2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
7 ----------------------------
12 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
13 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
14 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
15 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
16 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
17 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
18 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
20 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
21 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
22 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
23 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
24 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
25 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
27 Configuration/Behavior Changes
28 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
30 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
31 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
32 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
38 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
41 Compatibility and Dependencies
42 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
44 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
45 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
46 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
48 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
49 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
50 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
51 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
52 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
53 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
54 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
55 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
56 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
57 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
58 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
59 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
60 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
61 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
62 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
63 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
64 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
67 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
68 --------------------------
70 Security-related Bugfix
71 '''''''''''''''''''''''
73 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
74 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
76 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
79 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
80 --------------------------
85 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
86 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
87 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
88 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
89 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
90 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
91 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
92 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
93 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
94 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
95 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
96 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
97 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
98 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
99 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
100 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
101 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
103 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
104 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
105 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
106 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
108 Configuration/Behavior Changes
109 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
111 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
112 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
113 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
114 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
115 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
116 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
117 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
118 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
119 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
120 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
121 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
122 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
127 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
128 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
130 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
131 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
132 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
133 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
134 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
135 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
136 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
141 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
142 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
143 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
144 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
145 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
146 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
147 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
148 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
149 (any version of each):
151 * Academic Free License
152 * Apple Public Source License
153 * BitTorrent Open Source License
154 * Lucent Public License
155 * Jabber Open Source License
156 * Common Development and Distribution License
157 * Microsoft Public License
158 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
159 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
160 * Open Software License
162 Compatibility and Dependencies
163 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
165 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
166 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
167 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
168 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
169 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
170 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
171 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
173 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
174 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
179 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
181 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
182 of share files. (`#1391`_)
183 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
184 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
185 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
187 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
188 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
189 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
190 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
191 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
192 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
193 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
194 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
195 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
196 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
197 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
198 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
199 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
200 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
201 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
202 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
203 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
204 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
205 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
208 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
209 --------------------------
211 Security-related Bugfix
212 '''''''''''''''''''''''
214 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
215 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
216 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
217 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
218 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
219 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
220 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
222 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
225 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
226 --------------------------
228 Compatibility and Dependencies
229 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
231 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
232 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
233 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
234 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
235 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
236 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
237 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
238 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
244 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
246 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
247 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
248 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
250 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
251 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
252 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
253 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
254 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
255 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
256 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
258 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
259 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
260 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
261 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
262 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
263 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
266 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
267 --------------------------
269 Bugfixes and Improvements
270 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
272 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
273 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
274 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
276 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
277 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
278 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
279 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
281 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
282 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
283 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
284 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
285 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
286 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
287 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
288 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
289 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
290 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
291 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
292 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
293 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
294 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
296 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
297 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
298 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
303 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
304 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
305 platforms. (`#1262`_)
310 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
311 systems can install without having a compiler.
312 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
313 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
314 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
316 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
317 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
318 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
319 version number. (`#1233`_)
324 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
326 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
327 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
330 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
331 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
332 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
333 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
334 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
335 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
336 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
337 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
338 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
339 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
340 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
341 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
342 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
343 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
344 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
347 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
348 --------------------------
353 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
354 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
355 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
356 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
357 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
358 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
359 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
360 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
361 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
362 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
363 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
365 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
366 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
369 Bugfixes and Improvements
370 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
372 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
373 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
375 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
376 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
377 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
379 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
380 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
381 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
382 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
383 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
384 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
389 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
390 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
392 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
393 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
394 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
395 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
396 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
397 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
398 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
399 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
400 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
401 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
402 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
403 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
404 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
405 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
406 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
407 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
408 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
409 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
410 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
411 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
412 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
413 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
414 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
416 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
417 --------------------------
419 Bugfixes and Improvements
420 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
422 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
423 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
424 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
425 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
426 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
428 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
430 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
432 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
433 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
434 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
435 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
437 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
438 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
439 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
444 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
445 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
447 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
448 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
449 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
450 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
451 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
452 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
453 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
454 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
455 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
456 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
457 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
458 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
459 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
462 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
463 --------------------------
468 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
469 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
470 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
471 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
472 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
474 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
475 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
476 characters on all supported platforms:
478 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
479 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
481 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
482 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
484 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
485 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
486 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
488 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
489 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
490 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
491 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
492 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
493 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
494 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
495 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
496 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
497 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
498 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
499 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
500 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
501 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
502 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
504 Bugfixes and Improvements
505 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
507 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
508 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
509 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
511 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
512 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
513 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
514 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
516 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
518 - ImportError: No module named
519 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
520 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
521 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
522 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
523 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
524 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
525 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
526 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
527 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
528 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
529 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
530 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
532 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
538 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
539 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
545 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
546 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
550 - mock (only required by unit tests)
552 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
553 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
554 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
555 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
556 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
557 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
558 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
559 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
560 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
561 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
562 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
563 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
564 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
565 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
566 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
567 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
568 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
569 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
570 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
571 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
572 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
573 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
574 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
575 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
576 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
578 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
579 --------------------------
584 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
586 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
587 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
588 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
589 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
592 Usability Improvements
593 ''''''''''''''''''''''
595 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
597 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
598 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
599 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
600 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
602 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
603 --------------------------
608 - Immutable Directories
610 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
611 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
612 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
613 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
614 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
615 immutable directories).
617 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
618 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
619 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
620 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
621 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
622 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
623 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
625 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
626 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
627 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
628 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
629 the listing of that directory.
631 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
634 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
635 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
637 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
640 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
641 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
642 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
643 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
644 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
645 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
646 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
648 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
649 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
650 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
651 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
652 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
653 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
654 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
655 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
656 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
657 considerably. (`#606`_)
659 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
660 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
661 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
662 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
663 directories and stat() all your local files.
665 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
666 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
667 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
668 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
669 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
670 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
671 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
672 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
674 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
675 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
676 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
679 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
680 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
681 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
682 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
683 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
684 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
685 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
687 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
690 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
691 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
692 "node" process, which has several components that can be
693 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
694 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
695 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
696 future release will make it optional. There are three special
697 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
698 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
700 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
701 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
702 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
703 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
704 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
705 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
707 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
708 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
709 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
710 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
711 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
712 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
713 create-node" instead.
715 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
716 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
717 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
718 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
720 - Performance Improvements
722 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
723 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
724 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
725 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
726 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
727 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
728 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
729 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
730 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
731 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
732 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
733 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
734 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
735 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
736 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
737 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
738 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
739 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
740 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
745 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
746 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
747 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
748 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
751 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
752 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
753 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
754 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
756 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
757 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
760 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
761 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
762 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
765 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
766 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
769 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
772 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
774 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
775 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
777 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
778 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
780 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
781 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
782 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
783 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
784 additional licensing text was added.
786 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
788 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
789 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
791 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
792 has been improved. (`#773`_)
794 For other changes not mentioned here, see
795 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
796 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
797 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
799 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
800 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
801 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
802 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
803 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
804 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
805 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
806 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
807 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
808 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
809 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
810 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
811 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
812 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
813 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
814 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
815 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
816 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
817 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
818 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
819 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
820 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
821 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
822 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
823 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
824 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
825 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
826 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
827 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
828 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
829 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
831 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
832 --------------------------
837 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
838 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
840 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
841 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
842 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
844 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
845 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
846 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
847 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
848 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
850 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
851 directories. (`#705`_)
853 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
854 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
857 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
858 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
859 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
860 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
861 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
863 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
864 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
865 directories from the future. This should improve the user
866 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
867 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
868 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
869 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
870 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
875 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
876 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
877 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
878 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
879 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
880 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
881 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
883 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
884 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
887 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
888 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
889 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
891 Platform/packaging changes
892 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
894 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
895 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
897 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
898 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
899 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
900 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
901 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
902 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
904 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
905 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
906 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
907 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
909 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
911 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
912 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
913 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
915 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
916 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
917 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
924 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
925 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
926 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
930 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
931 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
932 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
933 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
934 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
935 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
936 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
937 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
938 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
940 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
941 --------------------------
946 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
947 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
948 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
949 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
950 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
951 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
952 lease. The process is described in detail in
953 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
955 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
956 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
957 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
959 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
960 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
961 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
962 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
963 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
964 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
965 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
967 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
968 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
970 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
971 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
972 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
973 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
974 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
976 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
977 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
978 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
979 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
980 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
981 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
982 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
987 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
988 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
989 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
990 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
991 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
993 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
994 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
995 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
998 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
999 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1000 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1001 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1002 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1003 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1004 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1005 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1008 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1009 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1010 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1012 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1013 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1014 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1015 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1016 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1017 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1018 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1023 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1024 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1025 of garbage collection.
1027 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1028 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1030 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1031 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1033 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1034 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1035 metadata) during backup.
1037 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1038 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1040 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1041 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1044 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1045 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1046 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1047 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1048 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1049 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1050 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1051 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1052 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1053 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1054 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1055 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1057 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1058 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1059 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1060 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1065 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1066 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1067 instance of RuntimeError.
1069 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1070 speeding them up considerably.
1072 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1073 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1074 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1075 with hundreds of entries.
1077 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1078 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1081 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1082 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1083 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1085 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1086 --------------------------
1088 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1089 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1091 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1092 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1093 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1094 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1095 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1096 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1097 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1098 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1099 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1102 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1103 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1104 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1105 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1106 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1107 permanent drive failure.
1109 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1110 shares. The limitations are:
1112 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1113 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1114 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1115 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1116 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1117 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1118 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1119 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1120 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1121 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1122 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1123 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1124 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1126 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1127 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1128 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1129 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1132 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1133 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1134 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1135 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1136 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1137 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1138 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1139 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1140 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1141 considered highly unusual.
1143 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1144 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1145 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1147 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1148 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1149 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1150 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1151 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1152 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1153 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1154 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1155 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1156 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1157 button will appear on the results page.
1159 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1160 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1161 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1162 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1163 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1164 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1170 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1171 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1172 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1173 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1174 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1175 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1176 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1177 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1178 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1179 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1180 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1181 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1182 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1183 to run from a daily cronjob.
1185 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1186 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1187 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1188 $target/Latest) from working.
1193 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1194 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1195 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1196 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1197 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1198 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1199 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1200 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1201 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1202 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1203 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1204 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1209 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1210 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1211 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1212 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1213 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1214 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1215 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1216 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1217 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1218 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1223 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1224 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1225 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1226 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1227 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1230 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1231 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1232 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1233 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1234 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1235 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1236 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1238 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1239 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1240 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1242 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1243 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1244 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1245 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1246 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1248 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1251 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1252 - tahoe debug dump-share
1253 - tahoe debug find-shares
1254 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1255 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1257 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1258 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1259 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1262 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1263 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1264 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1265 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1266 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1271 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1272 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1273 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1274 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1275 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1276 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1277 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1278 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1279 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1280 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1281 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1282 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1283 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1285 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1286 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1287 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1288 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1289 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1290 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1292 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1293 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1294 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1295 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1296 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1297 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1298 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1299 deep-check operations.
1301 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1302 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1303 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1304 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1305 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1308 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1309 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1310 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1311 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1312 "same-origin policy".
1314 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1315 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1316 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1317 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1318 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1319 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1320 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1321 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1322 processing by operations staff.
1324 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1325 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1326 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1327 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1328 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1329 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1331 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1332 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1333 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1334 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1335 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1336 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1337 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1339 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1340 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1341 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1342 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1343 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1344 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1345 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1346 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1348 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1349 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1350 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1351 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1352 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1353 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1354 target) of a t=rename command.
1359 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1360 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1361 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1362 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1363 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1364 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1365 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1366 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1369 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1370 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1371 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1372 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1373 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1374 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1375 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1376 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1377 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1378 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1380 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1381 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1383 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1384 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1385 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1386 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1387 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1390 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1391 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1392 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1393 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1394 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1395 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1396 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1398 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1399 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1400 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1401 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1402 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1404 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1405 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1406 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1407 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1408 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1409 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1410 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1412 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1413 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1414 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1416 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1417 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1418 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1420 Grid Management Tools
1421 '''''''''''''''''''''
1423 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1424 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1426 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1427 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1428 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1429 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1430 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1431 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1432 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1433 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1434 before the grid is completely full.
1436 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1437 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1438 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1440 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1441 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1442 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1443 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1444 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1445 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1446 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1447 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1448 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1449 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1451 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1452 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1453 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1454 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1455 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1456 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1458 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1459 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1461 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1462 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1463 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1464 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1465 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1466 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1467 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1468 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1470 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1471 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1473 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1474 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1475 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1477 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1478 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1479 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1480 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1481 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1482 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1483 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1484 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1485 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1486 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1487 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1492 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1493 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1494 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1496 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1497 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1498 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1501 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1502 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1503 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1506 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1507 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1508 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1509 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1510 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1511 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1513 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1514 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1515 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1516 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1518 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1519 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1521 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1522 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1523 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1524 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1527 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1529 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1530 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1531 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1532 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1534 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1535 --------------------------
1540 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1541 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1542 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1543 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1544 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1545 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1546 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1547 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1548 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1549 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1550 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1553 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1554 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1560 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1561 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1562 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1563 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1564 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1570 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1571 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1572 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1573 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1575 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1576 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1577 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1578 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1579 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1582 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1583 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1584 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1585 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1586 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1587 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1589 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1590 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1591 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1592 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1593 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1594 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1597 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1598 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1600 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1601 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1602 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1603 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1604 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1605 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1606 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1607 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1608 (which may take a very long time).
1610 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1612 Operations/Packaging
1613 ''''''''''''''''''''
1615 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1616 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1617 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1618 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1619 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1620 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1621 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1624 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1625 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1626 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1628 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1629 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1630 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1633 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1634 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1635 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1641 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1642 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1643 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1644 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1645 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1646 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1647 directory for a second time.
1649 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1650 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1651 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1652 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1653 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1654 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1656 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1657 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1658 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1659 from the web browser end.
1661 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1662 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1663 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1665 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1666 --------------------------
1668 CLI: new "alias" model
1669 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1671 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1672 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1673 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1675 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1676 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1678 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1679 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1680 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1681 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1683 wapi: new pages, new commands
1684 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1686 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1688 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1689 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1690 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1691 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1693 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1694 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1695 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1696 new "cp -r" command.
1698 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1700 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1701 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1703 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1706 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1708 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1709 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1711 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1712 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1714 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1717 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1718 - tahoe_estimate_files
1719 - mutable files published/retrieved
1728 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1730 New Mutable-File Code
1731 '''''''''''''''''''''
1733 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1734 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1735 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1736 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1738 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1739 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1740 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1741 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1743 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1744 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1745 published when in fact it failed.
1750 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1751 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1752 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1754 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1755 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1756 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1757 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1758 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1760 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1761 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1762 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1763 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1764 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1765 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1766 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1768 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1769 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1770 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1771 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1772 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1773 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1775 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1776 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1778 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1779 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1780 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1781 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1782 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1784 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1785 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1787 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1788 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1789 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1790 order. This has been fixed.
1792 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1793 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1794 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1795 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1796 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst