2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.10 (2013-??-??)
11 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
12 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
13 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
14 - A new, more extensible Introducer protocol has been added, to act as the
15 basis for future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older
16 nodes is not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all
17 upgraded, the welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead
18 of the old tubid. (`#466`_)
19 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
20 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
25 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
26 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
27 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
28 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
29 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
30 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
31 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
32 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
33 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
34 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
36 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
37 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
38 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
39 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
40 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
45 - If an immutable file failed to download, e.g. due to a connection problem,
46 subsequent attempts to download the same file could also fail. (`#1679`_)
47 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
48 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
50 - Failure handling in the SFTP frontend has been improved. (`#1525`_)
51 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
53 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
54 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
55 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
56 - Error messages containing tracebacks may be slightly more readable.
58 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` counts the files being processed correctly.
60 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
61 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
62 - Improve error message when CLI tools cannot connect to a gateway. (`#974`_)
63 - Other minor changes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_
65 Performance Improvements
66 ''''''''''''''''''''''''
68 - Allow web clients to cache immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
73 - docs/helper.rst has been brought up to date. (`#1915`_)
74 - docs/convergence_secret.rst was added to document the adminstration of
75 convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
80 - The flogtool utility, used to read logs, can now be accessed as
81 ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when foolscap is not installed system-wide.
83 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
84 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool in
85 misc/operations_helpers/provisioning. Use the ``run.py`` script to access
88 Compatibility and Dependencies
89 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
91 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
92 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
94 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for ed25519)
96 Precautions when Upgrading
97 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
99 - When upgrading a grid from a recent version of trunk, follow the
100 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
101 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
102 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release.
104 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
105 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
106 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
107 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
108 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
109 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
110 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
111 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
112 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
113 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
114 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
115 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
116 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
117 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
118 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
119 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
120 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
121 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
122 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
123 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
124 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
125 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
126 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
127 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
128 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
129 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
130 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
131 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
132 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
134 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
135 --------------------------
140 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
141 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
142 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
143 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
144 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
145 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
146 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
148 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
149 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
150 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
151 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
152 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
153 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
155 Configuration/Behavior Changes
156 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
158 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
159 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
160 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
166 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
169 Compatibility and Dependencies
170 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
172 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
173 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
174 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
176 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
177 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
178 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
179 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
180 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
181 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
182 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
183 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
184 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
185 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
186 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
187 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
188 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
189 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
190 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
191 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
192 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
195 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
196 --------------------------
198 Security-related Bugfix
199 '''''''''''''''''''''''
201 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
202 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
204 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
207 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
208 --------------------------
213 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
214 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
215 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
216 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
217 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
218 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
219 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
220 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
221 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
222 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
223 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
224 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
225 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
226 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
227 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
228 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
229 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
231 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
232 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
233 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
234 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
236 Configuration/Behavior Changes
237 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
239 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
240 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
241 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
242 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
243 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
244 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
245 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
246 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
247 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
248 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
249 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
250 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
255 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
256 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
258 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
259 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
260 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
261 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
262 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
263 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
264 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
269 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
270 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
271 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
272 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
273 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
274 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
275 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
276 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
277 (any version of each):
279 * Academic Free License
280 * Apple Public Source License
281 * BitTorrent Open Source License
282 * Lucent Public License
283 * Jabber Open Source License
284 * Common Development and Distribution License
285 * Microsoft Public License
286 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
287 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
288 * Open Software License
290 Compatibility and Dependencies
291 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
293 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
294 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
295 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
296 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
297 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
298 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
299 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
301 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
302 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
307 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
309 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
310 of share files. (`#1391`_)
311 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
312 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
313 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
315 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
316 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
317 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
318 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
319 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
320 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
321 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
322 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
323 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
324 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
325 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
326 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
327 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
328 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
329 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
330 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
331 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
332 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
333 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
336 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
337 --------------------------
339 Security-related Bugfix
340 '''''''''''''''''''''''
342 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
343 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
344 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
345 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
346 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
347 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
348 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
350 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
353 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
354 --------------------------
356 Compatibility and Dependencies
357 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
359 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
360 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
361 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
362 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
363 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
364 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
365 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
366 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
372 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
374 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
375 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
376 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
378 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
379 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
380 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
381 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
382 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
383 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
384 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
386 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
387 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
388 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
389 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
390 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
391 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
394 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
395 --------------------------
397 Bugfixes and Improvements
398 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
400 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
401 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
402 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
404 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
405 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
406 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
407 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
409 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
410 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
411 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
412 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
413 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
414 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
415 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
416 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
417 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
418 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
419 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
420 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
421 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
422 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
424 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
425 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
426 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
431 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
432 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
433 platforms. (`#1262`_)
438 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
439 systems can install without having a compiler.
440 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
441 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
442 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
444 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
445 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
446 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
447 version number. (`#1233`_)
452 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
454 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
455 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
458 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
459 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
460 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
461 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
462 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
463 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
464 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
465 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
466 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
467 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
468 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
469 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
470 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
471 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
472 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
475 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
476 --------------------------
481 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
482 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
483 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
484 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
485 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
486 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
487 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
488 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
489 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
490 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
491 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
493 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
494 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
497 Bugfixes and Improvements
498 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
500 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
501 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
503 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
504 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
505 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
507 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
508 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
509 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
510 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
511 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
512 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
517 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
518 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
520 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
521 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
522 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
523 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
524 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
525 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
526 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
527 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
528 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
529 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
530 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
531 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
532 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
533 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
534 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
535 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
536 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
537 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
538 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
539 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
540 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
541 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
542 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
544 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
545 --------------------------
547 Bugfixes and Improvements
548 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
550 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
551 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
552 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
553 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
554 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
556 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
558 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
560 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
561 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
562 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
563 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
565 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
566 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
567 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
572 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
573 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
575 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
576 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
577 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
578 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
579 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
580 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
581 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
582 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
583 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
584 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
585 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
586 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
587 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
590 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
591 --------------------------
596 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
597 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
598 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
599 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
600 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
602 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
603 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
604 characters on all supported platforms:
606 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
607 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
609 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
610 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
612 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
613 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
614 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
616 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
617 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
618 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
619 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
620 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
621 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
622 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
623 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
624 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
625 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
626 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
627 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
628 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
629 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
630 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
632 Bugfixes and Improvements
633 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
635 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
636 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
637 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
639 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
640 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
641 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
642 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
644 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
646 - ImportError: No module named
647 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
648 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
649 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
650 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
651 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
652 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
653 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
654 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
655 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
656 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
657 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
658 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
660 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
666 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
667 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
673 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
674 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
678 - mock (only required by unit tests)
680 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
681 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
682 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
683 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
684 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
685 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
686 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
687 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
688 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
689 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
690 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
691 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
692 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
693 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
694 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
695 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
696 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
697 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
698 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
699 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
700 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
701 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
702 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
703 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
704 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
706 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
707 --------------------------
712 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
714 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
715 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
716 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
717 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
720 Usability Improvements
721 ''''''''''''''''''''''
723 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
725 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
726 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
727 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
728 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
730 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
731 --------------------------
736 - Immutable Directories
738 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
739 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
740 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
741 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
742 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
743 immutable directories).
745 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
746 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
747 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
748 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
749 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
750 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
751 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
753 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
754 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
755 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
756 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
757 the listing of that directory.
759 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
762 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
763 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
765 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
768 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
769 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
770 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
771 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
772 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
773 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
774 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
776 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
777 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
778 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
779 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
780 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
781 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
782 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
783 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
784 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
785 considerably. (`#606`_)
787 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
788 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
789 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
790 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
791 directories and stat() all your local files.
793 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
794 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
795 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
796 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
797 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
798 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
799 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
800 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
802 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
803 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
804 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
807 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
808 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
809 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
810 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
811 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
812 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
813 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
815 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
818 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
819 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
820 "node" process, which has several components that can be
821 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
822 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
823 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
824 future release will make it optional. There are three special
825 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
826 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
828 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
829 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
830 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
831 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
832 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
833 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
835 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
836 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
837 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
838 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
839 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
840 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
841 create-node" instead.
843 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
844 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
845 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
846 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
848 - Performance Improvements
850 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
851 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
852 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
853 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
854 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
855 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
856 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
857 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
858 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
859 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
860 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
861 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
862 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
863 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
864 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
865 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
866 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
867 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
868 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
873 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
874 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
875 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
876 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
879 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
880 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
881 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
882 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
884 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
885 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
888 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
889 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
890 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
893 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
894 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
897 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
900 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
902 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
903 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
905 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
906 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
908 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
909 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
910 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
911 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
912 additional licensing text was added.
914 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
916 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
917 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
919 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
920 has been improved. (`#773`_)
922 For other changes not mentioned here, see
923 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
924 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
925 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
927 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
928 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
929 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
930 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
931 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
932 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
933 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
934 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
935 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
936 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
937 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
938 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
939 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
940 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
941 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
942 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
943 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
944 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
945 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
946 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
947 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
948 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
949 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
950 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
951 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
952 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
953 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
954 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
955 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
956 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
957 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
959 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
960 --------------------------
965 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
966 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
968 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
969 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
970 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
972 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
973 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
974 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
975 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
976 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
978 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
979 directories. (`#705`_)
981 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
982 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
985 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
986 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
987 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
988 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
989 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
991 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
992 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
993 directories from the future. This should improve the user
994 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
995 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
996 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
997 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
998 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1003 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1004 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1005 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1006 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1007 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1008 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1009 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1011 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1012 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1015 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1016 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1017 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1019 Platform/packaging changes
1020 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1022 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1023 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1025 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1026 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1027 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1028 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1029 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1030 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1032 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1033 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1034 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1035 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1037 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1039 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1040 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1041 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1043 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1044 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1045 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1052 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1053 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1054 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1058 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1059 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1060 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1061 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1062 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1063 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1064 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1065 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1066 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1068 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1069 --------------------------
1074 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1075 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1076 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1077 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1078 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1079 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1080 lease. The process is described in detail in
1081 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1083 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1084 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1085 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1087 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1088 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1089 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1090 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1091 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1092 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1093 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1095 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1096 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1098 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1099 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1100 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1101 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1102 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1104 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1105 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1106 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1107 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1108 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1109 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1110 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1115 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1116 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1117 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1118 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1119 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1121 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1122 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1123 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1126 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1127 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1128 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1129 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1130 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1131 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1132 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1133 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1136 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1137 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1138 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1140 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1141 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1142 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1143 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1144 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1145 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1146 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1151 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1152 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1153 of garbage collection.
1155 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1156 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1158 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1159 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1161 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1162 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1163 metadata) during backup.
1165 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1166 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1168 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1169 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1172 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1173 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1174 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1175 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1176 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1177 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1178 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1179 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1180 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1181 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1182 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1183 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1185 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1186 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1187 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1188 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1193 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1194 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1195 instance of RuntimeError.
1197 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1198 speeding them up considerably.
1200 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1201 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1202 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1203 with hundreds of entries.
1205 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1206 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1209 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1210 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1211 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1213 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1214 --------------------------
1216 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1217 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1219 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1220 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1221 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1222 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1223 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1224 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1225 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1226 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1227 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1230 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1231 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1232 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1233 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1234 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1235 permanent drive failure.
1237 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1238 shares. The limitations are:
1240 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1241 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1242 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1243 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1244 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1245 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1246 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1247 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1248 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1249 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1250 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1251 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1252 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1254 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1255 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1256 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1257 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1260 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1261 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1262 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1263 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1264 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1265 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1266 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1267 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1268 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1269 considered highly unusual.
1271 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1272 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1273 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1275 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1276 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1277 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1278 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1279 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1280 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1281 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1282 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1283 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1284 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1285 button will appear on the results page.
1287 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1288 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1289 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1290 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1291 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1292 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1298 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1299 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1300 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1301 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1302 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1303 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1304 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1305 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1306 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1307 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1308 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1309 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1310 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1311 to run from a daily cronjob.
1313 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1314 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1315 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1316 $target/Latest) from working.
1321 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1322 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1323 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1324 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1325 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1326 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1327 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1328 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1329 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1330 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1331 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1332 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1337 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1338 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1339 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1340 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1341 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1342 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1343 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1344 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1345 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1346 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1351 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1352 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1353 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1354 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1355 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1358 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1359 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1360 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1361 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1362 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1363 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1364 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1366 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1367 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1368 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1370 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1371 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1372 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1373 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1374 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1376 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1379 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1380 - tahoe debug dump-share
1381 - tahoe debug find-shares
1382 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1383 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1385 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1386 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1387 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1390 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1391 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1392 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1393 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1394 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1399 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1400 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1401 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1402 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1403 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1404 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1405 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1406 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1407 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1408 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1409 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1410 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1411 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1413 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1414 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1415 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1416 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1417 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1418 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1420 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1421 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1422 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1423 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1424 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1425 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1426 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1427 deep-check operations.
1429 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1430 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1431 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1432 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1433 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1436 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1437 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1438 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1439 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1440 "same-origin policy".
1442 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1443 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1444 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1445 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1446 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1447 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1448 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1449 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1450 processing by operations staff.
1452 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1453 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1454 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1455 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1456 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1457 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1459 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1460 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1461 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1462 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1463 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1464 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1465 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1467 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1468 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1469 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1470 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1471 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1472 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1473 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1474 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1476 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1477 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1478 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1479 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1480 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1481 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1482 target) of a t=rename command.
1487 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1488 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1489 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1490 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1491 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1492 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1493 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1494 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1497 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1498 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1499 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1500 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1501 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1502 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1503 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1504 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1505 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1506 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1508 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1509 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1511 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1512 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1513 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1514 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1515 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1518 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1519 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1520 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1521 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1522 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1523 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1524 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1526 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1527 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1528 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1529 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1530 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1532 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1533 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1534 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1535 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1536 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1537 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1538 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1540 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1541 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1542 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1544 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1545 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1546 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1548 Grid Management Tools
1549 '''''''''''''''''''''
1551 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1552 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1554 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1555 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1556 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1557 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1558 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1559 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1560 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1561 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1562 before the grid is completely full.
1564 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1565 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1566 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1568 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1569 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1570 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1571 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1572 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1573 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1574 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1575 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1576 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1577 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1579 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1580 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1581 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1582 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1583 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1584 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1586 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1587 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1589 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1590 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1591 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1592 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1593 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1594 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1595 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1596 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1598 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1599 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1601 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1602 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1603 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1605 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1606 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1607 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1608 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1609 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1610 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1611 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1612 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1613 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1614 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1615 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1620 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1621 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1622 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1624 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1625 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1626 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1629 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1630 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1631 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1634 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1635 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1636 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1637 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1638 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1639 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1641 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1642 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1643 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1644 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1646 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1647 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1649 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1650 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1651 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1652 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1655 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1657 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1658 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1659 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1660 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1662 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1663 --------------------------
1668 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1669 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1670 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1671 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1672 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1673 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1674 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1675 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1676 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1677 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1678 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1681 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1682 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1688 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1689 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1690 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1691 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1692 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1698 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1699 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1700 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1701 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1703 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1704 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1705 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1706 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1707 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1710 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1711 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1712 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1713 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1714 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1715 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1717 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1718 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1719 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1720 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1721 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1722 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1725 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1726 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1728 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1729 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1730 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1731 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1732 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1733 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1734 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1735 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1736 (which may take a very long time).
1738 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1740 Operations/Packaging
1741 ''''''''''''''''''''
1743 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1744 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1745 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1746 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1747 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1748 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1749 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1752 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1753 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1754 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1756 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1757 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1758 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1761 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1762 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1763 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1769 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1770 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1771 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1772 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1773 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1774 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1775 directory for a second time.
1777 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1778 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1779 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1780 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1781 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1782 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1784 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1785 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1786 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1787 from the web browser end.
1789 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1790 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1791 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1793 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1794 --------------------------
1796 CLI: new "alias" model
1797 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1799 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1800 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1801 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1803 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1804 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1806 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1807 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1808 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1809 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1811 wapi: new pages, new commands
1812 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1814 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1816 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1817 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1818 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1819 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1821 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1822 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1823 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1824 new "cp -r" command.
1826 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1828 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1829 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1831 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1834 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1836 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1837 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1839 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1840 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1842 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1845 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1846 - tahoe_estimate_files
1847 - mutable files published/retrieved
1856 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1858 New Mutable-File Code
1859 '''''''''''''''''''''
1861 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1862 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1863 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1864 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1866 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1867 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1868 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1869 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1871 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1872 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1873 published when in fact it failed.
1878 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1879 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1880 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1882 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1883 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1884 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1885 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1886 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1888 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1889 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1890 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1891 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1892 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1893 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1894 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1896 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1897 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1898 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1899 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1900 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1901 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1903 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1904 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1906 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1907 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1908 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1909 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1910 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1912 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1913 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1915 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1916 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1917 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1918 order. This has been fixed.
1920 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1921 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1922 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1923 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1924 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst