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1150 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1151 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1153 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1154 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1155 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1156 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1158 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1160 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1161 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1162 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1164 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1165 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1166 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1173 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1174 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1175 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1179 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1180 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1181 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1182 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1183 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1184 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1185 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1186 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1187 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1189 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1190 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1195 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1196 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1197 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1198 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1199 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1200 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1201 lease. The process is described in detail in
1202 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1204 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1205 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1206 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1208 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1209 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1210 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1211 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1212 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1213 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1214 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1216 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1217 ---------------------------------
1219 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1220 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1221 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1222 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1223 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1225 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1226 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1227 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1228 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1229 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1230 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1231 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1236 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1237 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1238 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1239 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1240 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1242 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1243 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1244 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1247 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1248 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1249 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1250 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1251 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1252 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1253 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1254 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1257 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1258 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1259 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1261 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1262 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1263 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1264 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1265 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1266 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1267 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1272 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1273 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1274 of garbage collection.
1276 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1277 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1279 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1280 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1282 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1283 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1284 metadata) during backup.
1286 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1287 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1289 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1290 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1293 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1294 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1295 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1296 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1297 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1298 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1299 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1300 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1301 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1302 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1303 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1304 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1306 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1307 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1308 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1309 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1314 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1315 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1316 instance of RuntimeError.
1318 - Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1319 speeding them up considerably.
1321 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1322 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1323 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1324 with hundreds of entries.
1326 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1327 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1330 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1331 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1332 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1334 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1335 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1337 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1338 -------------------------
1340 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1341 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1342 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1343 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1344 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1345 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1346 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1347 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1348 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1351 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1352 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1353 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1354 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1355 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1356 permanent drive failure.
1358 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1359 shares. The limitations are:
1361 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1362 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1363 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1364 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1365 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1366 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1367 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1368 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1369 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1370 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1371 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1372 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1373 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1375 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1376 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1377 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1378 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1381 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1382 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1383 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1384 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1385 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1386 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1387 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1388 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1389 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1390 considered highly unusual.
1392 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1393 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1394 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1396 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1397 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1398 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1399 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1400 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1401 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1402 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1403 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1404 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1405 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1406 button will appear on the results page.
1408 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1409 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1410 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1411 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1412 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1413 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1419 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1420 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1421 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1422 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1423 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1424 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1425 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1426 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1427 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1428 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1429 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1430 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1431 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1432 to run from a daily cronjob.
1434 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1435 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1436 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1437 $target/Latest) from working.
1442 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1443 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1444 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1445 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1446 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1447 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1448 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1449 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1450 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1451 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1452 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1453 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1458 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1459 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1460 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1461 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1462 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1463 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1464 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1465 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1466 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1467 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1472 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1473 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1474 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1475 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1476 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1479 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1480 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1481 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1482 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1483 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1484 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1485 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1487 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1488 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1489 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1491 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1492 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1493 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1494 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1495 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1497 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1500 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1501 - tahoe debug dump-share
1502 - tahoe debug find-shares
1503 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1504 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1506 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1507 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1508 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1511 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1512 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1513 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1514 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1515 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1520 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1521 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1522 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1523 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1524 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1525 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1526 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1527 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1528 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1529 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1530 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1531 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1532 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1534 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1535 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1536 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1537 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1538 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1539 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1541 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1542 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1543 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1544 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1545 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1546 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1547 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1548 deep-check operations.
1550 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1551 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1552 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1553 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1554 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1557 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1558 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1559 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1560 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1561 "same-origin policy".
1563 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1564 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1565 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1566 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1567 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1568 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1569 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1570 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1571 processing by operations staff.
1573 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1574 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1575 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1576 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1577 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1578 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1580 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1581 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1582 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1583 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1584 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1585 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1586 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1588 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1589 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1590 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1591 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1592 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1593 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1594 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1595 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1597 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1598 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1599 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1600 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1601 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1602 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1603 target) of a t=rename command.
1608 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1609 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1610 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1611 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1612 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1613 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1614 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1615 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1618 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1619 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1620 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1621 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1622 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1623 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1624 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1625 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1626 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1627 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1629 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1630 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1632 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1633 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1634 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1635 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1636 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1639 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1640 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1641 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1642 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1643 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1644 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1645 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1647 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1648 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1649 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1650 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1651 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1653 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1654 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1655 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1656 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1657 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1658 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1659 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1661 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1662 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1663 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1665 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1666 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1667 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1669 Grid Management Tools
1670 ---------------------
1672 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1673 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1675 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1676 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1677 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1678 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1679 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1680 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1681 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1682 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1683 before the grid is completely full.
1685 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1686 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1687 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1689 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1690 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1691 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1692 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1693 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1694 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1695 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1696 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1697 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1698 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1700 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1701 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1702 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1703 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1704 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1705 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1707 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1708 -------------------------------------------------------
1710 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1711 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1712 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1713 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1714 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1715 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1716 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1717 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1719 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1720 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1722 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1723 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1724 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1726 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1727 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1728 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1729 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1730 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1731 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1732 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1733 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1734 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1735 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1736 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1741 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1742 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1743 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1745 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1746 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1747 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1750 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1751 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1752 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1755 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1756 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1757 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1758 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1759 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1760 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1762 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1763 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1764 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1765 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1767 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1768 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1770 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1771 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1772 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1773 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1776 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1778 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1779 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1780 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1781 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1783 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1784 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1789 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1790 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1791 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1792 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1793 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1794 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1795 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1796 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1797 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1798 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1799 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1802 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1803 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1809 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1810 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1811 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1812 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1813 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1819 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1820 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1821 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1822 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1824 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1825 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1826 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1827 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1828 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1831 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1832 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1833 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1834 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1835 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1836 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1838 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1839 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1840 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1841 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1842 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1843 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1846 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1847 -------------------------
1849 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1850 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1851 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1852 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1853 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1854 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1855 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1856 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1857 (which may take a very long time).
1859 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1861 Operations/Packaging
1862 --------------------
1864 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1865 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1866 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1867 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1868 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1869 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1870 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1873 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1874 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1875 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1877 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1878 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1879 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1882 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1883 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1884 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1890 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1891 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1892 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1893 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1894 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1895 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1896 directory for a second time.
1898 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1899 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1900 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1901 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1902 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1903 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1905 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1906 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1907 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1908 from the web browser end.
1910 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1911 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1912 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1914 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1915 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1917 CLI: new "alias" model
1918 ----------------------
1920 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1921 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1922 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1924 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1925 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1927 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1928 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1929 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1930 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1932 wapi: new pages, new commands
1933 -----------------------------
1935 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1937 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1938 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1939 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1940 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1942 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1943 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1944 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1945 new "cp -r" command.
1947 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1949 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1950 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1952 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1955 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1957 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1958 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1960 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1961 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1963 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1966 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1967 - tahoe_estimate_files
1968 - mutable files published/retrieved
1977 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1979 New Mutable-File Code
1980 ---------------------
1982 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1983 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1984 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1985 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1987 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1988 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1989 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1990 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1992 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1993 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1994 published when in fact it failed.
1999 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
2000 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
2001 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
2003 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
2004 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
2005 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
2006 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
2007 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
2009 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
2010 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
2011 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
2012 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
2013 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
2014 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
2015 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
2017 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
2018 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
2019 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
2020 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
2021 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
2022 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
2024 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
2025 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
2027 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
2028 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
2029 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
2030 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
2031 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
2033 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
2034 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
2036 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
2037 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
2038 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
2039 order. This has been fixed.
2041 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
2042 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
2043 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
2044 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
2045 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst