1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.10.0 (2013-05-01)
6 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
11 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
12 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
13 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
14 - A new extensible Introducer protocol has been added, as the basis for
15 future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older nodes is
16 not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all upgraded, the
17 welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead of the old
18 tubid. See `<docs/nodekeys.rst>`__ for details. (`#466`_)
19 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
20 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
25 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
26 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
27 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
28 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
29 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
30 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
31 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
32 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
33 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
34 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
35 updated. Note that other users of a shared machine may be able to read
36 ``introducer.furl`` from your ``tahoe.cfg`` file unless you configure the
37 file permissions to prevent them. (`#1802`_)
38 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
39 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
40 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
41 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
42 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
44 Command-line Syntax Changes
45 ---------------------------
47 - Global options to ``tahoe``, such as ``-d``/``--node-directory``, must now
48 come before rather than after the command name (for example,
49 ``tahoe -d BASEDIR cp -r foo: bar:`` ). (`#166`_)
54 - In earlier versions, if a connection problem caused a download failure for
55 an immutable file, subsequent attempts to download the same file could also
56 fail. This is now fixed. (`#1679`_)
57 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
58 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
59 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
60 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
62 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
63 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
65 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` now counts the files being processed correctly.
67 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
68 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
69 - The error message displayed when a CLI tool cannot connect to a gateway has
70 been improved. (`#974`_)
71 - Other minor fixes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_, `#1915`_, `#1484`_, `#1525`_
73 Compatibility and Dependencies
74 ------------------------------
76 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
77 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
78 - mock >= 0.8 (for unit tests)
79 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for Ed25519 signatures)
80 - zope.interface >= 3.6.0 (except 3.6.3 or 3.6.4)
85 - The flogtool utility, used to read detailed event logs, can now be accessed
86 as ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when Foolscap is not installed
87 system-wide. (`#1693`_)
88 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
89 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool. Use the ``run.py``
90 script in misc/operations_helpers/provisioning to access them.
91 - Web clients can now cache (ETag) immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
92 - `<docs/convergence_secret.rst>`__ was added to document the adminstration
93 of convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
95 Precautions when Upgrading
96 --------------------------
98 - When upgrading a grid from a recent version of trunk, follow the
99 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
100 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
101 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release.
103 .. _`#166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/166
104 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
105 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
106 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
107 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
108 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
109 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
110 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
111 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
112 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
113 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
114 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
115 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
116 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
117 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
118 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
119 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
120 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
121 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
122 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
123 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
124 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
125 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
126 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
127 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
128 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
129 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
130 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
131 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
132 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
135 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
136 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
141 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
142 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
143 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
144 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
145 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
146 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
147 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
149 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
150 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
151 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
152 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
153 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
154 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
156 Configuration/Behavior Changes
157 ------------------------------
159 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
160 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
161 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
167 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
170 Compatibility and Dependencies
171 ------------------------------
173 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
174 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
175 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
177 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
178 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
179 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
180 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
181 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
182 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
183 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
184 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
185 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
186 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
187 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
188 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
189 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
190 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
191 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
192 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
193 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
196 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
197 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
199 Security-related Bugfix
200 -----------------------
202 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
203 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
205 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
208 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
209 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
214 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
215 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
216 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
217 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
218 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
219 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
220 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
221 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
222 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
223 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
224 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
225 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
226 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
227 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
228 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
229 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
230 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
232 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
233 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
234 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
235 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
237 Configuration/Behavior Changes
238 ------------------------------
240 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
241 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
242 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
243 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
244 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
245 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
246 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
247 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
248 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
249 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
250 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
251 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
256 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
257 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
259 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
260 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
261 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
262 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
263 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
264 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
265 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
270 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
271 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
272 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
273 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
274 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
275 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
276 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
277 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
278 (any version of each):
280 * Academic Free License
281 * Apple Public Source License
282 * BitTorrent Open Source License
283 * Lucent Public License
284 * Jabber Open Source License
285 * Common Development and Distribution License
286 * Microsoft Public License
287 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
288 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
289 * Open Software License
291 Compatibility and Dependencies
292 ------------------------------
294 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
295 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
296 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
297 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
298 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
299 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
300 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
302 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
303 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
308 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
310 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
311 of share files. (`#1391`_)
312 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
313 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
314 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
316 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
317 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
318 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
319 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
320 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
321 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
322 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
323 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
324 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
325 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
326 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
327 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
328 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
329 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
330 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
331 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
332 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
333 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
334 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
337 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
338 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
340 Security-related Bugfix
341 -----------------------
343 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
344 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
345 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
346 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
347 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
348 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
349 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
351 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
354 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
355 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
357 Compatibility and Dependencies
358 ------------------------------
360 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
361 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
362 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
363 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
364 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
365 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
366 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
367 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
373 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
375 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
376 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
377 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
379 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
380 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
381 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
382 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
383 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
384 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
385 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
387 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
388 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
389 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
390 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
391 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
392 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
395 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
396 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
398 Bugfixes and Improvements
399 -------------------------
401 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
402 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
403 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
405 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
406 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
407 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
408 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
410 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
411 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
412 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
413 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
414 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
415 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
416 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
417 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
418 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
419 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
420 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
421 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
422 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
423 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
425 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
426 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
427 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
432 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
433 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
434 platforms. (`#1262`_)
439 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
440 systems can install without having a compiler.
441 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
442 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
443 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
445 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
446 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
447 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
448 version number. (`#1233`_)
453 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
455 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
456 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
459 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
460 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
461 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
462 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
463 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
464 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
465 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
466 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
467 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
468 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
469 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
470 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
471 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
472 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
473 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
476 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
477 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
482 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
483 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
484 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
485 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
486 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
487 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
488 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
489 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
490 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
491 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
492 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
494 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
495 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
498 Bugfixes and Improvements
499 -------------------------
501 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
502 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
504 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
505 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
506 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
508 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
509 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
510 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
511 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
512 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
513 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
518 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
519 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
521 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
522 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
523 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
524 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
525 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
526 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
527 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
528 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
529 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
530 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
531 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
532 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
533 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
534 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
535 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
536 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
537 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
538 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
539 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
540 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
541 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
542 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
543 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
545 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
546 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
548 Bugfixes and Improvements
549 -------------------------
551 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
552 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
553 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
554 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
555 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
557 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
559 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
561 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
562 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
563 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
564 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
566 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
567 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
568 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
573 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
574 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
576 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
577 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
578 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
579 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
580 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
581 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
582 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
583 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
584 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
585 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
586 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
587 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
588 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
591 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
592 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
597 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
598 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
599 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
600 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
601 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
603 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
604 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
605 characters on all supported platforms:
607 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
608 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
610 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
611 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
613 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
614 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
615 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
617 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
618 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
619 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
620 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
621 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
622 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
623 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
624 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
625 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
626 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
627 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
628 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
629 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
630 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
631 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
633 Bugfixes and Improvements
634 -------------------------
636 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
637 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
638 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
640 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
641 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
642 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
643 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
645 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
647 - ImportError: No module named
648 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
649 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
650 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
651 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
652 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
653 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
654 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
655 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
656 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
657 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
658 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
659 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
661 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
667 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
668 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
674 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
675 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
679 - mock (only required by unit tests)
681 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
682 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
683 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
684 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
685 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
686 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
687 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
688 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
689 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
690 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
691 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
692 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
693 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
694 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
695 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
696 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
697 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
698 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
699 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
700 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
701 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
702 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
703 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
704 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
705 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
707 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
708 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
713 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
715 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
716 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
717 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
718 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
721 Usability Improvements
722 ----------------------
724 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
726 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
727 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
728 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
729 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
731 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
732 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
737 - Immutable Directories
739 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
740 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
741 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
742 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
743 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
744 immutable directories).
746 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
747 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
748 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
749 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
750 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
751 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
752 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
754 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
755 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
756 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
757 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
758 the listing of that directory.
760 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
763 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
764 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
766 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
769 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
770 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
771 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
772 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
773 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
774 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
775 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
777 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
778 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
779 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
780 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
781 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
782 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
783 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
784 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
785 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
786 considerably. (`#606`_)
788 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
789 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
790 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
791 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
792 directories and stat() all your local files.
794 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
795 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
796 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
797 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
798 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
799 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
800 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
801 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
803 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
804 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
805 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
808 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
809 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
810 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
811 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
812 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
813 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
814 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
816 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
819 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
820 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
821 "node" process, which has several components that can be
822 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
823 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
824 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
825 future release will make it optional. There are three special
826 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
827 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
829 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
830 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
831 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
832 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
833 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
834 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
836 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
837 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
838 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
839 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
840 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
841 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
842 create-node" instead.
844 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
845 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
846 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
847 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
849 - Performance Improvements
851 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
852 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
853 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
854 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
855 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
856 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
857 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
858 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
859 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
860 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
861 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
862 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
863 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
864 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
865 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
866 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
867 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
868 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
869 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
874 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
875 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
876 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
877 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
880 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
881 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
882 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
883 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
885 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
886 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
889 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
890 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
891 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
894 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
895 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
898 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
901 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
903 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
904 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
906 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
907 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
909 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
910 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
911 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
912 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
913 additional licensing text was added.
915 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
917 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
918 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
920 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
921 has been improved. (`#773`_)
923 For other changes not mentioned here, see
924 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
925 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
926 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
928 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
929 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
930 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
931 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
932 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
933 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
934 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
935 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
936 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
937 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
938 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
939 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
940 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
941 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
942 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
943 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
944 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
945 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
946 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
947 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
948 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
949 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
950 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
951 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
952 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
953 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
954 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
955 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
956 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
957 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
958 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
960 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
961 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
966 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
967 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
969 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
970 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
971 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
973 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
974 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
975 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
976 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
977 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
979 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
980 directories. (`#705`_)
982 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
983 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
986 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
987 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
988 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
989 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
990 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
992 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
993 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
994 directories from the future. This should improve the user
995 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
996 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
997 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
998 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
999 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1004 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1005 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1006 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1007 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1008 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1009 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1010 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1012 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1013 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1016 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1017 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1018 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1020 Platform/packaging changes
1021 --------------------------
1023 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1024 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1026 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1027 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1028 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1029 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1030 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1031 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1033 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1034 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1035 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1036 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1038 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1040 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1041 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1042 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1044 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1045 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1046 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1053 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1054 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1055 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1059 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1060 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1061 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1062 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1063 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1064 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1065 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1066 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1067 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1069 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1070 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1075 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1076 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1077 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1078 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1079 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1080 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1081 lease. The process is described in detail in
1082 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1084 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1085 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1086 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1088 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1089 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1090 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1091 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1092 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1093 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1094 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1096 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1097 ---------------------------------
1099 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1100 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1101 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1102 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1103 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1105 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1106 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1107 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1108 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1109 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1110 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1111 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1116 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1117 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1118 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1119 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1120 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1122 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1123 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1124 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1127 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1128 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1129 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1130 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1131 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1132 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1133 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1134 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1137 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1138 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1139 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1141 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1142 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1143 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1144 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1145 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1146 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1147 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1152 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1153 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1154 of garbage collection.
1156 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1157 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1159 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1160 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1162 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1163 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1164 metadata) during backup.
1166 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1167 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1169 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1170 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1173 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1174 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1175 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1176 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1177 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1178 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1179 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1180 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1181 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1182 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1183 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1184 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1186 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1187 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1188 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1189 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1194 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1195 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1196 instance of RuntimeError.
1198 - Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1199 speeding them up considerably.
1201 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1202 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1203 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1204 with hundreds of entries.
1206 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1207 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1210 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1211 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1212 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1214 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1215 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1217 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1218 -------------------------
1220 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1221 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1222 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1223 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1224 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1225 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1226 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1227 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1228 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1231 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1232 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1233 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1234 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1235 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1236 permanent drive failure.
1238 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1239 shares. The limitations are:
1241 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1242 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1243 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1244 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1245 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1246 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1247 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1248 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1249 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1250 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1251 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1252 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1253 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1255 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1256 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1257 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1258 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1261 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1262 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1263 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1264 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1265 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1266 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1267 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1268 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1269 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1270 considered highly unusual.
1272 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1273 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1274 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1276 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1277 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1278 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1279 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1280 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1281 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1282 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1283 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1284 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1285 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1286 button will appear on the results page.
1288 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1289 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1290 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1291 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1292 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1293 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1299 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1300 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1301 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1302 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1303 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1304 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1305 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1306 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1307 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1308 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1309 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1310 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1311 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1312 to run from a daily cronjob.
1314 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1315 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1316 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1317 $target/Latest) from working.
1322 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1323 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1324 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1325 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1326 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1327 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1328 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1329 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1330 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1331 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1332 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1333 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1338 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1339 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1340 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1341 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1342 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1343 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1344 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1345 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1346 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1347 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1352 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1353 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1354 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1355 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1356 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1359 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1360 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1361 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1362 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1363 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1364 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1365 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1367 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1368 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1369 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1371 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1372 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1373 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1374 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1375 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1377 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1380 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1381 - tahoe debug dump-share
1382 - tahoe debug find-shares
1383 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1384 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1386 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1387 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1388 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1391 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1392 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1393 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1394 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1395 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1400 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1401 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1402 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1403 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1404 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1405 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1406 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1407 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1408 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1409 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1410 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1411 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1412 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1414 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1415 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1416 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1417 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1418 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1419 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1421 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1422 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1423 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1424 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1425 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1426 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1427 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1428 deep-check operations.
1430 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1431 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1432 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1433 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1434 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1437 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1438 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1439 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1440 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1441 "same-origin policy".
1443 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1444 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1445 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1446 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1447 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1448 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1449 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1450 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1451 processing by operations staff.
1453 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1454 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1455 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1456 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1457 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1458 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1460 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1461 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1462 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1463 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1464 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1465 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1466 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1468 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1469 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1470 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1471 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1472 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1473 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1474 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1475 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1477 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1478 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1479 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1480 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1481 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1482 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1483 target) of a t=rename command.
1488 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1489 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1490 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1491 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1492 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1493 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1494 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1495 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1498 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1499 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1500 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1501 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1502 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1503 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1504 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1505 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1506 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1507 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1509 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1510 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1512 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1513 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1514 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1515 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1516 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1519 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1520 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1521 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1522 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1523 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1524 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1525 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1527 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1528 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1529 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1530 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1531 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1533 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1534 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1535 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1536 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1537 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1538 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1539 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1541 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1542 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1543 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1545 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1546 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1547 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1549 Grid Management Tools
1550 ---------------------
1552 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1553 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1555 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1556 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1557 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1558 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1559 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1560 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1561 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1562 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1563 before the grid is completely full.
1565 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1566 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1567 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1569 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1570 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1571 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1572 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1573 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1574 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1575 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1576 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1577 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1578 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1580 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1581 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1582 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1583 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1584 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1585 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1587 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1588 -------------------------------------------------------
1590 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1591 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1592 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1593 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1594 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1595 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1596 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1597 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1599 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1600 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1602 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1603 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1604 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1606 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1607 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1608 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1609 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1610 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1611 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1612 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1613 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1614 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1615 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1616 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1621 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1622 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1623 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1625 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1626 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1627 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1630 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1631 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1632 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1635 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1636 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1637 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1638 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1639 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1640 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1642 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1643 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1644 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1645 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1647 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1648 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1650 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1651 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1652 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1653 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1656 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1658 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1659 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1660 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1661 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1663 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1664 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1669 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1670 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1671 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1672 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1673 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1674 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1675 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1676 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1677 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1678 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1679 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1682 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1683 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1689 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1690 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1691 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1692 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1693 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1699 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1700 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1701 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1702 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1704 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1705 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1706 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1707 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1708 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1711 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1712 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1713 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1714 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1715 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1716 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1718 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1719 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1720 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1721 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1722 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1723 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1726 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1727 -------------------------
1729 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1730 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1731 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1732 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1733 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1734 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1735 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1736 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1737 (which may take a very long time).
1739 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1741 Operations/Packaging
1742 --------------------
1744 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1745 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1746 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1747 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1748 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1749 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1750 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1753 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1754 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1755 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1757 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1758 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1759 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1762 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1763 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1764 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1770 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1771 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1772 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1773 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1774 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1775 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1776 directory for a second time.
1778 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1779 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1780 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1781 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1782 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1783 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1785 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1786 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1787 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1788 from the web browser end.
1790 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1791 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1792 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1794 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1795 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1797 CLI: new "alias" model
1798 ----------------------
1800 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1801 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1802 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1804 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1805 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1807 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1808 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1809 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1810 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1812 wapi: new pages, new commands
1813 -----------------------------
1815 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1817 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1818 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1819 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1820 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1822 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1823 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1824 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1825 new "cp -r" command.
1827 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1829 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1830 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1832 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1835 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1837 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1838 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1840 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1841 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1843 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1846 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1847 - tahoe_estimate_files
1848 - mutable files published/retrieved
1857 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1859 New Mutable-File Code
1860 ---------------------
1862 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1863 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1864 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1865 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1867 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1868 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1869 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1870 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1872 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1873 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1874 published when in fact it failed.
1879 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1880 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1881 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1883 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1884 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1885 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1886 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1887 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1889 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1890 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1891 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1892 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1893 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1894 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1895 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1897 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1898 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1899 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1900 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1901 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1902 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1904 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1905 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1907 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1908 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1909 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1910 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1911 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1913 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1914 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1916 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1917 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1918 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1919 order. This has been fixed.
1921 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1922 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1923 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1924 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1925 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst