1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.9.0 (2011-??-??)
6 --------------------------
10 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
11 docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst for how to use sshfs. (`#1409`_)
12 - Nodes now emit "None" for percentiles with higher implied precision
13 than the number of observations can support. Older stats gatherers
14 will throw an exception if they gather stats from a new storage
15 server and it sends a "None" for a percentile. (`#1392`_)
17 Compatibility and Dependencies
18 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
20 - An incompatibility of zope.interface version 3.6.4 with Nevow has
21 been resolved. Tahoe-LAFS now requires one of the exact versions
22 v3.3.1, v3.5.3, or v3.6.1 of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
23 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1. This ensures
24 that we no longer require pywin32 on Windows, and that it is never
25 necessary to patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend.
28 .. _`#1274`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
29 .. _`#1392`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1392
30 .. _`#1409`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
31 .. _`#1435`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
32 .. _`#1438`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
35 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
36 --------------------------
38 Compatibility and Dependencies
39 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
41 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
42 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
43 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
44 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
45 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
46 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
47 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
48 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
54 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
56 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
57 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
58 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
60 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
61 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
62 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
63 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
64 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
65 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
66 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
68 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
69 .. _`#1208`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
70 .. _`#1282`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
71 .. _`#1286`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
72 .. _`#1287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
73 .. _`#1296`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
74 .. _`#1337`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
77 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
78 --------------------------
80 Bugfixes and Improvements
81 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
83 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
84 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
85 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
87 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
88 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
89 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
90 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
92 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
93 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
94 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
95 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
96 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
97 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
98 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
99 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
100 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
101 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
102 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
103 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
104 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
105 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
107 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
108 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
109 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
114 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
115 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
116 platforms. (`#1262`_)
121 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
122 systems can install without having a compiler.
123 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
124 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
125 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
127 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
128 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
129 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
130 version number. (`#1233`_)
135 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
137 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
138 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
141 .. _`#71`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
142 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
143 .. _`#1212`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
144 .. _`#1045`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
145 .. _`#1190`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
146 .. _`#1216`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
147 .. _`#1223`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
148 .. _`#1224`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
149 .. _`#1225`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
150 .. _`#1232`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
151 .. _`#1233`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
152 .. _`#1241`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
153 .. _`#1253`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
154 .. _`#1255`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
155 .. _`#1262`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
158 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
159 --------------------------
164 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
165 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
166 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
167 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
168 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
169 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
170 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
171 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
172 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
173 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
174 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
176 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
177 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
180 Bugfixes and Improvements
181 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
183 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
184 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
186 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
187 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
188 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
190 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
191 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
192 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
193 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
194 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
195 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
200 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
201 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
203 .. _`#188`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
204 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
205 .. _`#288`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
206 .. _`#448`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
207 .. _`#685`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
208 .. _`#706`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
209 .. _`#715`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
210 .. _`#772`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
211 .. _`#798`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
212 .. _`#800`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
213 .. _`#890`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
214 .. _`#983`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
215 .. _`#990`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
216 .. _`#1055`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
217 .. _`#1074`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
218 .. _`#1108`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
219 .. _`#1155`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
220 .. _`#1170`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
221 .. _`#1191`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
222 .. _`#1127`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
223 .. _`#1129`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
224 .. _`#1131`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
225 .. _`#1166`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
226 .. _`#1175`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
228 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
229 --------------------------
231 Bugfixes and Improvements
232 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
234 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
235 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
236 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
237 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
238 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
240 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
242 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
244 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
245 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
246 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
247 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
249 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
250 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
251 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
256 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
257 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
259 .. _`#776`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
260 .. _`#923`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
261 .. _`#961`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
262 .. _`#967`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
263 .. _`#1051`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
264 .. _`#1067`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
265 .. _`#1072`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
266 .. _`#1083`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
267 .. _`#1097`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
268 .. _`#1098`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
269 .. _`#1099`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
270 .. _`#1117`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
271 .. _`#1118`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
274 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
275 --------------------------
280 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
281 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
282 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
283 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
284 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
286 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
287 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
288 characters on all supported platforms:
290 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
291 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
293 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
294 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
296 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
297 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
298 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
300 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
301 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
302 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
303 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
304 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
305 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
306 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
307 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
308 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
309 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
310 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
311 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
312 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
313 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
314 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
316 Bugfixes and Improvements
317 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
319 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
320 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
321 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
323 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
324 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
325 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
326 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
328 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
330 - ImportError: No module named
331 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
332 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
333 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
334 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
335 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
336 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
337 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
338 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
339 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
340 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
341 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
342 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
344 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
350 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
351 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
357 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
358 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
362 - mock (only required by unit tests)
364 .. _`#534`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
365 .. _`#608`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
366 .. _`#778`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
367 .. _`#803`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
368 .. _`#902`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
369 .. _`#911`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
370 .. _`#924`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
371 .. _`#937`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
372 .. _`#933`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
373 .. _`#968`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
374 .. _`#973`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
375 .. _`#1024`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
376 .. _`#1027`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
377 .. _`#1028`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
378 .. _`#1033`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
379 .. _`#1034`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
380 .. _`#1037`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
381 .. _`#1054`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
382 .. _`#1062`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
383 .. _`#1066`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
384 .. _`#1068`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
385 .. _`#1076`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
386 .. _`#1082`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
387 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
388 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
390 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
391 --------------------------
396 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
398 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
399 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
400 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
401 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
404 Usability Improvements
405 ''''''''''''''''''''''
407 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
409 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
410 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
411 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
412 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
414 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
415 --------------------------
420 - Immutable Directories
422 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
423 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
424 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
425 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
426 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
427 immutable directories).
429 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
430 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
431 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
432 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
433 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
434 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
435 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
437 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
438 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
439 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
440 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
441 the listing of that directory.
443 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
446 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
447 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
449 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
452 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
453 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
454 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
455 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
456 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
457 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
458 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
460 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
461 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
462 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
463 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
464 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
465 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
466 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
467 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
468 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
469 considerably. (`#606`_)
471 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
472 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
473 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
474 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
475 directories and stat() all your local files.
477 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
478 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
479 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
480 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
481 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
482 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
483 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
484 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
486 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
487 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
488 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
491 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
492 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
493 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
494 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
495 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
496 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
497 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
499 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
502 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
503 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
504 "node" process, which has several components that can be
505 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
506 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
507 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
508 future release will make it optional. There are three special
509 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
510 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
512 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
513 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
514 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
515 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
516 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
517 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
519 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
520 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
521 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
522 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
523 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
524 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
525 create-node" instead.
527 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
528 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
529 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
530 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
532 - Performance Improvements
534 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
535 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
536 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
537 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
538 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
539 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
540 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
541 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
542 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
543 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
544 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
545 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
546 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
547 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
548 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
549 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
550 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
551 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
552 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
557 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
558 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
559 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
560 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
563 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
564 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
565 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
566 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
568 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
569 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
572 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
573 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
574 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
577 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
578 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
581 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
584 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
586 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
587 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
589 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
590 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
592 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
593 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
594 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
595 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
596 additional licensing text was added.
598 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
600 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
601 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
603 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
604 has been improved. (`#773`_)
606 For other changes not mentioned here, see
607 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
608 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
609 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
611 .. _`#121`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
612 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
613 .. _`#381`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
614 .. _`#457`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
615 .. _`#533`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
616 .. _`#577`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
617 .. _`#606`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
618 .. _`#607`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
619 .. _`#637`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
620 .. _`#641`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
621 .. _`#646`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
622 .. _`#681`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
623 .. _`#729`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
624 .. _`#741`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
625 .. _`#760`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
626 .. _`#761`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
627 .. _`#768`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
628 .. _`#773`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
629 .. _`#786`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
630 .. _`#828`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
631 .. _`#833`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
632 .. _`#859`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
633 .. _`#874`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
634 .. _`#875`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
635 .. _`#931`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
636 .. _`#837`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
637 .. _`#850`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
638 .. _`#927`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
639 .. _`#928`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
640 .. _`#939`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
641 .. _`#948`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
642 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
644 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
645 --------------------------
650 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
651 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
653 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
654 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
655 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
657 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
658 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
659 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
660 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
661 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
663 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
664 directories. (`#705`_)
666 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
667 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
670 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
671 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
672 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
673 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
674 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
676 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
677 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
678 directories from the future. This should improve the user
679 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
680 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
681 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
682 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
683 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
688 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
689 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
690 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
691 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
692 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
693 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
694 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
696 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
697 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
700 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
701 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
702 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
704 Platform/packaging changes
705 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
707 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
708 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
710 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
711 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
712 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
713 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
714 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
715 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
717 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
718 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
719 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
720 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
722 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
724 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
725 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
726 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
728 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
729 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
730 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
737 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
738 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
739 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
743 .. _#392: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
744 .. _#625: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
745 .. _#653: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
746 .. _#683: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
747 .. _#694: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
748 .. _#705: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
749 .. _#722: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
750 .. _#750: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
751 .. _#752: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
753 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
754 --------------------------
759 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
760 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
761 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
762 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
763 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
764 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
765 lease. The process is described in detail in
766 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
768 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
769 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
770 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
772 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
773 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
774 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
775 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
776 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
777 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
778 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
780 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
781 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
783 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
784 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
785 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
786 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
787 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
789 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
790 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
791 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
792 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
793 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
794 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
795 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
800 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
801 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
802 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
803 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
804 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
806 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
807 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
808 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
811 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
812 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
813 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
814 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
815 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
816 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
817 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
818 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
821 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
822 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
823 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
825 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
826 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
827 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
828 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
829 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
830 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
831 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
836 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
837 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
838 of garbage collection.
840 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
841 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
843 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
844 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
846 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
847 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
848 metadata) during backup.
850 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
851 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
853 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
854 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
857 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
858 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
859 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
860 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
861 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
862 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
863 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
864 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
865 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
866 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
867 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
868 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
870 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
871 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
872 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
873 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
878 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
879 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
880 instance of RuntimeError.
882 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
883 speeding them up considerably.
885 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
886 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
887 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
888 with hundreds of entries.
890 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
891 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
894 .. _#442: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
895 .. _#645: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
896 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
898 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
899 --------------------------
901 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
902 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
904 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
905 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
906 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
907 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
908 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
909 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
910 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
911 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
912 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
915 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
916 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
917 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
918 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
919 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
920 permanent drive failure.
922 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
923 shares. The limitations are:
925 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
926 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
927 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
928 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
929 and most fields of the shares are validated.
930 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
931 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
932 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
933 corrupted shares will be left in place.
934 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
935 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
936 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
937 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
939 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
940 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
941 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
942 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
945 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
946 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
947 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
948 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
949 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
950 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
951 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
952 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
953 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
954 considered highly unusual.
956 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
957 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
958 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
960 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
961 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
962 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
963 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
964 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
965 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
966 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
967 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
968 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
969 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
970 button will appear on the results page.
972 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
973 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
974 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
975 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
976 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
977 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
983 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
984 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
985 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
986 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
987 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
988 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
989 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
990 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
991 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
992 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
993 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
994 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
995 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
996 to run from a daily cronjob.
998 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
999 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1000 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1001 $target/Latest) from working.
1006 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1007 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1008 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1009 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1010 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1011 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1012 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1013 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1014 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1015 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1016 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1017 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1022 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1023 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1024 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1025 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1026 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1027 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1028 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1029 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1030 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1031 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1036 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1037 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1038 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1039 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1040 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1043 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1044 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1045 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1046 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1047 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1048 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1049 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1051 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1052 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1053 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1055 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1056 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1057 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1058 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1059 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1061 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1064 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1065 - tahoe debug dump-share
1066 - tahoe debug find-shares
1067 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1068 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1070 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1071 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1072 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1075 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1076 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1077 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1078 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1079 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/565 for details.
1084 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1085 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1086 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1087 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1088 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1089 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1090 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1091 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1092 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1093 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1094 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1095 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1096 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1098 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1099 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1100 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1101 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1102 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1103 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1105 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1106 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1107 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1108 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1109 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1110 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1111 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1112 deep-check operations.
1114 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1115 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1116 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1117 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1118 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1121 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1122 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1123 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1124 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1125 "same-origin policy".
1127 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1128 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1129 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1130 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1131 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1132 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1133 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1134 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1135 processing by operations staff.
1137 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1138 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1139 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1140 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1141 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1142 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1144 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1145 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1146 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1147 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1148 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1149 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1150 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1152 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1153 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1154 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1155 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1156 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1157 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1158 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1159 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1161 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1162 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1163 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1164 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1165 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1166 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1167 target) of a t=rename command.
1172 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1173 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1174 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1175 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1176 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1177 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1178 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1179 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1182 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1183 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1184 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1185 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1186 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1187 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1188 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1189 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1190 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1191 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1193 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1194 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1196 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1197 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1198 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1199 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1200 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1203 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1204 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1205 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1206 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1207 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1208 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1209 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1211 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1212 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1213 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1214 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1215 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1217 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1218 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1219 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1220 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1221 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1222 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1223 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1225 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1226 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1227 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1229 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1230 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1231 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1233 Grid Management Tools
1234 '''''''''''''''''''''
1236 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1237 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1239 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1240 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1241 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1242 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1243 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1244 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1245 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1246 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1247 before the grid is completely full.
1249 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1250 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1251 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1253 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1254 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1255 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1256 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1257 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1258 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1259 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1260 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1261 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1262 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1264 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1265 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1266 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1267 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1268 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1269 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1271 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1272 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1274 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1275 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1276 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1277 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1278 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1279 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1280 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1281 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1283 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1284 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1286 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1287 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1288 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1290 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1291 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1292 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1293 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1294 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1295 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1296 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1297 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1298 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1299 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1300 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1305 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1306 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1307 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning .
1309 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1310 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1311 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1314 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1315 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1316 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1319 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1320 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1321 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1322 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1323 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1324 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1326 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1327 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1328 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1329 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1331 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1332 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1334 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1335 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1336 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1337 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1340 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1342 .. _#512: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1343 .. _#518: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1344 .. _#521: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1345 .. _#531: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1347 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1348 --------------------------
1353 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1354 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1355 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1356 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1357 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1358 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1359 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1360 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1361 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1362 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1363 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1366 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1367 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1373 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1374 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1375 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1376 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1377 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1383 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1384 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1385 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1386 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1388 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1389 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1390 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1391 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1392 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1395 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1396 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1397 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1398 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1399 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1400 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1402 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1403 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1404 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1405 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1406 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1407 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1410 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1411 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1413 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1414 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1415 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1416 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1417 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1418 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1419 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1420 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1421 (which may take a very long time).
1423 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1425 Operations/Packaging
1426 ''''''''''''''''''''
1428 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1429 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1430 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1431 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1432 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1433 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1434 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1437 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1438 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1439 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1441 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1442 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1443 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1446 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1447 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1448 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1454 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1455 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1456 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1457 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1458 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1459 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1460 directory for a second time.
1462 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1463 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1464 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1465 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1466 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1467 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1469 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1470 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1471 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1472 from the web browser end.
1474 .. _#463: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1475 .. _#491: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1476 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1478 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1479 --------------------------
1481 CLI: new "alias" model
1482 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1484 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1485 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1486 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1488 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1489 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1491 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1492 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1493 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1494 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1496 wapi: new pages, new commands
1497 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1499 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1501 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1502 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1503 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1504 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1506 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1507 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1508 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1509 new "cp -r" command.
1511 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1513 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1514 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1516 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1519 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1521 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1522 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1524 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1525 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1527 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1530 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1531 - tahoe_estimate_files
1532 - mutable files published/retrieved
1541 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1543 New Mutable-File Code
1544 '''''''''''''''''''''
1546 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1547 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1548 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1549 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1551 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1552 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1553 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1554 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1556 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1557 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1558 published when in fact it failed.
1563 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1564 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1565 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1567 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1568 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1569 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1570 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1571 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1573 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1574 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1575 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1576 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1577 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1578 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1579 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1581 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1582 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1583 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1584 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1585 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1586 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1588 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1589 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1591 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1592 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1593 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1594 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1595 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1597 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1598 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1600 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1601 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1602 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1603 order. This has been fixed.
1605 .. _#221: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1606 .. _#374: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1607 .. _#391: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1608 .. _#439: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1609 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst