1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.10 (2013-??-??)
10 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
11 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
12 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
13 - A new, more extensible Introducer protocol has been added, to act as the
14 basis for future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older
15 nodes is not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all
16 upgraded, the welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead
17 of the old tubid. (`#466`_)
18 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
19 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
24 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
25 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
26 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
27 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
28 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
29 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
30 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
31 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
32 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
33 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
35 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
36 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
37 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
38 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
39 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
41 Command-line Syntax Changes
42 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
44 - Global options to ``tahoe``, such as ``-d``/``--node-directory``, must now
45 come before rather than after the command name (for example,
46 ``tahoe -d BASEDIR cp -r foo: bar:`` ). (`#166`_)
51 - If an immutable file failed to download, e.g. due to a connection problem,
52 subsequent attempts to download the same file could also fail. (`#1679`_)
53 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
54 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
56 - Failure handling in the SFTP frontend has been improved. (`#1525`_)
57 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
59 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
60 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
61 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
62 - Error messages containing tracebacks may be slightly more readable.
64 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` counts the files being processed correctly.
66 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
67 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
68 - Improve error message when CLI tools cannot connect to a gateway. (`#974`_)
69 - Other minor changes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_
71 Performance Improvements
72 ''''''''''''''''''''''''
74 - Allow web clients to cache immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
79 - docs/helper.rst has been brought up to date. (`#1915`_)
80 - docs/convergence_secret.rst was added to document the adminstration of
81 convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
86 - The flogtool utility, used to read logs, can now be accessed as
87 ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when foolscap is not installed system-wide.
89 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
90 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool in
91 misc/operations_helpers/provisioning. Use the ``run.py`` script to access
94 Compatibility and Dependencies
95 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
97 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
98 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
100 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for ed25519)
102 Precautions when Upgrading
103 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
105 - When upgrading a grid from a recent version of trunk, follow the
106 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
107 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
108 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release.
110 .. _`#166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/166
111 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
112 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
113 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
114 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
115 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
116 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
117 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
118 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
119 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
120 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
121 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
122 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
123 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
124 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
125 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
126 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
127 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
128 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
129 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
130 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
131 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
132 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
133 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
134 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
135 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
136 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
137 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
138 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
139 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
141 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
142 --------------------------
147 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
148 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
149 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
150 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
151 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
152 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
153 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
155 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
156 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
157 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
158 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
159 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
160 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
162 Configuration/Behavior Changes
163 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
165 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
166 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
167 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
173 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
176 Compatibility and Dependencies
177 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
179 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
180 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
181 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
183 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
184 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
185 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
186 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
187 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
188 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
189 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
190 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
191 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
192 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
193 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
194 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
195 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
196 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
197 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
198 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
199 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
202 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
203 --------------------------
205 Security-related Bugfix
206 '''''''''''''''''''''''
208 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
209 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
211 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
214 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
215 --------------------------
220 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
221 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
222 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
223 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
224 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
225 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
226 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
227 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
228 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
229 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
230 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
231 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
232 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
233 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
234 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
235 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
236 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
238 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
239 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
240 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
241 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
243 Configuration/Behavior Changes
244 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
246 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
247 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
248 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
249 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
250 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
251 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
252 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
253 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
254 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
255 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
256 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
257 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
262 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
263 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
265 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
266 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
267 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
268 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
269 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
270 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
271 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
276 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
277 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
278 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
279 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
280 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
281 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
282 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
283 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
284 (any version of each):
286 * Academic Free License
287 * Apple Public Source License
288 * BitTorrent Open Source License
289 * Lucent Public License
290 * Jabber Open Source License
291 * Common Development and Distribution License
292 * Microsoft Public License
293 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
294 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
295 * Open Software License
297 Compatibility and Dependencies
298 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
300 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
301 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
302 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
303 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
304 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
305 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
306 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
308 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
309 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
314 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
316 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
317 of share files. (`#1391`_)
318 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
319 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
320 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
322 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
323 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
324 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
325 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
326 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
327 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
328 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
329 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
330 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
331 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
332 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
333 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
334 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
335 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
336 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
337 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
338 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
339 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
340 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
343 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
344 --------------------------
346 Security-related Bugfix
347 '''''''''''''''''''''''
349 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
350 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
351 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
352 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
353 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
354 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
355 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
357 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
360 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
361 --------------------------
363 Compatibility and Dependencies
364 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
366 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
367 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
368 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
369 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
370 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
371 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
372 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
373 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
379 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
381 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
382 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
383 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
385 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
386 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
387 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
388 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
389 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
390 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
391 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
393 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
394 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
395 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
396 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
397 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
398 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
401 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
402 --------------------------
404 Bugfixes and Improvements
405 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
407 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
408 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
409 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
411 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
412 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
413 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
414 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
416 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
417 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
418 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
419 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
420 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
421 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
422 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
423 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
424 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
425 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
426 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
427 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
428 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
429 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
431 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
432 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
433 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
438 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
439 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
440 platforms. (`#1262`_)
445 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
446 systems can install without having a compiler.
447 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
448 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
449 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
451 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
452 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
453 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
454 version number. (`#1233`_)
459 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
461 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
462 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
465 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
466 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
467 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
468 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
469 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
470 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
471 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
472 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
473 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
474 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
475 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
476 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
477 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
478 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
479 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
482 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
483 --------------------------
488 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
489 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
490 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
491 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
492 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
493 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
494 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
495 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
496 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
497 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
498 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
500 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
501 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
504 Bugfixes and Improvements
505 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
507 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
508 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
510 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
511 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
512 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
514 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
515 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
516 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
517 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
518 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
519 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
524 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
525 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
527 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
528 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
529 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
530 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
531 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
532 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
533 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
534 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
535 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
536 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
537 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
538 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
539 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
540 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
541 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
542 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
543 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
544 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
545 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
546 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
547 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
548 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
549 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
551 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
552 --------------------------
554 Bugfixes and Improvements
555 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
557 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
558 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
559 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
560 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
561 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
563 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
565 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
567 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
568 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
569 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
570 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
572 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
573 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
574 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
579 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
580 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
582 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
583 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
584 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
585 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
586 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
587 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
588 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
589 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
590 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
591 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
592 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
593 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
594 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
597 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
598 --------------------------
603 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
604 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
605 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
606 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
607 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
609 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
610 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
611 characters on all supported platforms:
613 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
614 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
616 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
617 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
619 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
620 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
621 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
623 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
624 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
625 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
626 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
627 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
628 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
629 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
630 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
631 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
632 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
633 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
634 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
635 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
636 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
637 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
639 Bugfixes and Improvements
640 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
642 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
643 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
644 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
646 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
647 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
648 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
649 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
651 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
653 - ImportError: No module named
654 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
655 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
656 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
657 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
658 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
659 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
660 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
661 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
662 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
663 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
664 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
665 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
667 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
673 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
674 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
680 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
681 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
685 - mock (only required by unit tests)
687 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
688 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
689 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
690 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
691 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
692 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
693 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
694 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
695 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
696 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
697 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
698 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
699 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
700 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
701 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
702 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
703 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
704 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
705 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
706 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
707 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
708 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
709 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
710 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
711 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
713 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
714 --------------------------
719 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
721 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
722 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
723 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
724 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
727 Usability Improvements
728 ''''''''''''''''''''''
730 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
732 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
733 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
734 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
735 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
737 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
738 --------------------------
743 - Immutable Directories
745 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
746 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
747 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
748 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
749 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
750 immutable directories).
752 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
753 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
754 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
755 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
756 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
757 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
758 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
760 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
761 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
762 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
763 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
764 the listing of that directory.
766 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
769 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
770 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
772 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
775 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
776 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
777 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
778 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
779 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
780 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
781 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
783 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
784 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
785 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
786 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
787 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
788 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
789 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
790 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
791 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
792 considerably. (`#606`_)
794 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
795 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
796 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
797 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
798 directories and stat() all your local files.
800 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
801 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
802 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
803 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
804 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
805 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
806 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
807 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
809 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
810 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
811 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
814 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
815 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
816 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
817 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
818 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
819 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
820 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
822 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
825 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
826 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
827 "node" process, which has several components that can be
828 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
829 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
830 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
831 future release will make it optional. There are three special
832 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
833 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
835 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
836 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
837 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
838 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
839 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
840 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
842 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
843 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
844 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
845 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
846 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
847 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
848 create-node" instead.
850 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
851 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
852 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
853 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
855 - Performance Improvements
857 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
858 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
859 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
860 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
861 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
862 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
863 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
864 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
865 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
866 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
867 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
868 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
869 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
870 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
871 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
872 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
873 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
874 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
875 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
880 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
881 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
882 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
883 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
886 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
887 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
888 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
889 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
891 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
892 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
895 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
896 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
897 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
900 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
901 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
904 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
907 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
909 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
910 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
912 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
913 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
915 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
916 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
917 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
918 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
919 additional licensing text was added.
921 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
923 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
924 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
926 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
927 has been improved. (`#773`_)
929 For other changes not mentioned here, see
930 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
931 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
932 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
934 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
935 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
936 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
937 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
938 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
939 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
940 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
941 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
942 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
943 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
944 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
945 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
946 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
947 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
948 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
949 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
950 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
951 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
952 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
953 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
954 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
955 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
956 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
957 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
958 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
959 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
960 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
961 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
962 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
963 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
964 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
966 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
967 --------------------------
972 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
973 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
975 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
976 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
977 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
979 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
980 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
981 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
982 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
983 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
985 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
986 directories. (`#705`_)
988 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
989 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
992 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
993 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
994 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
995 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
996 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
998 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
999 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
1000 directories from the future. This should improve the user
1001 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
1002 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
1003 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
1004 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
1005 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1010 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1011 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1012 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1013 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1014 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1015 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1016 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1018 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1019 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1022 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1023 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1024 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1026 Platform/packaging changes
1027 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1029 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1030 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1032 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1033 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1034 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1035 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1036 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1037 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1039 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1040 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1041 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1042 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1044 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1046 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1047 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1048 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1050 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1051 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1052 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1059 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1060 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1061 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1065 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1066 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1067 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1068 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1069 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1070 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1071 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1072 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1073 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1075 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1076 --------------------------
1081 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1082 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1083 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1084 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1085 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1086 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1087 lease. The process is described in detail in
1088 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1090 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1091 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1092 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1094 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1095 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1096 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1097 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1098 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1099 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1100 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1102 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1103 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1105 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1106 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1107 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1108 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1109 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1111 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1112 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1113 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1114 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1115 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1116 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1117 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1122 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1123 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1124 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1125 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1126 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1128 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1129 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1130 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1133 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1134 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1135 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1136 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1137 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1138 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1139 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1140 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1143 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1144 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1145 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1147 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1148 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1149 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1150 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1151 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1152 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1153 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1158 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1159 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1160 of garbage collection.
1162 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1163 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1165 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1166 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1168 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1169 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1170 metadata) during backup.
1172 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1173 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1175 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1176 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1179 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1180 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1181 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1182 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1183 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1184 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1185 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1186 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1187 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1188 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1189 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1190 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1192 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1193 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1194 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1195 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1200 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1201 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1202 instance of RuntimeError.
1204 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1205 speeding them up considerably.
1207 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1208 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1209 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1210 with hundreds of entries.
1212 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1213 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1216 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1217 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1218 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1220 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1221 --------------------------
1223 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1224 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1226 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1227 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1228 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1229 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1230 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1231 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1232 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1233 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1234 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1237 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1238 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1239 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1240 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1241 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1242 permanent drive failure.
1244 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1245 shares. The limitations are:
1247 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1248 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1249 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1250 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1251 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1252 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1253 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1254 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1255 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1256 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1257 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1258 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1259 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1261 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1262 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1263 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1264 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1267 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1268 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1269 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1270 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1271 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1272 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1273 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1274 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1275 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1276 considered highly unusual.
1278 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1279 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1280 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1282 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1283 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1284 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1285 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1286 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1287 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1288 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1289 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1290 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1291 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1292 button will appear on the results page.
1294 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1295 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1296 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1297 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1298 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1299 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1305 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1306 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1307 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1308 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1309 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1310 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1311 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1312 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1313 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1314 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1315 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1316 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1317 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1318 to run from a daily cronjob.
1320 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1321 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1322 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1323 $target/Latest) from working.
1328 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1329 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1330 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1331 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1332 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1333 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1334 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1335 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1336 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1337 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1338 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1339 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1344 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1345 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1346 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1347 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1348 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1349 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1350 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1351 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1352 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1353 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1358 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1359 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1360 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1361 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1362 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1365 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1366 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1367 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1368 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1369 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1370 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1371 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1373 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1374 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1375 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1377 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1378 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1379 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1380 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1381 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1383 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1386 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1387 - tahoe debug dump-share
1388 - tahoe debug find-shares
1389 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1390 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1392 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1393 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1394 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1397 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1398 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1399 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1400 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1401 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1406 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1407 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1408 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1409 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1410 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1411 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1412 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1413 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1414 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1415 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1416 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1417 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1418 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1420 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1421 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1422 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1423 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1424 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1425 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1427 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1428 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1429 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1430 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1431 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1432 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1433 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1434 deep-check operations.
1436 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1437 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1438 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1439 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1440 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1443 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1444 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1445 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1446 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1447 "same-origin policy".
1449 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1450 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1451 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1452 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1453 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1454 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1455 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1456 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1457 processing by operations staff.
1459 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1460 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1461 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1462 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1463 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1464 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1466 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1467 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1468 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1469 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1470 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1471 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1472 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1474 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1475 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1476 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1477 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1478 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1479 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1480 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1481 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1483 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1484 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1485 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1486 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1487 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1488 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1489 target) of a t=rename command.
1494 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1495 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1496 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1497 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1498 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1499 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1500 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1501 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1504 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1505 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1506 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1507 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1508 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1509 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1510 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1511 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1512 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1513 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1515 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1516 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1518 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1519 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1520 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1521 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1522 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1525 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1526 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1527 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1528 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1529 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1530 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1531 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1533 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1534 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1535 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1536 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1537 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1539 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1540 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1541 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1542 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1543 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1544 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1545 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1547 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1548 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1549 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1551 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1552 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1553 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1555 Grid Management Tools
1556 '''''''''''''''''''''
1558 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1559 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1561 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1562 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1563 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1564 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1565 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1566 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1567 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1568 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1569 before the grid is completely full.
1571 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1572 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1573 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1575 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1576 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1577 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1578 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1579 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1580 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1581 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1582 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1583 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1584 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1586 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1587 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1588 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1589 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1590 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1591 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1593 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1594 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1596 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1597 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1598 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1599 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1600 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1601 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1602 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1603 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1605 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1606 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1608 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1609 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1610 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1612 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1613 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1614 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1615 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1616 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1617 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1618 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1619 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1620 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1621 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1622 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1627 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1628 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1629 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1631 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1632 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1633 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1636 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1637 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1638 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1641 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1642 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1643 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1644 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1645 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1646 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1648 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1649 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1650 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1651 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1653 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1654 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1656 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1657 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1658 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1659 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1662 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1664 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1665 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1666 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1667 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1669 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1670 --------------------------
1675 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1676 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1677 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1678 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1679 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1680 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1681 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1682 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1683 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1684 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1685 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1688 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1689 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1695 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1696 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1697 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1698 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1699 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1705 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1706 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1707 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1708 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1710 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1711 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1712 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1713 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1714 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1717 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1718 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1719 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1720 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1721 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1722 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1724 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1725 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1726 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1727 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1728 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1729 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1732 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1733 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1735 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1736 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1737 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1738 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1739 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1740 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1741 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1742 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1743 (which may take a very long time).
1745 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1747 Operations/Packaging
1748 ''''''''''''''''''''
1750 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1751 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1752 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1753 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1754 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1755 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1756 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1759 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1760 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1761 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1763 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1764 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1765 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1768 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1769 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1770 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1776 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1777 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1778 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1779 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1780 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1781 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1782 directory for a second time.
1784 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1785 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1786 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1787 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1788 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1789 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1791 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1792 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1793 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1794 from the web browser end.
1796 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1797 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1798 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1800 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1801 --------------------------
1803 CLI: new "alias" model
1804 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1806 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1807 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1808 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1810 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1811 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1813 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1814 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1815 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1816 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1818 wapi: new pages, new commands
1819 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1821 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1823 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1824 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1825 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1826 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1828 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1829 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1830 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1831 new "cp -r" command.
1833 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1835 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1836 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1838 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1841 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1843 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1844 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1846 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1847 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1849 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1852 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1853 - tahoe_estimate_files
1854 - mutable files published/retrieved
1863 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1865 New Mutable-File Code
1866 '''''''''''''''''''''
1868 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1869 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1870 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1871 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1873 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1874 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1875 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1876 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1878 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1879 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1880 published when in fact it failed.
1885 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1886 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1887 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1889 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1890 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1891 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1892 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1893 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1895 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1896 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1897 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1898 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1899 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1900 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1901 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1903 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1904 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1905 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1906 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1907 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1908 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1910 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1911 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1913 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1914 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1915 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1916 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1917 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1919 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1920 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1922 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1923 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1924 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1925 order. This has been fixed.
1927 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1928 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1929 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1930 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1931 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst