1 .. -*- coding: utf-8-with-signature -*-
3 ==================================
4 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
5 ==================================
7 Release 1.10.1 (XXXX-XX-XX)
8 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
10 UI / Configuration Changes
11 --------------------------
13 The "tahoe cp" CLI command's "--recursive" option is now more predictable,
14 but behaves slightly differently than before. See below for details. Tickets
17 The SFTP server can now use public-key authentication (instead of only
18 password-based auth). Public keys are configured through an "account file",
19 just like passwords. See docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP for examples of the
22 The Tahoe node can now be configured to disable automatic IP-address
23 detection. Using "AUTO" in tahoe.cfg [node]tub.location= (which is now the
24 default) triggers autodetection. Omit "AUTO" to disable autodetection. "AUTO"
25 can be combined with static addresses to e.g. use both a stable
26 UPnP-configured tunneled address with a DHCP-assigned dynamic (local subnet
27 only) address. See configuration.rst for details. #754
29 The web-based user interface ("WUI") Directory and Welcome pages have been
30 redesigned, with improved CSS for narrow windows and more-accessible icons
31 (using distinctive shapes instead of just colors). #1931 #1961 #1966 #1972
37 The many "cp"-like tools in the unix world (POSIX /bin/cp, the "scp" provided
38 by SSH, rsync) all behave slightly differently in unusual circumstances,
39 especially when copying whole directories into a target which may or may not
40 already exist. The most common difference is whether the user is referring to
41 the source directory as a whole, or to its contents. For example, should
42 "cp -r foodir bardir" create a new directory named "bardir/foodir"? Or should
43 it behave more like "cp -r foodir/* bardir"? Some tools use the presence of a
44 trailing slash to indicate which behavior you want. Others ignore trailing
47 "tahoe cp" is no exception to having exceptional cases. This release fixes
48 some bad behavior and attempts to establish a consistent rationale for its
49 behavior. The new rule is:
51 - If the thing being copied is a directory, and it has a name (e.g. it's not
52 a raw tahoe directorycap), then you are referring to the directory itself.
53 - If the thing being copied is an unnamed directory (e.g. raw dircap or
54 alias), then you are referring to the contents.
55 - Trailing slashes do not affect the behavior of the copy (although putting a
56 trailing slash on a file-like target is an error).
57 - The "-r" (--recursive) flag does not affect the behavior of the copy
58 (although omitting -r when the source is a directory is an error).
59 - If the target refers to something that does not yet exist:
60 - and if the source is a single file, then create a new file;
61 - otherwise, create a directory.
63 There are two main cases where the behavior of tahoe-1.10.1 differs from that
64 of the previous 1.10.0 release:
66 - "cp DIRCAP/file.txt ./local/missing" , where "./local" is a directory but
67 "./local/missing" does not exist. The implication is that you want tahoe to
68 create a new file named "./local/missing" and fill it with the contents of
69 the tahoe-side DIRCAP/file.txt. In 1.10.0, a plain "cp" would do just this,
70 but "cp -r" would do "mkdir ./local/missing" and then create a file named
71 "./local/missing/file.txt". In 1.10.1, both "cp" and "cp -r" create a file
72 named "./local/missing".
73 - "cp -r PARENTCAP/dir ./local/missing", where PARENTCAP/dir/ contains
74 "file.txt", and again "./local" is a directory but "./local/missing" does
75 not exist. In both 1.10.0 and 1.10.1, this first does "mkdir
76 ./local/missing". In 1.10.0, it would then copy the contents of the source
77 directory into the new directory, resulting in "./local/missing/file.txt".
78 In 1.10.1, following the new rule of "a named directory source refers to
79 the directory itself", the tool creates "./local/missing/dir/file.txt".
81 Compatibility and Dependency Updates
82 ------------------------------------
84 Windows now requires python2.7 . Unix/OS-X platforms can still use either 2.6
85 or 2.7, however this is probably the last release that will support 2.6 (it
86 is no longer receiving security updates, and most OS distributions have
87 switched to 2.7). Tahoe now has the following dependencies:
93 - characteristic >= 14.0.0
95 - pyasn1-modules >= 0.0.5
97 On Windows, if pywin32 is not installed then the dependencies on Twisted
100 - Twisted >= 11.1.0, <= 12.1.0
101 - Nevow >= 0.9.33, <= 0.10
103 On all platforms, if pyOpenSSL >= 0.14 is installed, then it will be used,
104 but if not then only pyOpenSSL >= 0.13, <= 0.13.1 will be built when directly
105 invoking `setup.py build` or `setup.py install`.
107 We strongly advise OS packagers to take the option of making a tahoe-lafs
108 package depend on pyOpenSSL >= 0.14. In order for that to work, the following
109 additional Python dependencies are needed:
117 as well as libffi (for Debian/Ubuntu, the name of the needed OS package is
120 Tahoe-LAFS is now compatible with Setuptools version 8 and Pip version 6 or
121 later, which should fix execution on Ubuntu 15.04 (it now tolerates PEP440
122 semantics in dependency specifications). #2354 #2242
124 Tahoe-LAFS now depends upon foolscap-0.8.0, which creates better private keys
125 and certificates than previous versions. To benefit from the improvements
126 (2048-bit RSA keys and SHA256-based certificates), you must re-generate your
127 Tahoe nodes (which changes their TubIDs and FURLs). #2400
132 A preliminary OS-X package, named "tahoe-lafs-VERSION-osx.pkg", is now being
133 generated. It is a standard double-clickable installer, which creates
134 /Applications/tahoe.app that embeds a complete runtime tree. However
135 launching the .app only brings up docs on how to run tahoe from the command
136 line. A future release will turn this into a fully-fledged application
137 launcher. #182 #2393 #2323
139 Preliminary Docker support was added. Tahoe container images may be available
140 on DockerHub. PR#165 #2419 #2421
142 Old/obsolete debian packaging tools have been removed. #2282
147 - Welcome page: add per-server "(space) Available" column #648
148 - check/deep-check learned to accept multiple location args #740
149 - Checker reports: remove needs-rebalancing, add count-happiness #1784 #2105
150 - CLI --help: cite (but don't list) global options on each command #2233
151 - Fix ftp 'ls' to work with Twisted-15.0.0 #2394
153 Roughly 75 tickets were closed in this release: 623 648 712 740 754 898 1146
154 1159 1336 1381 1411 1634 1674 1698 1707 1717 1737 1784 1800 1807 1842 1847
155 1901 1918 1953 1960 1961 1966 1969 1972 1974 1988 1992 2005 2008 2023 2027
156 2028 2034 2048 2067 2086 2105 2121 2128 2165 2193 2208 2209 2233 2235 2242
157 2245 2248 2249 2249 2280 2281 2282 2290 2305 2312 2323 2340 2354 2380 2393
158 2394 2398 2400 2415 2416 2417 2433. Another dozen were referenced but not
159 closed: 182 666 982 1064 1258 1531 1536 1742 1834 1931 1935 2286. Roughly 40
160 GitHub pull-requests were closed: 32 48 50 56 57 61 62 62 63 64 69 73 81 82
161 84 85 87 91 94 95 96 103 107 109 112 114 120 122 125 126 133 135 136 137 142
164 For more information about any ticket, visit e.g.
165 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/754
168 Release 1.10.0 (2013-05-01)
169 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
174 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
175 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
176 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
177 - A new extensible Introducer protocol has been added, as the basis for
178 future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older nodes is
179 not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all upgraded, the
180 welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead of the old
181 tubid. See `<docs/nodekeys.rst>`__ for details. (`#466`_)
182 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
183 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
185 Security Improvements
186 ---------------------
188 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
189 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
190 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
191 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
192 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
193 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
194 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
195 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
196 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
197 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
198 updated. Note that other users of a shared machine may be able to read
199 ``introducer.furl`` from your ``tahoe.cfg`` file unless you configure the
200 file permissions to prevent them. (`#1802`_)
201 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
202 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
203 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
204 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
205 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
207 Command-line Syntax Changes
208 ---------------------------
210 - Global options to ``tahoe``, such as ``-d``/``--node-directory``, must now
211 come before rather than after the command name (for example,
212 ``tahoe -d BASEDIR cp -r foo: bar:`` ). (`#166`_)
217 - In earlier versions, if a connection problem caused a download failure for
218 an immutable file, subsequent attempts to download the same file could also
219 fail. This is now fixed. (`#1679`_)
220 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
221 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
222 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
223 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
224 exception. (`#1758`_)
225 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
226 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
228 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` now counts the files being processed correctly.
230 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
231 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
232 - The error message displayed when a CLI tool cannot connect to a gateway has
233 been improved. (`#974`_)
234 - Other minor fixes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_, `#1915`_, `#1484`_, `#1525`_
236 Compatibility and Dependencies
237 ------------------------------
239 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
240 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
241 - mock >= 0.8 (for unit tests)
242 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for Ed25519 signatures)
243 - zope.interface >= 3.6.0 (except 3.6.3 or 3.6.4)
248 - The ``flogtool`` utility, used to read detailed event logs, can now be
249 accessed as ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when Foolscap is not installed
250 system-wide. (`#1693`_)
251 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
252 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool. Use the ``run.py``
253 script in ``misc/operations_helpers/provisioning/`` to access them.
254 - Web clients can now cache (ETag) immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
255 - `<docs/convergence_secret.rst>`__ was added to document the adminstration
256 of convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
258 Precautions when Upgrading
259 --------------------------
261 - When upgrading a grid from a recent revision of trunk, follow the
262 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
263 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
264 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release like 1.9.2.
266 .. _`#166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/166
267 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
268 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
269 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
270 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
271 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
272 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
273 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
274 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
275 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
276 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
277 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
278 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
279 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
280 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
281 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
282 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
283 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
284 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
285 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
286 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
287 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
288 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
289 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
290 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
291 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
292 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
293 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
294 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
295 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
298 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
299 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
304 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
305 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
306 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
307 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
308 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
309 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
310 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
312 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
313 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
314 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
315 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
316 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
317 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
319 Configuration/Behavior Changes
320 ------------------------------
322 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
323 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
324 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
330 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
333 Compatibility and Dependencies
334 ------------------------------
336 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
337 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
338 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
340 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
341 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
342 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
343 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
344 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
345 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
346 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
347 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
348 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
349 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
350 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
351 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
352 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
353 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
354 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
355 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
356 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
359 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
360 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
362 Security-related Bugfix
363 -----------------------
365 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
366 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
368 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
371 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
372 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
377 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
378 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
379 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
380 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
381 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
382 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
383 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
384 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
385 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
386 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
387 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
388 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
389 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
390 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
391 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
392 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
393 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
395 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
396 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
397 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
398 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
400 Configuration/Behavior Changes
401 ------------------------------
403 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
404 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
405 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
406 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
407 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
408 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
409 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
410 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
411 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
412 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
413 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
414 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
419 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
420 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
422 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
423 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
424 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
425 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
426 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
427 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
428 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
433 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
434 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
435 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
436 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
437 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
438 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
439 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
440 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
441 (any version of each):
443 * Academic Free License
444 * Apple Public Source License
445 * BitTorrent Open Source License
446 * Lucent Public License
447 * Jabber Open Source License
448 * Common Development and Distribution License
449 * Microsoft Public License
450 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
451 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
452 * Open Software License
454 Compatibility and Dependencies
455 ------------------------------
457 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
458 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
459 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
460 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
461 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
462 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
463 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
465 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
466 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
471 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
473 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
474 of share files. (`#1391`_)
475 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
476 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
477 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
479 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
480 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
481 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
482 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
483 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
484 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
485 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
486 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
487 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
488 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
489 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
490 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
491 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
492 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
493 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
494 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
495 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
496 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
497 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
500 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
501 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
503 Security-related Bugfix
504 -----------------------
506 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
507 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
508 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
509 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
510 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
511 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
512 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
514 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
517 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
518 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
520 Compatibility and Dependencies
521 ------------------------------
523 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
524 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
525 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
526 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
527 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
528 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
529 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
530 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
536 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
538 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
539 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
540 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
542 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
543 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
544 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
545 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
546 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
547 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
548 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
550 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
551 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
552 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
553 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
554 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
555 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
558 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
559 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
561 Bugfixes and Improvements
562 -------------------------
564 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
565 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
566 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
568 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
569 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
570 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
571 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
573 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
574 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
575 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
576 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
577 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
578 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
579 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
580 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
581 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
582 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
583 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
584 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
585 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
586 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
588 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
589 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
590 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
595 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
596 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
597 platforms. (`#1262`_)
602 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
603 systems can install without having a compiler.
604 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
605 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
606 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
608 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
609 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
610 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
611 version number. (`#1233`_)
616 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
618 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
619 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
622 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
623 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
624 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
625 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
626 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
627 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
628 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
629 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
630 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
631 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
632 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
633 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
634 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
635 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
636 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
639 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
640 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
645 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
646 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
647 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
648 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
649 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
650 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
651 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
652 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
653 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
654 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
655 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
657 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
658 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
661 Bugfixes and Improvements
662 -------------------------
664 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
665 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
667 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
668 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
669 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
671 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
672 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
673 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
674 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
675 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
676 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
681 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
682 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
684 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
685 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
686 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
687 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
688 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
689 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
690 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
691 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
692 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
693 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
694 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
695 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
696 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
697 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
698 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
699 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
700 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
701 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
702 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
703 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
704 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
705 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
706 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
708 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
709 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
711 Bugfixes and Improvements
712 -------------------------
714 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
715 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
716 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
717 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
718 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
720 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
722 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
724 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
725 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
726 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
727 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
729 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
730 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
731 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
736 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
737 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
739 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
740 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
741 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
742 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
743 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
744 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
745 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
746 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
747 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
748 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
749 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
750 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
751 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
754 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
755 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
760 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
761 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
762 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
763 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
764 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
766 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
767 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
768 characters on all supported platforms:
770 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
771 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
773 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
774 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
776 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
777 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
778 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
780 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
781 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
782 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
783 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
784 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
785 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
786 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
787 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
788 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
789 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
790 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
791 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
792 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
793 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
794 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
796 Bugfixes and Improvements
797 -------------------------
799 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
800 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
801 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
803 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
804 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
805 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
806 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
808 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
810 - ImportError: No module named
811 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
812 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
813 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
814 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
815 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
816 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
817 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
818 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
819 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
820 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
821 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
822 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
824 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
830 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
831 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
837 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
838 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
842 - mock (only required by unit tests)
844 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
845 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
846 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
847 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
848 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
849 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
850 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
851 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
852 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
853 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
854 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
855 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
856 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
857 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
858 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
859 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
860 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
861 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
862 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
863 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
864 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
865 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
866 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
867 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
868 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
870 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
871 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
876 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
878 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
879 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
880 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
881 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
884 Usability Improvements
885 ----------------------
887 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
889 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
890 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
891 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
892 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
894 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
895 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
900 - Immutable Directories
902 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
903 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
904 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
905 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
906 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
907 immutable directories).
909 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
910 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
911 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
912 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
913 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
914 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
915 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
917 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
918 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
919 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
920 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
921 the listing of that directory.
923 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
926 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
927 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
929 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
932 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
933 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
934 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
935 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
936 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
937 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
938 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
940 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
941 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
942 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
943 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
944 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
945 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
946 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
947 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
948 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
949 considerably. (`#606`_)
951 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
952 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
953 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
954 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
955 directories and stat() all your local files.
957 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
958 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
959 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
960 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
961 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
962 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
963 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
964 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
966 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
967 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
968 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
971 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
972 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
973 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
974 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
975 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
976 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
977 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
979 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
982 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
983 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
984 "node" process, which has several components that can be
985 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
986 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
987 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
988 future release will make it optional. There are three special
989 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
990 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
992 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
993 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
994 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
995 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
996 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
997 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
999 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
1000 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
1001 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
1002 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
1003 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
1004 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
1005 create-node" instead.
1007 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
1008 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
1009 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
1010 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
1012 - Performance Improvements
1014 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
1015 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
1016 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
1017 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
1018 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
1019 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
1020 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
1021 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
1022 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
1023 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
1024 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
1025 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
1026 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
1027 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
1028 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
1029 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
1030 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
1031 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
1032 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
1037 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
1038 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
1039 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
1040 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
1043 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
1044 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
1045 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
1046 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
1048 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
1049 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
1052 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
1053 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
1054 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
1057 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
1058 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
1061 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
1064 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
1066 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
1067 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
1069 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
1070 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
1072 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
1073 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
1074 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
1075 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
1076 additional licensing text was added.
1078 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
1080 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
1081 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
1083 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
1084 has been improved. (`#773`_)
1086 For other changes not mentioned here, see
1087 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
1088 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
1089 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
1091 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
1092 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
1093 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
1094 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
1095 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
1096 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
1097 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
1098 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
1099 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
1100 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
1101 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
1102 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
1103 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
1104 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
1105 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
1106 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
1107 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
1108 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
1109 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
1110 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
1111 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
1112 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
1113 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
1114 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
1115 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
1116 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
1117 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
1118 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
1119 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
1120 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
1121 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
1123 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
1124 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1129 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
1130 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
1132 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
1133 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
1134 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
1136 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
1137 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
1138 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
1139 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
1140 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
1142 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
1143 directories. (`#705`_)
1145 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
1146 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
1149 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
1150 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
1151 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
1152 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
1153 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
1155 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
1156 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
1157 directories from the future. This should improve the user
1158 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
1159 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
1160 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
1161 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
1162 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1167 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1168 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1169 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1170 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1171 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1172 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1173 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1175 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1176 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1179 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1180 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1181 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1183 Platform/packaging changes
1184 --------------------------
1186 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1187 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1189 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1190 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1191 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1192 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1193 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1194 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1196 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1197 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1198 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1199 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1201 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1203 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1204 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1205 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1207 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1208 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1209 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1216 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1217 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1218 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1222 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1223 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1224 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1225 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1226 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1227 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1228 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1229 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1230 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1232 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1233 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1238 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1239 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1240 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1241 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1242 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1243 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1244 lease. The process is described in detail in
1245 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1247 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1248 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1249 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1251 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1252 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1253 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1254 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1255 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1256 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1257 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1259 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1260 ---------------------------------
1262 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1263 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1264 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1265 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1266 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1268 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1269 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1270 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1271 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1272 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1273 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1274 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1279 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1280 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1281 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1282 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1283 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1285 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1286 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1287 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1290 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1291 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1292 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1293 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1294 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1295 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1296 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1297 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1300 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1301 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1302 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1304 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1305 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1306 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1307 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1308 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1309 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1310 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1315 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1316 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1317 of garbage collection.
1319 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1320 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1322 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1323 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1325 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1326 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1327 metadata) during backup.
1329 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1330 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1332 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1333 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1336 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1337 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1338 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1339 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1340 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1341 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1342 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1343 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1344 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1345 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1346 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1347 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1349 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1350 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1351 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1352 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1357 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1358 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1359 instance of RuntimeError.
1361 - Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1362 speeding them up considerably.
1364 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1365 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1366 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1367 with hundreds of entries.
1369 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1370 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1373 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1374 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1375 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1377 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1378 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1380 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1381 -------------------------
1383 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1384 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1385 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1386 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1387 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1388 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1389 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1390 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1391 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1394 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1395 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1396 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1397 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1398 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1399 permanent drive failure.
1401 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1402 shares. The limitations are:
1404 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1405 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1406 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1407 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1408 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1409 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1410 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1411 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1412 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1413 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1414 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1415 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1416 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1418 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1419 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1420 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1421 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1424 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1425 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1426 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1427 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1428 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1429 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1430 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1431 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1432 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1433 considered highly unusual.
1435 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1436 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1437 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1439 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1440 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1441 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1442 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1443 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1444 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1445 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1446 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1447 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1448 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1449 button will appear on the results page.
1451 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1452 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1453 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1454 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1455 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1456 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1462 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1463 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1464 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1465 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1466 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1467 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1468 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1469 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1470 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1471 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1472 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1473 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1474 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1475 to run from a daily cronjob.
1477 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1478 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1479 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1480 $target/Latest) from working.
1485 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1486 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1487 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1488 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1489 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1490 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1491 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1492 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1493 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1494 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1495 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1496 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1501 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1502 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1503 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1504 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1505 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1506 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1507 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1508 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1509 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1510 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1515 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1516 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1517 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1518 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1519 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1522 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1523 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1524 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1525 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1526 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1527 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1528 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1530 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1531 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1532 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1534 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1535 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1536 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1537 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1538 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1540 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1543 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1544 - tahoe debug dump-share
1545 - tahoe debug find-shares
1546 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1547 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1549 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1550 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1551 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1554 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1555 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1556 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1557 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1558 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1563 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1564 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1565 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1566 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1567 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1568 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1569 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1570 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1571 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1572 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1573 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1574 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1575 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1577 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1578 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1579 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1580 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1581 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1582 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1584 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1585 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1586 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1587 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1588 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1589 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1590 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1591 deep-check operations.
1593 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1594 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1595 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1596 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1597 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1600 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1601 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1602 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1603 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1604 "same-origin policy".
1606 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1607 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1608 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1609 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1610 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1611 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1612 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1613 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1614 processing by operations staff.
1616 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1617 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1618 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1619 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1620 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1621 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1623 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1624 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1625 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1626 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1627 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1628 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1629 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1631 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1632 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1633 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1634 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1635 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1636 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1637 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1638 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1640 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1641 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1642 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1643 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1644 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1645 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1646 target) of a t=rename command.
1651 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1652 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1653 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1654 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1655 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1656 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1657 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1658 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1661 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1662 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1663 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1664 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1665 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1666 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1667 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1668 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1669 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1670 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1672 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1673 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1675 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1676 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1677 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1678 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1679 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1682 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1683 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1684 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1685 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1686 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1687 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1688 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1690 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1691 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1692 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1693 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1694 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1696 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1697 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1698 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1699 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1700 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1701 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1702 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1704 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1705 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1706 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1708 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1709 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1710 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1712 Grid Management Tools
1713 ---------------------
1715 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1716 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1718 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1719 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1720 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1721 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1722 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1723 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1724 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1725 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1726 before the grid is completely full.
1728 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1729 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1730 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1732 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1733 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1734 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1735 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1736 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1737 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1738 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1739 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1740 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1741 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1743 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1744 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1745 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1746 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1747 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1748 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1750 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1751 -------------------------------------------------------
1753 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1754 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1755 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1756 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1757 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1758 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1759 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1760 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1762 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1763 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1765 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1766 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1767 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1769 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1770 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1771 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1772 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1773 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1774 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1775 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1776 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1777 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1778 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1779 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1784 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1785 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1786 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1788 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1789 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1790 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1793 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1794 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1795 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1798 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1799 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1800 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1801 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1802 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1803 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1805 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1806 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1807 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1808 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1810 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1811 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1813 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1814 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1815 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1816 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1819 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1821 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1822 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1823 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1824 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1826 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1827 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1832 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1833 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1834 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1835 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1836 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1837 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1838 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1839 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1840 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1841 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1842 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1845 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1846 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1852 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1853 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1854 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1855 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1856 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1862 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1863 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1864 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1865 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1867 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1868 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1869 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1870 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1871 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1874 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1875 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1876 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1877 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1878 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1879 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1881 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1882 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1883 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1884 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1885 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1886 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1889 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1890 -------------------------
1892 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1893 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1894 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1895 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1896 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1897 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1898 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1899 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1900 (which may take a very long time).
1902 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1904 Operations/Packaging
1905 --------------------
1907 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1908 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1909 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1910 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1911 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1912 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1913 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1916 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1917 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1918 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1920 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1921 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1922 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1925 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1926 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1927 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1933 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1934 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1935 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1936 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1937 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1938 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1939 directory for a second time.
1941 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1942 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1943 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1944 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1945 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1946 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1948 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1949 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1950 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1951 from the web browser end.
1953 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1954 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1955 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1957 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1958 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1960 CLI: new "alias" model
1961 ----------------------
1963 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1964 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1965 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1967 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1968 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1970 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1971 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1972 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1973 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1975 wapi: new pages, new commands
1976 -----------------------------
1978 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1980 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1981 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1982 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1983 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1985 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1986 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1987 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1988 new "cp -r" command.
1990 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1992 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1993 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1995 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1998 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
2000 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
2001 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
2003 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
2004 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
2006 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
2009 - tahoe-rootdir-space
2010 - tahoe_estimate_files
2011 - mutable files published/retrieved
2020 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
2022 New Mutable-File Code
2023 ---------------------
2025 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
2026 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
2027 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
2028 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
2030 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
2031 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
2032 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
2033 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
2035 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
2036 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
2037 published when in fact it failed.
2042 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
2043 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
2044 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
2046 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
2047 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
2048 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
2049 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
2050 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
2052 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
2053 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
2054 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
2055 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
2056 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
2057 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
2058 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
2060 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
2061 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
2062 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
2063 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
2064 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
2065 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
2067 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
2068 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
2070 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
2071 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
2072 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
2073 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
2074 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
2076 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
2077 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
2079 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
2080 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
2081 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
2082 order. This has been fixed.
2084 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
2085 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
2086 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
2087 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
2088 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst