2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.10 (2013-??-??)
8 Unsorted 1.9.0 -> 1.9.2
9 '''''''''''''''''''''''
11 - removed provisioning/reliability from WUI to misc/
12 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for ed25519)
13 - signed introducer announcements, show 8-char serverid instead of 6-char
14 tubid, improve introweb
15 - "node key", not "server key"
16 - WUI move button #1579
17 - 'tahoe debug flogtool'
18 - ETags for immutable directories, short-circuit GET when ETag matches
20 - new helper: remove timings["existence_check"] (not very visible). Any
21 visible changes to UploadResults?
24 Unsorted 1.9.2 -> trunk
25 '''''''''''''''''''''''
27 - improve error message when CLI cannot connect to gateway
29 - handle non-ascii node nicknames better #1298
33 - unguessable introducer.furl, censor furls from welcome page
39 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
40 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
41 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
42 - A new, more extensible Introducer protocol has been added, to act as the
43 basis for future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older
44 nodes is not affected. (`#466`_)
45 - The web-API has a new move operation that supports directly moving files
46 between directories. (`#1579`_)
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 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`_)
69 Performance Improvements
70 ''''''''''''''''''''''''
72 - Allow web clients to cache immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
77 - docs/helper.rst has been brought up to date. (`#1915`_)
78 - docs/convergence_secret.rst was added to document the adminstration of
79 convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
84 - The flogtool utility, used to read logs, can now be accessed as
85 ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when foolscap is not installed system-wide.
88 Compatibility and Dependencies
89 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
91 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
92 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
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 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
104 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
105 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
106 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
107 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
108 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
109 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
110 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
111 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
112 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
113 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
114 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
115 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
116 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
117 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
118 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
119 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
120 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
121 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
122 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
123 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
124 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
125 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
126 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
128 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
129 --------------------------
134 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
135 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
136 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
137 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
138 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
139 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
140 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
142 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
143 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
144 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
145 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
146 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
147 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
149 Configuration/Behavior Changes
150 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
152 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
153 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
154 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
160 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
163 Compatibility and Dependencies
164 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
166 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
167 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
168 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
170 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
171 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
172 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
173 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
174 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
175 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
176 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
177 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
178 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
179 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
180 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
181 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
182 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
183 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
184 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
185 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
186 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
189 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
190 --------------------------
192 Security-related Bugfix
193 '''''''''''''''''''''''
195 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
196 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
198 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
201 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
202 --------------------------
207 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
208 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
209 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
210 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
211 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
212 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
213 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
214 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
215 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
216 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
217 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
218 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
219 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
220 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
221 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
222 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
223 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
225 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
226 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
227 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
228 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
230 Configuration/Behavior Changes
231 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
233 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
234 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
235 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
236 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
237 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
238 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
239 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
240 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
241 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
242 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
243 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
244 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
249 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
250 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
252 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
253 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
254 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
255 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
256 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
257 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
258 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
263 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
264 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
265 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
266 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
267 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
268 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
269 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
270 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
271 (any version of each):
273 * Academic Free License
274 * Apple Public Source License
275 * BitTorrent Open Source License
276 * Lucent Public License
277 * Jabber Open Source License
278 * Common Development and Distribution License
279 * Microsoft Public License
280 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
281 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
282 * Open Software License
284 Compatibility and Dependencies
285 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
287 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
288 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
289 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
290 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
291 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
292 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
293 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
295 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
296 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
301 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
303 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
304 of share files. (`#1391`_)
305 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
306 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
307 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
309 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
310 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
311 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
312 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
313 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
314 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
315 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
316 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
317 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
318 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
319 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
320 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
321 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
322 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
323 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
324 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
325 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
326 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
327 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
330 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
331 --------------------------
333 Security-related Bugfix
334 '''''''''''''''''''''''
336 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
337 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
338 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
339 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
340 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
341 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
342 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
344 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
347 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
348 --------------------------
350 Compatibility and Dependencies
351 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
353 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
354 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
355 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
356 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
357 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
358 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
359 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
360 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
366 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
368 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
369 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
370 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
372 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
373 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
374 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
375 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
376 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
377 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
378 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
380 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
381 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
382 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
383 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
384 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
385 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
388 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
389 --------------------------
391 Bugfixes and Improvements
392 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
394 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
395 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
396 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
398 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
399 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
400 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
401 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
403 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
404 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
405 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
406 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
407 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
408 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
409 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
410 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
411 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
412 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
413 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
414 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
415 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
416 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
418 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
419 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
420 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
425 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
426 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
427 platforms. (`#1262`_)
432 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
433 systems can install without having a compiler.
434 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
435 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
436 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
438 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
439 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
440 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
441 version number. (`#1233`_)
446 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
448 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
449 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
452 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
453 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
454 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
455 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
456 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
457 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
458 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
459 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
460 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
461 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
462 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
463 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
464 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
465 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
466 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
469 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
470 --------------------------
475 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
476 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
477 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
478 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
479 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
480 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
481 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
482 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
483 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
484 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
485 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
487 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
488 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
491 Bugfixes and Improvements
492 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
494 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
495 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
497 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
498 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
499 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
501 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
502 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
503 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
504 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
505 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
506 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
511 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
512 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
514 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
515 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
516 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
517 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
518 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
519 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
520 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
521 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
522 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
523 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
524 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
525 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
526 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
527 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
528 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
529 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
530 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
531 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
532 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
533 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
534 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
535 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
536 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
538 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
539 --------------------------
541 Bugfixes and Improvements
542 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
544 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
545 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
546 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
547 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
548 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
550 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
552 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
554 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
555 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
556 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
557 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
559 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
560 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
561 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
566 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
567 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
569 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
570 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
571 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
572 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
573 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
574 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
575 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
576 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
577 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
578 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
579 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
580 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
581 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
584 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
585 --------------------------
590 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
591 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
592 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
593 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
594 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
596 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
597 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
598 characters on all supported platforms:
600 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
601 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
603 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
604 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
606 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
607 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
608 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
610 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
611 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
612 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
613 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
614 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
615 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
616 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
617 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
618 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
619 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
620 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
621 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
622 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
623 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
624 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
626 Bugfixes and Improvements
627 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
629 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
630 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
631 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
633 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
634 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
635 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
636 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
638 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
640 - ImportError: No module named
641 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
642 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
643 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
644 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
645 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
646 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
647 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
648 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
649 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
650 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
651 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
652 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
654 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
660 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
661 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
667 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
668 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
672 - mock (only required by unit tests)
674 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
675 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
676 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
677 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
678 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
679 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
680 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
681 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
682 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
683 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
684 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
685 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
686 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
687 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
688 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
689 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
690 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
691 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
692 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
693 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
694 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
695 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
696 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
697 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
698 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
700 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
701 --------------------------
706 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
708 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
709 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
710 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
711 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
714 Usability Improvements
715 ''''''''''''''''''''''
717 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
719 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
720 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
721 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
722 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
724 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
725 --------------------------
730 - Immutable Directories
732 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
733 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
734 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
735 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
736 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
737 immutable directories).
739 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
740 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
741 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
742 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
743 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
744 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
745 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
747 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
748 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
749 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
750 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
751 the listing of that directory.
753 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
756 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
757 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
759 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
762 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
763 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
764 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
765 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
766 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
767 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
768 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
770 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
771 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
772 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
773 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
774 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
775 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
776 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
777 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
778 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
779 considerably. (`#606`_)
781 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
782 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
783 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
784 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
785 directories and stat() all your local files.
787 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
788 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
789 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
790 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
791 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
792 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
793 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
794 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
796 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
797 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
798 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
801 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
802 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
803 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
804 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
805 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
806 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
807 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
809 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
812 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
813 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
814 "node" process, which has several components that can be
815 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
816 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
817 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
818 future release will make it optional. There are three special
819 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
820 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
822 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
823 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
824 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
825 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
826 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
827 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
829 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
830 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
831 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
832 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
833 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
834 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
835 create-node" instead.
837 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
838 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
839 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
840 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
842 - Performance Improvements
844 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
845 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
846 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
847 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
848 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
849 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
850 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
851 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
852 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
853 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
854 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
855 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
856 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
857 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
858 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
859 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
860 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
861 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
862 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
867 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
868 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
869 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
870 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
873 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
874 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
875 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
876 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
878 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
879 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
882 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
883 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
884 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
887 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
888 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
891 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
894 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
896 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
897 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
899 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
900 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
902 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
903 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
904 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
905 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
906 additional licensing text was added.
908 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
910 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
911 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
913 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
914 has been improved. (`#773`_)
916 For other changes not mentioned here, see
917 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
918 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
919 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
921 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
922 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
923 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
924 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
925 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
926 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
927 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
928 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
929 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
930 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
931 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
932 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
933 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
934 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
935 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
936 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
937 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
938 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
939 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
940 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
941 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
942 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
943 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
944 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
945 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
946 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
947 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
948 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
949 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
950 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
951 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
953 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
954 --------------------------
959 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
960 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
962 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
963 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
964 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
966 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
967 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
968 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
969 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
970 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
972 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
973 directories. (`#705`_)
975 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
976 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
979 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
980 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
981 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
982 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
983 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
985 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
986 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
987 directories from the future. This should improve the user
988 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
989 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
990 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
991 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
992 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
997 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
998 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
999 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1000 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1001 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1002 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1003 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1005 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1006 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1009 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1010 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1011 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1013 Platform/packaging changes
1014 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1016 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1017 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1019 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1020 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1021 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1022 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1023 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1024 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1026 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1027 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1028 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1029 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1031 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1033 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1034 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1035 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1037 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1038 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1039 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1046 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1047 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1048 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1052 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1053 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1054 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1055 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1056 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1057 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1058 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1059 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1060 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1062 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1063 --------------------------
1068 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1069 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1070 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1071 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1072 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1073 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1074 lease. The process is described in detail in
1075 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1077 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1078 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1079 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1081 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1082 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1083 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1084 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1085 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1086 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1087 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1089 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1090 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1092 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1093 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1094 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1095 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1096 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1098 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1099 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1100 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1101 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1102 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1103 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1104 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1109 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1110 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1111 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1112 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1113 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1115 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1116 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1117 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1120 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1121 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1122 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1123 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1124 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1125 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1126 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1127 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1130 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1131 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1132 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1134 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1135 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1136 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1137 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1138 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1139 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1140 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1145 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1146 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1147 of garbage collection.
1149 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1150 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1152 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1153 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1155 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1156 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1157 metadata) during backup.
1159 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1160 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1162 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1163 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1166 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1167 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1168 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1169 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1170 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1171 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1172 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1173 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1174 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1175 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1176 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1177 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1179 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1180 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1181 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1182 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1187 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1188 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1189 instance of RuntimeError.
1191 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1192 speeding them up considerably.
1194 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1195 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1196 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1197 with hundreds of entries.
1199 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1200 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1203 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1204 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1205 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1207 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1208 --------------------------
1210 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1211 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1213 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1214 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1215 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1216 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1217 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1218 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1219 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1220 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1221 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1224 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1225 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1226 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1227 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1228 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1229 permanent drive failure.
1231 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1232 shares. The limitations are:
1234 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1235 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1236 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1237 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1238 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1239 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1240 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1241 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1242 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1243 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1244 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1245 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1246 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1248 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1249 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1250 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1251 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1254 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1255 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1256 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1257 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1258 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1259 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1260 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1261 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1262 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1263 considered highly unusual.
1265 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1266 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1267 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1269 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1270 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1271 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1272 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1273 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1274 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1275 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1276 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1277 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1278 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1279 button will appear on the results page.
1281 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1282 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1283 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1284 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1285 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1286 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1292 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1293 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1294 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1295 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1296 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1297 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1298 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1299 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1300 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1301 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1302 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1303 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1304 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1305 to run from a daily cronjob.
1307 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1308 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1309 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1310 $target/Latest) from working.
1315 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1316 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1317 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1318 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1319 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1320 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1321 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1322 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1323 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1324 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1325 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1326 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1331 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1332 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1333 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1334 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1335 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1336 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1337 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1338 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1339 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1340 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1345 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1346 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1347 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1348 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1349 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1352 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1353 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1354 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1355 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1356 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1357 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1358 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1360 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1361 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1362 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1364 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1365 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1366 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1367 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1368 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1370 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1373 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1374 - tahoe debug dump-share
1375 - tahoe debug find-shares
1376 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1377 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1379 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1380 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1381 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1384 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1385 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1386 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1387 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1388 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1393 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1394 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1395 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1396 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1397 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1398 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1399 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1400 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1401 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1402 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1403 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1404 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1405 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1407 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1408 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1409 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1410 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1411 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1412 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1414 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1415 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1416 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1417 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1418 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1419 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1420 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1421 deep-check operations.
1423 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1424 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1425 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1426 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1427 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1430 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1431 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1432 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1433 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1434 "same-origin policy".
1436 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1437 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1438 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1439 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1440 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1441 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1442 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1443 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1444 processing by operations staff.
1446 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1447 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1448 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1449 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1450 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1451 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1453 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1454 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1455 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1456 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1457 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1458 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1459 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1461 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1462 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1463 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1464 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1465 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1466 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1467 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1468 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1470 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1471 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1472 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1473 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1474 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1475 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1476 target) of a t=rename command.
1481 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1482 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1483 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1484 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1485 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1486 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1487 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1488 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1491 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1492 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1493 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1494 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1495 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1496 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1497 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1498 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1499 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1500 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1502 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1503 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1505 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1506 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1507 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1508 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1509 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1512 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1513 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1514 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1515 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1516 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1517 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1518 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1520 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1521 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1522 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1523 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1524 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1526 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1527 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1528 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1529 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1530 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1531 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1532 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1534 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1535 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1536 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1538 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1539 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1540 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1542 Grid Management Tools
1543 '''''''''''''''''''''
1545 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1546 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1548 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1549 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1550 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1551 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1552 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1553 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1554 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1555 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1556 before the grid is completely full.
1558 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1559 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1560 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1562 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1563 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1564 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1565 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1566 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1567 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1568 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1569 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1570 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1571 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1573 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1574 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1575 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1576 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1577 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1578 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1580 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1581 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1583 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1584 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1585 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1586 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1587 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1588 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1589 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1590 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1592 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1593 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1595 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1596 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1597 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1599 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1600 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1601 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1602 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1603 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1604 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1605 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1606 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1607 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1608 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1609 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1614 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1615 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1616 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1618 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1619 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1620 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1623 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1624 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1625 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1628 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1629 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1630 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1631 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1632 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1633 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1635 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1636 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1637 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1638 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1640 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1641 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1643 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1644 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1645 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1646 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1649 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1651 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1652 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1653 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1654 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1656 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1657 --------------------------
1662 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1663 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1664 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1665 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1666 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1667 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1668 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1669 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1670 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1671 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1672 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1675 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1676 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1682 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1683 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1684 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1685 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1686 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1692 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1693 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1694 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1695 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1697 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1698 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1699 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1700 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1701 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1704 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1705 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1706 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1707 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1708 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1709 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1711 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1712 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1713 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1714 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1715 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1716 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1719 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1720 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1722 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1723 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1724 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1725 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1726 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1727 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1728 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1729 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1730 (which may take a very long time).
1732 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1734 Operations/Packaging
1735 ''''''''''''''''''''
1737 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1738 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1739 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1740 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1741 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1742 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1743 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1746 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1747 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1748 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1750 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1751 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1752 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1755 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1756 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1757 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1763 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1764 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1765 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1766 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1767 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1768 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1769 directory for a second time.
1771 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1772 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1773 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1774 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1775 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1776 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1778 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1779 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1780 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1781 from the web browser end.
1783 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1784 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1785 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1787 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1788 --------------------------
1790 CLI: new "alias" model
1791 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1793 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1794 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1795 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1797 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1798 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1800 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1801 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1802 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1803 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1805 wapi: new pages, new commands
1806 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1808 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1810 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1811 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1812 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1813 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1815 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1816 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1817 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1818 new "cp -r" command.
1820 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1822 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1823 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1825 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1828 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1830 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1831 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1833 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1834 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1836 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1839 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1840 - tahoe_estimate_files
1841 - mutable files published/retrieved
1850 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1852 New Mutable-File Code
1853 '''''''''''''''''''''
1855 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1856 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1857 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1858 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1860 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1861 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1862 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1863 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1865 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1866 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1867 published when in fact it failed.
1872 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1873 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1874 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1876 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1877 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1878 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1879 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1880 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1882 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1883 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1884 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1885 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1886 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1887 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1888 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1890 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1891 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1892 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1893 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1894 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1895 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1897 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1898 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1900 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1901 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1902 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1903 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1904 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1906 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1907 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1909 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1910 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1911 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1912 order. This has been fixed.
1914 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1915 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1916 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1917 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1918 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst