1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.10 (2013-??-??)
10 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
11 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
12 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
13 - A new, more extensible Introducer protocol has been added, to act as the
14 basis for future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older
15 nodes is not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all
16 upgraded, the welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead
17 of the old tubid. (`#466`_)
18 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
19 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
24 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
25 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
26 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
27 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
28 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
29 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
30 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
31 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
32 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
33 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
35 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
36 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
37 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
38 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
39 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
44 - If an immutable file failed to download, e.g. due to a connection problem,
45 subsequent attempts to download the same file could also fail. (`#1679`_)
46 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
47 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
49 - Failure handling in the SFTP frontend has been improved. (`#1525`_)
50 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
52 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
53 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
54 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
55 - Error messages containing tracebacks may be slightly more readable.
57 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` counts the files being processed correctly.
59 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
60 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
61 - Improve error message when CLI tools cannot connect to a gateway. (`#974`_)
62 - Other minor changes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_
64 Performance Improvements
65 ''''''''''''''''''''''''
67 - Allow web clients to cache immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
72 - docs/helper.rst has been brought up to date. (`#1915`_)
73 - docs/convergence_secret.rst was added to document the adminstration of
74 convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
79 - The flogtool utility, used to read logs, can now be accessed as
80 ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when foolscap is not installed system-wide.
82 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
83 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool in
84 misc/operations_helpers/provisioning. Use the ``run.py`` script to access
87 Compatibility and Dependencies
88 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
90 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
91 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
93 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for ed25519)
95 Precautions when Upgrading
96 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
98 - When upgrading a grid from a recent version of trunk, follow the
99 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
100 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
101 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release.
103 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
104 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
105 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
106 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
107 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
108 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
109 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
110 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
111 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
112 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
113 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
114 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
115 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
116 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
117 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
118 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
119 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
120 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
121 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
122 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
123 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
124 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
125 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
126 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
127 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
128 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
129 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
130 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
131 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
133 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
134 --------------------------
139 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
140 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
141 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
142 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
143 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
144 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
145 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
147 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
148 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
149 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
150 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
151 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
152 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
154 Configuration/Behavior Changes
155 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
157 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
158 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
159 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
165 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
168 Compatibility and Dependencies
169 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
171 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
172 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
173 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
175 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
176 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
177 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
178 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
179 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
180 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
181 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
182 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
183 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
184 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
185 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
186 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
187 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
188 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
189 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
190 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
191 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
194 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
195 --------------------------
197 Security-related Bugfix
198 '''''''''''''''''''''''
200 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
201 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
203 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
206 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
207 --------------------------
212 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
213 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
214 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
215 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
216 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
217 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
218 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
219 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
220 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
221 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
222 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
223 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
224 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
225 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
226 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
227 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
228 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
230 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
231 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
232 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
233 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
235 Configuration/Behavior Changes
236 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
238 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
239 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
240 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
241 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
242 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
243 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
244 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
245 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
246 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
247 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
248 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
249 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
254 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
255 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
257 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
258 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
259 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
260 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
261 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
262 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
263 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
268 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
269 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
270 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
271 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
272 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
273 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
274 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
275 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
276 (any version of each):
278 * Academic Free License
279 * Apple Public Source License
280 * BitTorrent Open Source License
281 * Lucent Public License
282 * Jabber Open Source License
283 * Common Development and Distribution License
284 * Microsoft Public License
285 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
286 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
287 * Open Software License
289 Compatibility and Dependencies
290 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
292 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
293 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
294 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
295 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
296 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
297 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
298 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
300 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
301 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
306 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
308 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
309 of share files. (`#1391`_)
310 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
311 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
312 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
314 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
315 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
316 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
317 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
318 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
319 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
320 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
321 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
322 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
323 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
324 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
325 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
326 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
327 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
328 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
329 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
330 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
331 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
332 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
335 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
336 --------------------------
338 Security-related Bugfix
339 '''''''''''''''''''''''
341 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
342 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
343 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
344 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
345 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
346 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
347 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
349 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
352 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
353 --------------------------
355 Compatibility and Dependencies
356 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
358 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
359 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
360 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
361 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
362 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
363 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
364 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
365 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
371 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
373 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
374 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
375 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
377 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
378 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
379 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
380 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
381 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
382 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
383 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
385 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
386 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
387 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
388 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
389 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
390 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
393 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
394 --------------------------
396 Bugfixes and Improvements
397 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
399 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
400 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
401 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
403 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
404 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
405 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
406 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
408 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
409 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
410 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
411 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
412 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
413 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
414 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
415 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
416 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
417 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
418 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
419 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
420 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
421 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
423 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
424 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
425 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
430 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
431 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
432 platforms. (`#1262`_)
437 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
438 systems can install without having a compiler.
439 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
440 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
441 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
443 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
444 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
445 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
446 version number. (`#1233`_)
451 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
453 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
454 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
457 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
458 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
459 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
460 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
461 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
462 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
463 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
464 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
465 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
466 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
467 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
468 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
469 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
470 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
471 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
474 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
475 --------------------------
480 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
481 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
482 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
483 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
484 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
485 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
486 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
487 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
488 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
489 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
490 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
492 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
493 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
496 Bugfixes and Improvements
497 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
499 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
500 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
502 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
503 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
504 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
506 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
507 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
508 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
509 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
510 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
511 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
516 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
517 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
519 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
520 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
521 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
522 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
523 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
524 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
525 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
526 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
527 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
528 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
529 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
530 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
531 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
532 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
533 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
534 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
535 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
536 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
537 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
538 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
539 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
540 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
541 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
543 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
544 --------------------------
546 Bugfixes and Improvements
547 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
549 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
550 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
551 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
552 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
553 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
555 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
557 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
559 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
560 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
561 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
562 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
564 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
565 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
566 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
571 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
572 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
574 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
575 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
576 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
577 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
578 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
579 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
580 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
581 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
582 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
583 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
584 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
585 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
586 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
589 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
590 --------------------------
595 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
596 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
597 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
598 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
599 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
601 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
602 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
603 characters on all supported platforms:
605 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
606 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
608 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
609 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
611 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
612 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
613 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
615 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
616 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
617 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
618 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
619 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
620 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
621 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
622 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
623 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
624 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
625 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
626 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
627 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
628 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
629 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
631 Bugfixes and Improvements
632 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
634 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
635 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
636 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
638 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
639 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
640 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
641 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
643 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
645 - ImportError: No module named
646 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
647 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
648 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
649 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
650 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
651 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
652 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
653 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
654 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
655 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
656 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
657 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
659 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
665 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
666 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
672 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
673 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
677 - mock (only required by unit tests)
679 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
680 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
681 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
682 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
683 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
684 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
685 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
686 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
687 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
688 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
689 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
690 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
691 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
692 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
693 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
694 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
695 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
696 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
697 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
698 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
699 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
700 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
701 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
702 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
703 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
705 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
706 --------------------------
711 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
713 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
714 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
715 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
716 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
719 Usability Improvements
720 ''''''''''''''''''''''
722 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
724 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
725 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
726 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
727 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
729 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
730 --------------------------
735 - Immutable Directories
737 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
738 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
739 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
740 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
741 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
742 immutable directories).
744 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
745 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
746 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
747 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
748 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
749 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
750 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
752 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
753 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
754 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
755 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
756 the listing of that directory.
758 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
761 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
762 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
764 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
767 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
768 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
769 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
770 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
771 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
772 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
773 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
775 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
776 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
777 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
778 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
779 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
780 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
781 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
782 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
783 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
784 considerably. (`#606`_)
786 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
787 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
788 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
789 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
790 directories and stat() all your local files.
792 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
793 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
794 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
795 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
796 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
797 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
798 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
799 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
801 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
802 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
803 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
806 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
807 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
808 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
809 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
810 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
811 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
812 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
814 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
817 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
818 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
819 "node" process, which has several components that can be
820 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
821 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
822 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
823 future release will make it optional. There are three special
824 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
825 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
827 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
828 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
829 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
830 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
831 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
832 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
834 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
835 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
836 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
837 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
838 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
839 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
840 create-node" instead.
842 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
843 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
844 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
845 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
847 - Performance Improvements
849 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
850 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
851 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
852 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
853 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
854 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
855 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
856 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
857 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
858 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
859 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
860 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
861 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
862 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
863 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
864 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
865 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
866 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
867 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
872 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
873 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
874 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
875 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
878 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
879 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
880 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
881 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
883 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
884 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
887 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
888 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
889 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
892 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
893 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
896 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
899 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
901 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
902 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
904 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
905 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
907 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
908 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
909 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
910 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
911 additional licensing text was added.
913 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
915 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
916 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
918 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
919 has been improved. (`#773`_)
921 For other changes not mentioned here, see
922 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
923 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
924 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
926 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
927 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
928 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
929 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
930 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
931 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
932 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
933 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
934 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
935 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
936 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
937 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
938 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
939 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
940 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
941 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
942 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
943 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
944 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
945 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
946 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
947 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
948 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
949 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
950 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
951 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
952 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
953 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
954 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
955 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
956 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
958 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
959 --------------------------
964 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
965 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
967 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
968 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
969 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
971 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
972 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
973 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
974 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
975 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
977 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
978 directories. (`#705`_)
980 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
981 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
984 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
985 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
986 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
987 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
988 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
990 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
991 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
992 directories from the future. This should improve the user
993 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
994 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
995 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
996 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
997 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1002 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1003 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1004 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1005 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1006 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1007 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1008 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1010 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1011 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1014 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1015 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1016 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1018 Platform/packaging changes
1019 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1021 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1022 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1024 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1025 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1026 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1027 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1028 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1029 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1031 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1032 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1033 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1034 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1036 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1038 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1039 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1040 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1042 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1043 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1044 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1051 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1052 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1053 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1057 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1058 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1059 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1060 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1061 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1062 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1063 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1064 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1065 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1067 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1068 --------------------------
1073 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1074 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1075 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1076 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1077 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1078 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1079 lease. The process is described in detail in
1080 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1082 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1083 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1084 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1086 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1087 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1088 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1089 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1090 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1091 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1092 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1094 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1095 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1097 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1098 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1099 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1100 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1101 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1103 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1104 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1105 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1106 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1107 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1108 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1109 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1114 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1115 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1116 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1117 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1118 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1120 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1121 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1122 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1125 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1126 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1127 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1128 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1129 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1130 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1131 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1132 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1135 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1136 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1137 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1139 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1140 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1141 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1142 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1143 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1144 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1145 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1150 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1151 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1152 of garbage collection.
1154 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1155 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1157 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1158 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1160 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1161 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1162 metadata) during backup.
1164 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1165 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1167 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1168 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1171 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1172 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1173 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1174 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1175 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1176 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1177 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1178 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1179 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1180 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1181 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1182 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1184 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1185 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1186 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1187 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1192 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1193 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1194 instance of RuntimeError.
1196 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1197 speeding them up considerably.
1199 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1200 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1201 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1202 with hundreds of entries.
1204 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1205 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1208 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1209 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1210 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1212 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1213 --------------------------
1215 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1216 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1218 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1219 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1220 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1221 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1222 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1223 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1224 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1225 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1226 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1229 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1230 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1231 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1232 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1233 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1234 permanent drive failure.
1236 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1237 shares. The limitations are:
1239 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1240 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1241 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1242 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1243 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1244 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1245 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1246 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1247 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1248 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1249 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1250 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1251 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1253 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1254 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1255 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1256 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1259 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1260 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1261 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1262 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1263 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1264 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1265 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1266 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1267 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1268 considered highly unusual.
1270 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1271 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1272 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1274 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1275 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1276 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1277 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1278 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1279 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1280 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1281 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1282 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1283 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1284 button will appear on the results page.
1286 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1287 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1288 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1289 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1290 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1291 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1297 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1298 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1299 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1300 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1301 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1302 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1303 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1304 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1305 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1306 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1307 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1308 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1309 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1310 to run from a daily cronjob.
1312 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1313 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1314 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1315 $target/Latest) from working.
1320 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1321 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1322 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1323 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1324 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1325 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1326 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1327 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1328 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1329 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1330 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1331 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1336 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1337 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1338 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1339 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1340 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1341 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1342 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1343 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1344 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1345 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1350 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1351 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1352 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1353 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1354 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1357 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1358 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1359 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1360 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1361 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1362 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1363 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1365 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1366 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1367 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1369 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1370 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1371 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1372 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1373 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1375 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1378 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1379 - tahoe debug dump-share
1380 - tahoe debug find-shares
1381 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1382 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1384 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1385 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1386 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1389 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1390 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1391 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1392 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1393 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1398 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1399 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1400 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1401 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1402 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1403 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1404 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1405 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1406 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1407 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1408 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1409 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1410 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1412 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1413 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1414 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1415 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1416 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1417 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1419 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1420 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1421 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1422 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1423 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1424 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1425 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1426 deep-check operations.
1428 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1429 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1430 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1431 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1432 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1435 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1436 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1437 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1438 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1439 "same-origin policy".
1441 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1442 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1443 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1444 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1445 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1446 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1447 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1448 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1449 processing by operations staff.
1451 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1452 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1453 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1454 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1455 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1456 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1458 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1459 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1460 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1461 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1462 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1463 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1464 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1466 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1467 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1468 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1469 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1470 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1471 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1472 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1473 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1475 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1476 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1477 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1478 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1479 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1480 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1481 target) of a t=rename command.
1486 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1487 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1488 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1489 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1490 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1491 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1492 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1493 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1496 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1497 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1498 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1499 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1500 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1501 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1502 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1503 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1504 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1505 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1507 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1508 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1510 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1511 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1512 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1513 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1514 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1517 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1518 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1519 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1520 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1521 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1522 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1523 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1525 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1526 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1527 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1528 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1529 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1531 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1532 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1533 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1534 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1535 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1536 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1537 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1539 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1540 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1541 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1543 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1544 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1545 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1547 Grid Management Tools
1548 '''''''''''''''''''''
1550 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1551 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1553 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1554 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1555 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1556 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1557 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1558 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1559 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1560 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1561 before the grid is completely full.
1563 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1564 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1565 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1567 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1568 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1569 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1570 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1571 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1572 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1573 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1574 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1575 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1576 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1578 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1579 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1580 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1581 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1582 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1583 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1585 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1586 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1588 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1589 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1590 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1591 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1592 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1593 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1594 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1595 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1597 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1598 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1600 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1601 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1602 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1604 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1605 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1606 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1607 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1608 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1609 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1610 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1611 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1612 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1613 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1614 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1619 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1620 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1621 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1623 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1624 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1625 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1628 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1629 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1630 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1633 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1634 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1635 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1636 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1637 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1638 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1640 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1641 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1642 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1643 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1645 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1646 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1648 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1649 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1650 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1651 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1654 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1656 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1657 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1658 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1659 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1661 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1662 --------------------------
1667 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1668 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1669 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1670 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1671 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1672 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1673 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1674 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1675 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1676 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1677 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1680 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1681 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1687 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1688 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1689 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1690 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1691 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1697 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1698 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1699 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1700 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1702 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1703 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1704 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1705 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1706 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1709 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1710 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1711 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1712 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1713 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1714 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1716 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1717 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1718 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1719 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1720 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1721 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1724 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1725 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1727 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1728 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1729 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1730 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1731 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1732 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1733 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1734 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1735 (which may take a very long time).
1737 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1739 Operations/Packaging
1740 ''''''''''''''''''''
1742 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1743 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1744 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1745 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1746 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1747 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1748 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1751 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1752 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1753 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1755 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1756 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1757 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1760 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1761 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1762 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1768 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1769 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1770 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1771 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1772 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1773 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1774 directory for a second time.
1776 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1777 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1778 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1779 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1780 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1781 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1783 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1784 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1785 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1786 from the web browser end.
1788 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1789 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1790 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1792 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1793 --------------------------
1795 CLI: new "alias" model
1796 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1798 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1799 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1800 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1802 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1803 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1805 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1806 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1807 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1808 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1810 wapi: new pages, new commands
1811 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1813 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1815 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1816 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1817 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1818 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1820 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1821 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1822 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1823 new "cp -r" command.
1825 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1827 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1828 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1830 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1833 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1835 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1836 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1838 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1839 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1841 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1844 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1845 - tahoe_estimate_files
1846 - mutable files published/retrieved
1855 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1857 New Mutable-File Code
1858 '''''''''''''''''''''
1860 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1861 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1862 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1863 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1865 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1866 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1867 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1868 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1870 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1871 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1872 published when in fact it failed.
1877 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1878 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1879 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1881 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1882 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1883 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1884 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1885 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1887 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1888 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1889 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1890 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1891 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1892 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1893 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1895 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1896 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1897 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1898 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1899 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1900 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1902 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1903 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1905 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1906 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1907 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1908 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1909 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1911 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1912 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1914 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1915 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1916 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1917 order. This has been fixed.
1919 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1920 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1921 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1922 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1923 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst