2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.9.0 (2011-??-??)
7 --------------------------
15 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
16 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
17 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
18 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
19 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
20 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
22 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
23 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
24 `<docs/configuration.rst>`_ for more details. (`#1425`_)
25 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
26 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
27 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
28 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
29 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`_ for documentation.
31 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
32 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
33 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
34 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
36 Configuration/Behavior Changes
37 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
39 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
40 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
41 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
42 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
43 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
44 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
45 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
46 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
47 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
48 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
49 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
50 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
55 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
56 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
58 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
59 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
60 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
61 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
62 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
63 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
64 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
69 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
70 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
71 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
72 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
73 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
74 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
75 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
76 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
77 (any version of each):
79 * Academic Free License
80 * Apple Public Source License
81 * BitTorrent Open Source License
82 * Lucent Public License
83 * Jabber Open Source License
84 * Common Development and Distribution License
85 * Microsoft Public License
86 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
87 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
88 * Open Software License
90 Compatibility and Dependencies
91 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
93 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
94 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
95 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
96 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
97 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
98 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
99 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
101 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
102 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
107 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
109 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
110 of share files. (`#1391`_)
111 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
112 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
113 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
115 .. _`#393`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
116 .. _`#1079`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
117 .. _`#1104`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
118 .. _`#1268`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
119 .. _`#1274`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
120 .. _`#1304`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
121 .. _`#1355`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1355
122 .. _`#1383`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
123 .. _`#1384`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
124 .. _`#1385`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
125 .. _`#1388`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1388
126 .. _`#1391`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
127 .. _`#1392`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1392
128 .. _`#1395`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
129 .. _`#1409`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
130 .. _`#1420`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
131 .. _`#1425`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
132 .. _`#1429`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
133 .. _`#1435`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
134 .. _`#1438`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
135 .. _`#1454`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
136 .. _`#1507`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
139 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
140 --------------------------
142 Security-related Bugfix
143 '''''''''''''''''''''''
145 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
146 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
147 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
148 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
149 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
150 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
151 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
153 .. _`#1528`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
156 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
157 --------------------------
159 Compatibility and Dependencies
160 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
162 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
163 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
164 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
165 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
166 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
167 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
168 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
169 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
175 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
177 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
178 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
179 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
181 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
182 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
183 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
184 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
185 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
186 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
187 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
189 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
190 .. _`#1208`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
191 .. _`#1282`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
192 .. _`#1286`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
193 .. _`#1287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
194 .. _`#1296`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
195 .. _`#1337`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
198 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
199 --------------------------
201 Bugfixes and Improvements
202 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
204 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
205 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
206 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
208 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
209 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
210 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
211 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
213 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
214 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
215 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
216 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
217 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
218 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
219 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
220 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
221 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
222 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
223 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
224 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
225 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
226 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
228 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
229 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
230 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
235 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
236 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
237 platforms. (`#1262`_)
242 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
243 systems can install without having a compiler.
244 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
245 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
246 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
248 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
249 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
250 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
251 version number. (`#1233`_)
256 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
258 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
259 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
262 .. _`#71`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
263 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
264 .. _`#1212`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
265 .. _`#1045`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
266 .. _`#1190`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
267 .. _`#1216`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
268 .. _`#1223`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
269 .. _`#1224`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
270 .. _`#1225`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
271 .. _`#1232`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
272 .. _`#1233`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
273 .. _`#1241`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
274 .. _`#1253`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
275 .. _`#1255`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
276 .. _`#1262`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
279 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
280 --------------------------
285 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
286 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
287 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
288 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
289 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
290 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
291 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
292 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
293 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
294 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
295 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
297 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
298 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
301 Bugfixes and Improvements
302 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
304 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
305 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
307 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
308 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
309 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
311 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
312 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
313 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
314 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
315 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
316 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
321 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
322 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
324 .. _`#188`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
325 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
326 .. _`#288`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
327 .. _`#448`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
328 .. _`#685`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
329 .. _`#706`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
330 .. _`#715`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
331 .. _`#772`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
332 .. _`#798`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
333 .. _`#800`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
334 .. _`#890`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
335 .. _`#983`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
336 .. _`#990`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
337 .. _`#1055`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
338 .. _`#1074`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
339 .. _`#1108`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
340 .. _`#1155`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
341 .. _`#1170`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
342 .. _`#1191`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
343 .. _`#1127`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
344 .. _`#1129`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
345 .. _`#1131`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
346 .. _`#1166`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
347 .. _`#1175`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
349 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
350 --------------------------
352 Bugfixes and Improvements
353 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
355 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
356 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
357 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
358 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
359 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
361 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
363 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
365 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
366 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
367 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
368 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
370 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
371 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
372 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
377 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
378 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
380 .. _`#776`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
381 .. _`#923`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
382 .. _`#961`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
383 .. _`#967`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
384 .. _`#1051`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
385 .. _`#1067`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
386 .. _`#1072`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
387 .. _`#1083`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
388 .. _`#1097`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
389 .. _`#1098`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
390 .. _`#1099`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
391 .. _`#1117`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
392 .. _`#1118`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
395 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
396 --------------------------
401 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
402 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
403 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
404 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
405 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
407 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
408 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
409 characters on all supported platforms:
411 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
412 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
414 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
415 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
417 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
418 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
419 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
421 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
422 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
423 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
424 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
425 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
426 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
427 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
428 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
429 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
430 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
431 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
432 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
433 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
434 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
435 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
437 Bugfixes and Improvements
438 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
440 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
441 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
442 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
444 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
445 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
446 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
447 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
449 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
451 - ImportError: No module named
452 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
453 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
454 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
455 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
456 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
457 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
458 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
459 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
460 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
461 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
462 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
463 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
465 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
471 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
472 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
478 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
479 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
483 - mock (only required by unit tests)
485 .. _`#534`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
486 .. _`#608`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
487 .. _`#778`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
488 .. _`#803`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
489 .. _`#902`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
490 .. _`#911`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
491 .. _`#924`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
492 .. _`#937`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
493 .. _`#933`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
494 .. _`#968`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
495 .. _`#973`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
496 .. _`#1024`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
497 .. _`#1027`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
498 .. _`#1028`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
499 .. _`#1033`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
500 .. _`#1034`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
501 .. _`#1037`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
502 .. _`#1054`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
503 .. _`#1062`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
504 .. _`#1066`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
505 .. _`#1068`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
506 .. _`#1076`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
507 .. _`#1082`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
508 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
509 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
511 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
512 --------------------------
517 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
519 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
520 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
521 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
522 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
525 Usability Improvements
526 ''''''''''''''''''''''
528 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
530 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
531 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
532 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
533 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
535 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
536 --------------------------
541 - Immutable Directories
543 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
544 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
545 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
546 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
547 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
548 immutable directories).
550 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
551 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
552 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
553 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
554 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
555 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
556 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
558 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
559 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
560 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
561 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
562 the listing of that directory.
564 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
567 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
568 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
570 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
573 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
574 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
575 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
576 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
577 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
578 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
579 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
581 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
582 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
583 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
584 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
585 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
586 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
587 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
588 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
589 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
590 considerably. (`#606`_)
592 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
593 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
594 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
595 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
596 directories and stat() all your local files.
598 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
599 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
600 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
601 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
602 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
603 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
604 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
605 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
607 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
608 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
609 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
612 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
613 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
614 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
615 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
616 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
617 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
618 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
620 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
623 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
624 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
625 "node" process, which has several components that can be
626 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
627 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
628 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
629 future release will make it optional. There are three special
630 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
631 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
633 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
634 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
635 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
636 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
637 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
638 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
640 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
641 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
642 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
643 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
644 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
645 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
646 create-node" instead.
648 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
649 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
650 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
651 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
653 - Performance Improvements
655 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
656 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
657 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
658 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
659 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
660 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
661 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
662 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
663 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
664 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
665 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
666 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
667 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
668 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
669 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
670 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
671 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
672 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
673 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
678 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
679 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
680 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
681 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
684 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
685 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
686 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
687 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
689 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
690 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
693 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
694 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
695 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
698 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
699 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
702 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
705 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
707 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
708 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
710 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
711 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
713 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
714 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
715 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
716 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
717 additional licensing text was added.
719 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
721 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
722 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
724 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
725 has been improved. (`#773`_)
727 For other changes not mentioned here, see
728 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
729 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
730 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
732 .. _`#121`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
733 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
734 .. _`#381`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
735 .. _`#457`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
736 .. _`#533`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
737 .. _`#577`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
738 .. _`#606`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
739 .. _`#607`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
740 .. _`#637`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
741 .. _`#641`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
742 .. _`#646`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
743 .. _`#681`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
744 .. _`#729`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
745 .. _`#741`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
746 .. _`#760`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
747 .. _`#761`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
748 .. _`#768`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
749 .. _`#773`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
750 .. _`#786`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
751 .. _`#828`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
752 .. _`#833`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
753 .. _`#859`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
754 .. _`#874`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
755 .. _`#875`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
756 .. _`#931`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
757 .. _`#837`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
758 .. _`#850`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
759 .. _`#927`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
760 .. _`#928`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
761 .. _`#939`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
762 .. _`#948`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
763 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
765 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
766 --------------------------
771 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
772 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
774 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
775 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
776 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
778 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
779 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
780 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
781 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
782 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
784 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
785 directories. (`#705`_)
787 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
788 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
791 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
792 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
793 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
794 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
795 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
797 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
798 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
799 directories from the future. This should improve the user
800 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
801 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
802 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
803 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
804 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
809 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
810 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
811 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
812 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
813 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
814 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
815 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
817 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
818 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
821 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
822 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
823 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
825 Platform/packaging changes
826 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
828 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
829 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
831 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
832 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
833 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
834 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
835 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
836 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
838 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
839 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
840 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
841 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
843 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
845 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
846 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
847 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
849 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
850 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
851 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
858 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
859 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
860 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
864 .. _#392: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
865 .. _#625: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
866 .. _#653: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
867 .. _#683: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
868 .. _#694: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
869 .. _#705: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
870 .. _#722: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
871 .. _#750: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
872 .. _#752: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
874 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
875 --------------------------
880 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
881 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
882 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
883 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
884 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
885 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
886 lease. The process is described in detail in
887 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
889 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
890 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
891 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
893 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
894 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
895 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
896 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
897 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
898 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
899 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
901 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
902 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
904 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
905 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
906 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
907 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
908 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
910 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
911 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
912 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
913 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
914 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
915 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
916 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
921 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
922 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
923 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
924 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
925 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
927 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
928 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
929 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
932 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
933 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
934 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
935 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
936 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
937 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
938 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
939 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
942 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
943 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
944 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
946 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
947 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
948 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
949 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
950 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
951 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
952 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
957 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
958 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
959 of garbage collection.
961 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
962 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
964 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
965 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
967 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
968 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
969 metadata) during backup.
971 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
972 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
974 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
975 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
978 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
979 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
980 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
981 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
982 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
983 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
984 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
985 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
986 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
987 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
988 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
989 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
991 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
992 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
993 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
994 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
999 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1000 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1001 instance of RuntimeError.
1003 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1004 speeding them up considerably.
1006 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1007 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1008 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1009 with hundreds of entries.
1011 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1012 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1015 .. _#442: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1016 .. _#645: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1017 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1019 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1020 --------------------------
1022 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1023 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1025 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1026 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1027 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1028 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1029 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1030 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1031 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1032 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1033 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1036 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1037 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1038 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1039 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1040 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1041 permanent drive failure.
1043 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1044 shares. The limitations are:
1046 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1047 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1048 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1049 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1050 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1051 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1052 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1053 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1054 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1055 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1056 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1057 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1058 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1060 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1061 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1062 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1063 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1066 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1067 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1068 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1069 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1070 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1071 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1072 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1073 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1074 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1075 considered highly unusual.
1077 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1078 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1079 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1081 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1082 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1083 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1084 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1085 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1086 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1087 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1088 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1089 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1090 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1091 button will appear on the results page.
1093 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1094 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1095 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1096 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1097 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1098 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1104 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1105 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1106 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1107 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1108 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1109 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1110 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1111 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1112 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1113 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1114 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1115 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1116 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1117 to run from a daily cronjob.
1119 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1120 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1121 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1122 $target/Latest) from working.
1127 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1128 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1129 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1130 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1131 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1132 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1133 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1134 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1135 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1136 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1137 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1138 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1143 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1144 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1145 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1146 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1147 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1148 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1149 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1150 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1151 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1152 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1157 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1158 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1159 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1160 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1161 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1164 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1165 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1166 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1167 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1168 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1169 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1170 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1172 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1173 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1174 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1176 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1177 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1178 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1179 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1180 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1182 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1185 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1186 - tahoe debug dump-share
1187 - tahoe debug find-shares
1188 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1189 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1191 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1192 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1193 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1196 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1197 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1198 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1199 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1200 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/565 for details.
1205 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1206 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1207 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1208 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1209 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1210 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1211 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1212 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1213 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1214 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1215 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1216 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1217 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1219 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1220 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1221 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1222 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1223 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1224 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1226 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1227 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1228 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1229 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1230 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1231 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1232 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1233 deep-check operations.
1235 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1236 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1237 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1238 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1239 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1242 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1243 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1244 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1245 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1246 "same-origin policy".
1248 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1249 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1250 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1251 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1252 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1253 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1254 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1255 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1256 processing by operations staff.
1258 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1259 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1260 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1261 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1262 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1263 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1265 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1266 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1267 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1268 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1269 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1270 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1271 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1273 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1274 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1275 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1276 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1277 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1278 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1279 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1280 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1282 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1283 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1284 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1285 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1286 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1287 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1288 target) of a t=rename command.
1293 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1294 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1295 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1296 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1297 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1298 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1299 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1300 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1303 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1304 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1305 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1306 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1307 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1308 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1309 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1310 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1311 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1312 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1314 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1315 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1317 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1318 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1319 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1320 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1321 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1324 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1325 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1326 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1327 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1328 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1329 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1330 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1332 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1333 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1334 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1335 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1336 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1338 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1339 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1340 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1341 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1342 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1343 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1344 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1346 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1347 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1348 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1350 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1351 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1352 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1354 Grid Management Tools
1355 '''''''''''''''''''''
1357 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1358 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1360 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1361 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1362 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1363 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1364 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1365 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1366 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1367 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1368 before the grid is completely full.
1370 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1371 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1372 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1374 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1375 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1376 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1377 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1378 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1379 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1380 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1381 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1382 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1383 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1385 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1386 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1387 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1388 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1389 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1390 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1392 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1393 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1395 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1396 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1397 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1398 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1399 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1400 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1401 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1402 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1404 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1405 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1407 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1408 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1409 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1411 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1412 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1413 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1414 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1415 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1416 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1417 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1418 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1419 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1420 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1421 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1426 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1427 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1428 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning .
1430 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1431 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1432 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1435 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1436 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1437 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1440 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1441 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1442 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1443 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1444 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1445 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1447 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1448 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1449 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1450 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1452 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1453 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1455 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1456 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1457 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1458 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1461 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1463 .. _#512: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1464 .. _#518: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1465 .. _#521: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1466 .. _#531: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1468 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1469 --------------------------
1474 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1475 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1476 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1477 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1478 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1479 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1480 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1481 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1482 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1483 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1484 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1487 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1488 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1494 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1495 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1496 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1497 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1498 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1504 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1505 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1506 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1507 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1509 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1510 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1511 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1512 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1513 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1516 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1517 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1518 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1519 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1520 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1521 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1523 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1524 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1525 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1526 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1527 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1528 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1531 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1532 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1534 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1535 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1536 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1537 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1538 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1539 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1540 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1541 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1542 (which may take a very long time).
1544 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1546 Operations/Packaging
1547 ''''''''''''''''''''
1549 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1550 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1551 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1552 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1553 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1554 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1555 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1558 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1559 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1560 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1562 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1563 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1564 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1567 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1568 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1569 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1575 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1576 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1577 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1578 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1579 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1580 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1581 directory for a second time.
1583 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1584 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1585 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1586 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1587 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1588 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1590 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1591 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1592 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1593 from the web browser end.
1595 .. _#463: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1596 .. _#491: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1597 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1599 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1600 --------------------------
1602 CLI: new "alias" model
1603 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1605 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1606 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1607 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1609 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1610 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1612 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1613 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1614 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1615 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1617 wapi: new pages, new commands
1618 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1620 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1622 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1623 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1624 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1625 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1627 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1628 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1629 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1630 new "cp -r" command.
1632 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1634 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1635 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1637 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1640 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1642 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1643 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1645 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1646 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1648 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1651 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1652 - tahoe_estimate_files
1653 - mutable files published/retrieved
1662 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1664 New Mutable-File Code
1665 '''''''''''''''''''''
1667 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1668 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1669 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1670 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1672 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1673 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1674 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1675 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1677 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1678 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1679 published when in fact it failed.
1684 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1685 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1686 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1688 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1689 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1690 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1691 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1692 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1694 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1695 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1696 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1697 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1698 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1699 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1700 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1702 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1703 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1704 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1705 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1706 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1707 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1709 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1710 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1712 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1713 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1714 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1715 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1716 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1718 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1719 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1721 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1722 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1723 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1724 order. This has been fixed.
1726 .. _#221: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1727 .. _#374: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1728 .. _#391: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1729 .. _#439: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1730 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst