1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.9.0 (2011-??-??)
6 --------------------------
14 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF, which stands
15 for "Medium Density Mutable Files". These are capable of providing more
16 efficient access and update of parts of a file. To ensure compatibility
17 with previous versions, MDMF is not yet the default format for mutable
18 files. Memory usage of a gateway when uploading and downloading MDMF
19 files may be higher than expected in this release. (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
20 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
21 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
22 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
23 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
24 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`_ for documentation.
26 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
27 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
28 `<docs/configuration.rst>`_ for more details. (`#1425`_)
29 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
30 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
31 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
32 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
34 Configuration/Behavior Changes
35 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
37 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
38 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
39 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
40 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the
41 filesystem containing the storage/shares/ directory. Previously they
42 looked at the filesystem containing the storage/ directory. This allows
43 storage/shares/, rather than storage/, to be a mount point or a symlink
44 pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
45 - 'tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE' will modify the existing mutable file instead of
46 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
47 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
48 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
53 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
54 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
56 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the 'tahoe put' and
57 'tahoe cp' commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
58 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
59 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
60 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
61 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.2 (about
62 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
67 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
68 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
69 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
70 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
71 docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
72 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
73 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
74 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
75 (any version of each)::
76 * Academic Free License
77 * Apple Public Source License
78 * BitTorrent Open Source License
79 * Lucent Public License
80 * Jabber Open Source License
81 * Common Development and Distribution License
82 * Microsoft Public License
83 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
84 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
85 * Open Software License
87 Compatibility and Dependencies
88 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
90 - An incompatibility of zope.interface versions 3.6.4 and 3.6.5 with Nevow
91 has been resolved. Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later version
92 of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
93 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1. This ensures
94 that we no longer require pywin32 on Windows, that the new drop-upload
95 feature has the required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is
96 never necessary to patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend.
97 (`#1274`_, `#1429`_, `#1438`_)
98 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
99 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
104 - When the '--version' or '--version-and-path' options to 'tahoe' were
105 used and the version of a dependency could not be parsed, an unhelpful
106 error message would be given. (`#1355`_, `#1388`_)
107 - The tahoe_files munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number of
108 share files. (`#1391`_)
109 - A ``man`` page has been added. (`#1420`_)
110 - Nodes now emit "None" for percentiles with higher implied precision
111 than the number of observations can support. Older stats gatherers
112 will throw an exception if they gather stats from a new storage server
113 and it sends a "None" for a percentile. (`#1392`_)
114 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
115 - Other minor changes: #636, #1366, #1412, #1344, #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441,
118 .. _`#393`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
119 .. _`#1079`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
120 .. _`#1104`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
121 .. _`#1268`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
122 .. _`#1274`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
123 .. _`#1304`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
124 .. _`#1355`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1355
125 .. _`#1383`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
126 .. _`#1384`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
127 .. _`#1385`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
128 .. _`#1388`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1388
129 .. _`#1391`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
130 .. _`#1392`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1392
131 .. _`#1395`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
132 .. _`#1409`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
133 .. _`#1420`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
134 .. _`#1425`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
135 .. _`#1429`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
136 .. _`#1435`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
137 .. _`#1438`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
138 .. _`#1454`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
139 .. _`#1507`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
142 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
143 --------------------------
145 Security-related Bugfix
146 '''''''''''''''''''''''
148 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
149 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
150 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
151 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
152 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
153 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
154 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
156 .. _`#1528`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
159 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
160 --------------------------
162 Compatibility and Dependencies
163 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
165 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
166 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
167 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
168 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
169 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
170 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
171 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
172 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
178 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
180 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
181 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
182 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
184 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
185 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
186 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
187 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
188 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
189 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
190 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
192 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
193 .. _`#1208`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
194 .. _`#1282`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
195 .. _`#1286`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
196 .. _`#1287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
197 .. _`#1296`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
198 .. _`#1337`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
201 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
202 --------------------------
204 Bugfixes and Improvements
205 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
207 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
208 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
209 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
211 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
212 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
213 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
214 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
216 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
217 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
218 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
219 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
220 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
221 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
222 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
223 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
224 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
225 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
226 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
227 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
228 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
229 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
231 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
232 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
233 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
238 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
239 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
240 platforms. (`#1262`_)
245 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
246 systems can install without having a compiler.
247 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
248 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
249 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
251 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
252 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
253 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
254 version number. (`#1233`_)
259 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
261 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
262 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
265 .. _`#71`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
266 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
267 .. _`#1212`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
268 .. _`#1045`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
269 .. _`#1190`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
270 .. _`#1216`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
271 .. _`#1223`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
272 .. _`#1224`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
273 .. _`#1225`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
274 .. _`#1232`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
275 .. _`#1233`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
276 .. _`#1241`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
277 .. _`#1253`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
278 .. _`#1255`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
279 .. _`#1262`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
282 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
283 --------------------------
288 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
289 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
290 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
291 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
292 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
293 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
294 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
295 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
296 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
297 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
298 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
300 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
301 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
304 Bugfixes and Improvements
305 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
307 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
308 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
310 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
311 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
312 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
314 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
315 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
316 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
317 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
318 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
319 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
324 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
325 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
327 .. _`#188`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
328 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
329 .. _`#288`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
330 .. _`#448`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
331 .. _`#685`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
332 .. _`#706`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
333 .. _`#715`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
334 .. _`#772`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
335 .. _`#798`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
336 .. _`#800`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
337 .. _`#890`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
338 .. _`#983`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
339 .. _`#990`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
340 .. _`#1055`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
341 .. _`#1074`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
342 .. _`#1108`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
343 .. _`#1155`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
344 .. _`#1170`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
345 .. _`#1191`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
346 .. _`#1127`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
347 .. _`#1129`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
348 .. _`#1131`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
349 .. _`#1166`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
350 .. _`#1175`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
352 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
353 --------------------------
355 Bugfixes and Improvements
356 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
358 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
359 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
360 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
361 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
362 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
364 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
366 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
368 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
369 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
370 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
371 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
373 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
374 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
375 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
380 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
381 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
383 .. _`#776`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
384 .. _`#923`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
385 .. _`#961`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
386 .. _`#967`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
387 .. _`#1051`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
388 .. _`#1067`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
389 .. _`#1072`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
390 .. _`#1083`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
391 .. _`#1097`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
392 .. _`#1098`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
393 .. _`#1099`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
394 .. _`#1117`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
395 .. _`#1118`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
398 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
399 --------------------------
404 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
405 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
406 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
407 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
408 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
410 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
411 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
412 characters on all supported platforms:
414 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
415 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
417 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
418 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
420 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
421 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
422 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
424 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
425 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
426 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
427 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
428 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
429 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
430 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
431 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
432 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
433 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
434 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
435 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
436 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
437 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
438 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
440 Bugfixes and Improvements
441 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
443 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
444 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
445 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
447 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
448 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
449 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
450 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
452 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
454 - ImportError: No module named
455 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
456 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
457 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
458 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
459 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
460 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
461 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
462 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
463 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
464 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
465 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
466 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
468 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
474 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
475 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
481 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
482 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
486 - mock (only required by unit tests)
488 .. _`#534`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
489 .. _`#608`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
490 .. _`#778`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
491 .. _`#803`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
492 .. _`#902`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
493 .. _`#911`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
494 .. _`#924`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
495 .. _`#937`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
496 .. _`#933`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
497 .. _`#968`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
498 .. _`#973`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
499 .. _`#1024`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
500 .. _`#1027`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
501 .. _`#1028`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
502 .. _`#1033`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
503 .. _`#1034`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
504 .. _`#1037`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
505 .. _`#1054`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
506 .. _`#1062`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
507 .. _`#1066`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
508 .. _`#1068`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
509 .. _`#1076`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
510 .. _`#1082`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
511 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
512 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
514 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
515 --------------------------
520 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
522 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
523 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
524 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
525 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
528 Usability Improvements
529 ''''''''''''''''''''''
531 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
533 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
534 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
535 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
536 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
538 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
539 --------------------------
544 - Immutable Directories
546 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
547 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
548 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
549 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
550 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
551 immutable directories).
553 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
554 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
555 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
556 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
557 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
558 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
559 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
561 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
562 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
563 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
564 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
565 the listing of that directory.
567 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
570 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
571 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
573 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
576 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
577 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
578 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
579 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
580 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
581 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
582 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
584 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
585 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
586 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
587 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
588 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
589 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
590 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
591 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
592 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
593 considerably. (`#606`_)
595 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
596 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
597 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
598 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
599 directories and stat() all your local files.
601 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
602 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
603 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
604 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
605 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
606 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
607 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
608 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
610 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
611 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
612 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
615 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
616 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
617 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
618 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
619 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
620 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
621 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
623 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
626 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
627 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
628 "node" process, which has several components that can be
629 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
630 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
631 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
632 future release will make it optional. There are three special
633 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
634 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
636 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
637 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
638 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
639 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
640 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
641 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
643 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
644 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
645 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
646 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
647 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
648 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
649 create-node" instead.
651 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
652 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
653 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
654 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
656 - Performance Improvements
658 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
659 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
660 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
661 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
662 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
663 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
664 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
665 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
666 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
667 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
668 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
669 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
670 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
671 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
672 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
673 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
674 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
675 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
676 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
681 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
682 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
683 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
684 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
687 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
688 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
689 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
690 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
692 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
693 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
696 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
697 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
698 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
701 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
702 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
705 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
708 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
710 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
711 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
713 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
714 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
716 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
717 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
718 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
719 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
720 additional licensing text was added.
722 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
724 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
725 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
727 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
728 has been improved. (`#773`_)
730 For other changes not mentioned here, see
731 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
732 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
733 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
735 .. _`#121`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
736 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
737 .. _`#381`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
738 .. _`#457`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
739 .. _`#533`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
740 .. _`#577`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
741 .. _`#606`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
742 .. _`#607`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
743 .. _`#637`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
744 .. _`#641`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
745 .. _`#646`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
746 .. _`#681`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
747 .. _`#729`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
748 .. _`#741`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
749 .. _`#760`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
750 .. _`#761`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
751 .. _`#768`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
752 .. _`#773`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
753 .. _`#786`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
754 .. _`#828`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
755 .. _`#833`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
756 .. _`#859`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
757 .. _`#874`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
758 .. _`#875`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
759 .. _`#931`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
760 .. _`#837`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
761 .. _`#850`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
762 .. _`#927`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
763 .. _`#928`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
764 .. _`#939`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
765 .. _`#948`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
766 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
768 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
769 --------------------------
774 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
775 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
777 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
778 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
779 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
781 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
782 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
783 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
784 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
785 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
787 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
788 directories. (`#705`_)
790 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
791 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
794 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
795 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
796 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
797 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
798 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
800 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
801 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
802 directories from the future. This should improve the user
803 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
804 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
805 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
806 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
807 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
812 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
813 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
814 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
815 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
816 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
817 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
818 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
820 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
821 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
824 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
825 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
826 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
828 Platform/packaging changes
829 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
831 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
832 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
834 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
835 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
836 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
837 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
838 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
839 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
841 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
842 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
843 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
844 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
846 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
848 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
849 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
850 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
852 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
853 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
854 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
861 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
862 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
863 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
867 .. _#392: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
868 .. _#625: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
869 .. _#653: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
870 .. _#683: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
871 .. _#694: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
872 .. _#705: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
873 .. _#722: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
874 .. _#750: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
875 .. _#752: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
877 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
878 --------------------------
883 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
884 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
885 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
886 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
887 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
888 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
889 lease. The process is described in detail in
890 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
892 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
893 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
894 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
896 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
897 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
898 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
899 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
900 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
901 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
902 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
904 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
905 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
907 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
908 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
909 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
910 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
911 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
913 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
914 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
915 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
916 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
917 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
918 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
919 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
924 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
925 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
926 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
927 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
928 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
930 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
931 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
932 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
935 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
936 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
937 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
938 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
939 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
940 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
941 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
942 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
945 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
946 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
947 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
949 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
950 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
951 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
952 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
953 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
954 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
955 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
960 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
961 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
962 of garbage collection.
964 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
965 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
967 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
968 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
970 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
971 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
972 metadata) during backup.
974 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
975 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
977 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
978 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
981 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
982 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
983 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
984 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
985 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
986 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
987 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
988 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
989 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
990 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
991 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
992 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
994 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
995 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
996 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
997 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1002 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1003 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1004 instance of RuntimeError.
1006 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1007 speeding them up considerably.
1009 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1010 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1011 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1012 with hundreds of entries.
1014 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1015 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1018 .. _#442: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1019 .. _#645: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1020 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1022 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1023 --------------------------
1025 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1026 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1028 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1029 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1030 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1031 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1032 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1033 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1034 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1035 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1036 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1039 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1040 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1041 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1042 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1043 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1044 permanent drive failure.
1046 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1047 shares. The limitations are:
1049 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1050 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1051 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1052 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1053 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1054 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1055 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1056 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1057 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1058 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1059 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1060 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1061 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1063 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1064 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1065 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1066 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1069 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1070 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1071 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1072 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1073 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1074 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1075 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1076 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1077 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1078 considered highly unusual.
1080 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1081 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1082 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1084 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1085 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1086 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1087 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1088 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1089 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1090 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1091 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1092 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1093 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1094 button will appear on the results page.
1096 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1097 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1098 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1099 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1100 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1101 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1107 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1108 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1109 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1110 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1111 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1112 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1113 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1114 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1115 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1116 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1117 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1118 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1119 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1120 to run from a daily cronjob.
1122 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1123 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1124 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1125 $target/Latest) from working.
1130 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1131 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1132 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1133 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1134 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1135 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1136 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1137 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1138 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1139 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1140 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1141 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1146 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1147 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1148 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1149 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1150 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1151 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1152 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1153 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1154 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1155 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1160 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1161 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1162 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1163 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1164 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1167 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1168 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1169 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1170 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1171 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1172 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1173 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1175 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1176 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1177 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1179 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1180 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1181 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1182 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1183 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1185 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1188 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1189 - tahoe debug dump-share
1190 - tahoe debug find-shares
1191 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1192 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1194 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1195 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1196 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1199 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1200 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1201 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1202 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1203 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/565 for details.
1208 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1209 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1210 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1211 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1212 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1213 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1214 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1215 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1216 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1217 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1218 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1219 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1220 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1222 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1223 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1224 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1225 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1226 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1227 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1229 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1230 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1231 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1232 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1233 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1234 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1235 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1236 deep-check operations.
1238 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1239 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1240 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1241 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1242 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1245 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1246 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1247 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1248 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1249 "same-origin policy".
1251 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1252 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1253 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1254 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1255 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1256 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1257 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1258 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1259 processing by operations staff.
1261 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1262 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1263 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1264 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1265 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1266 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1268 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1269 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1270 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1271 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1272 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1273 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1274 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1276 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1277 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1278 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1279 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1280 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1281 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1282 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1283 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1285 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1286 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1287 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1288 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1289 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1290 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1291 target) of a t=rename command.
1296 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1297 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1298 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1299 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1300 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1301 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1302 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1303 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1306 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1307 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1308 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1309 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1310 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1311 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1312 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1313 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1314 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1315 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1317 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1318 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1320 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1321 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1322 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1323 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1324 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1327 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1328 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1329 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1330 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1331 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1332 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1333 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1335 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1336 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1337 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1338 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1339 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1341 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1342 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1343 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1344 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1345 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1346 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1347 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1349 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1350 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1351 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1353 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1354 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1355 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1357 Grid Management Tools
1358 '''''''''''''''''''''
1360 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1361 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1363 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1364 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1365 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1366 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1367 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1368 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1369 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1370 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1371 before the grid is completely full.
1373 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1374 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1375 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1377 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1378 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1379 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1380 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1381 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1382 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1383 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1384 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1385 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1386 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1388 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1389 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1390 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1391 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1392 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1393 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1395 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1396 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1398 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1399 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1400 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1401 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1402 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1403 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1404 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1405 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1407 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1408 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1410 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1411 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1412 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1414 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1415 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1416 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1417 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1418 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1419 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1420 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1421 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1422 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1423 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1424 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1429 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1430 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1431 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning .
1433 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1434 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1435 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1438 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1439 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1440 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1443 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1444 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1445 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1446 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1447 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1448 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1450 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1451 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1452 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1453 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1455 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1456 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1458 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1459 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1460 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1461 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1464 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1466 .. _#512: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1467 .. _#518: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1468 .. _#521: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1469 .. _#531: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1471 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1472 --------------------------
1477 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1478 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1479 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1480 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1481 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1482 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1483 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1484 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1485 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1486 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1487 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1490 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1491 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1497 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1498 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1499 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1500 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1501 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1507 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1508 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1509 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1510 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1512 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1513 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1514 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1515 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1516 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1519 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1520 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1521 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1522 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1523 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1524 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1526 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1527 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1528 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1529 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1530 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1531 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1534 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1535 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1537 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1538 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1539 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1540 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1541 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1542 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1543 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1544 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1545 (which may take a very long time).
1547 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1549 Operations/Packaging
1550 ''''''''''''''''''''
1552 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1553 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1554 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1555 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1556 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1557 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1558 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1561 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1562 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1563 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1565 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1566 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1567 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1570 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1571 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1572 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1578 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1579 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1580 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1581 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1582 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1583 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1584 directory for a second time.
1586 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1587 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1588 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1589 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1590 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1591 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1593 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1594 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1595 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1596 from the web browser end.
1598 .. _#463: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1599 .. _#491: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1600 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1602 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1603 --------------------------
1605 CLI: new "alias" model
1606 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1608 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1609 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1610 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1612 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1613 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1615 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1616 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1617 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1618 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1620 wapi: new pages, new commands
1621 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1623 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1625 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1626 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1627 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1628 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1630 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1631 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1632 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1633 new "cp -r" command.
1635 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1637 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1638 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1640 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1643 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1645 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1646 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1648 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1649 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1651 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1654 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1655 - tahoe_estimate_files
1656 - mutable files published/retrieved
1665 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1667 New Mutable-File Code
1668 '''''''''''''''''''''
1670 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1671 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1672 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1673 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1675 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1676 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1677 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1678 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1680 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1681 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1682 published when in fact it failed.
1687 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1688 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1689 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1691 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1692 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1693 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1694 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1695 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1697 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1698 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1699 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1700 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1701 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1702 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1703 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1705 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1706 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1707 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1708 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1709 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1710 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1712 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1713 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1715 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1716 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1717 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1718 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1719 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1721 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1722 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1724 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1725 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1726 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1727 order. This has been fixed.
1729 .. _#221: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1730 .. _#374: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1731 .. _#391: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1732 .. _#439: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1733 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst