1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.9.0 (2011-??-??)
6 --------------------------
8 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
9 docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst for how to use sshfs. (`#1409`_)
10 - Nodes now emit "None" for percentiles with higher implied precision
11 than the number of observations can support. Older stats gatherers
12 will throw an exception if they gather stats from a new storage
13 server and it sends a "None" for a percentile. (`#1392`_)
15 .. _`#1409`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
17 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
18 --------------------------
20 Compatibility and Dependencies
21 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
23 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
24 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
25 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
26 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
27 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
28 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
29 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
30 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
36 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
38 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
39 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
40 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
42 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
43 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
44 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
45 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
46 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
47 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
48 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
50 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
51 .. _`#1208`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
52 .. _`#1282`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
53 .. _`#1286`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
54 .. _`#1287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
55 .. _`#1296`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
56 .. _`#1337`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
59 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
60 --------------------------
62 Bugfixes and Improvements
63 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
65 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
66 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
67 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
69 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
70 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
71 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
72 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
74 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
75 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
76 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
77 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
78 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
79 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
80 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
81 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
82 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
83 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
84 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
85 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
86 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
87 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
89 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
90 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
91 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
96 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
97 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
103 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
104 systems can install without having a compiler.
105 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
106 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
107 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
109 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
110 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
111 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
112 version number. (`#1233`_)
117 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
119 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
120 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
123 .. _`#71`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
124 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
125 .. _`#1212`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
126 .. _`#1045`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
127 .. _`#1190`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
128 .. _`#1216`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
129 .. _`#1223`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
130 .. _`#1224`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
131 .. _`#1225`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
132 .. _`#1232`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
133 .. _`#1233`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
134 .. _`#1241`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
135 .. _`#1253`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
136 .. _`#1255`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
137 .. _`#1262`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
140 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
141 --------------------------
146 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
147 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
148 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
149 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
150 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
151 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
152 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
153 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
154 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
155 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
156 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
158 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
159 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
162 Bugfixes and Improvements
163 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
165 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
166 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
168 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
169 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
170 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
172 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
173 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
174 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
175 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
176 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
177 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
182 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
183 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
185 .. _`#188`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
186 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
187 .. _`#288`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
188 .. _`#448`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
189 .. _`#685`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
190 .. _`#706`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
191 .. _`#715`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
192 .. _`#772`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
193 .. _`#798`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
194 .. _`#800`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
195 .. _`#890`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
196 .. _`#983`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
197 .. _`#990`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
198 .. _`#1055`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
199 .. _`#1074`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
200 .. _`#1108`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
201 .. _`#1155`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
202 .. _`#1170`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
203 .. _`#1191`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
204 .. _`#1127`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
205 .. _`#1129`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
206 .. _`#1131`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
207 .. _`#1166`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
208 .. _`#1175`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
210 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
211 --------------------------
213 Bugfixes and Improvements
214 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
216 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
217 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
218 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
219 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
220 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
222 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
224 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
226 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
227 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
228 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
229 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
231 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
232 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
233 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
238 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
239 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
241 .. _`#776`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
242 .. _`#923`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
243 .. _`#961`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
244 .. _`#967`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
245 .. _`#1051`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
246 .. _`#1067`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
247 .. _`#1072`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
248 .. _`#1083`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
249 .. _`#1097`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
250 .. _`#1098`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
251 .. _`#1099`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
252 .. _`#1117`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
253 .. _`#1118`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
256 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
257 --------------------------
262 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
263 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
264 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
265 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
266 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
268 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
269 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
270 characters on all supported platforms:
272 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
273 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
275 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
276 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
278 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
279 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
280 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
282 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
283 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
284 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
285 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
286 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
287 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
288 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
289 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
290 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
291 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
292 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
293 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
294 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
295 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
296 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
298 Bugfixes and Improvements
299 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
301 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
302 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
303 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
305 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
306 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
307 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
308 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
310 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
312 - ImportError: No module named
313 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
314 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
315 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
316 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
317 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
318 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
319 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
320 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
321 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
322 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
323 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
324 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
326 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
332 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
333 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
339 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
340 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
344 - mock (only required by unit tests)
346 .. _`#534`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
347 .. _`#608`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
348 .. _`#778`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
349 .. _`#803`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
350 .. _`#902`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
351 .. _`#911`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
352 .. _`#924`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
353 .. _`#937`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
354 .. _`#933`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
355 .. _`#968`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
356 .. _`#973`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
357 .. _`#1024`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
358 .. _`#1027`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
359 .. _`#1028`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
360 .. _`#1033`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
361 .. _`#1034`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
362 .. _`#1037`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
363 .. _`#1054`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
364 .. _`#1062`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
365 .. _`#1066`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
366 .. _`#1068`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
367 .. _`#1076`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
368 .. _`#1082`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
369 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
370 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
372 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
373 --------------------------
378 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
380 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
381 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
382 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
383 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
386 Usability Improvements
387 ''''''''''''''''''''''
389 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
391 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
392 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
393 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
394 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
396 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
397 --------------------------
402 - Immutable Directories
404 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
405 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
406 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
407 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
408 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
409 immutable directories).
411 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
412 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
413 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
414 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
415 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
416 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
417 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
419 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
420 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
421 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
422 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
423 the listing of that directory.
425 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
428 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
429 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
431 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
434 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
435 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
436 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
437 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
438 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
439 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
440 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
442 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
443 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
444 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
445 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
446 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
447 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
448 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
449 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
450 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
451 considerably. (`#606`_)
453 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
454 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
455 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
456 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
457 directories and stat() all your local files.
459 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
460 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
461 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
462 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
463 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
464 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
465 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
466 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
468 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
469 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
470 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
473 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
474 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
475 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
476 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
477 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
478 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
479 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
481 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
484 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
485 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
486 "node" process, which has several components that can be
487 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
488 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
489 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
490 future release will make it optional. There are three special
491 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
492 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
494 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
495 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
496 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
497 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
498 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
499 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
501 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
502 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
503 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
504 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
505 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
506 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
507 create-node" instead.
509 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
510 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
511 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
512 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
514 - Performance Improvements
516 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
517 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
518 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
519 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
520 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
521 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
522 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
523 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
524 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
525 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
526 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
527 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
528 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
529 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
530 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
531 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
532 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
533 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
534 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
539 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
540 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
541 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
542 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
545 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
546 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
547 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
548 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
550 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
551 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
554 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
555 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
556 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
559 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
560 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
563 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
566 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
568 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
569 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
571 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
572 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
574 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
575 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
576 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
577 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
578 additional licensing text was added.
580 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
582 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
583 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
585 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
586 has been improved. (`#773`_)
588 For other changes not mentioned here, see
589 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
590 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
591 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
593 .. _`#121`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
594 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
595 .. _`#381`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
596 .. _`#457`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
597 .. _`#533`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
598 .. _`#577`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
599 .. _`#606`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
600 .. _`#607`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
601 .. _`#637`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
602 .. _`#641`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
603 .. _`#646`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
604 .. _`#681`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
605 .. _`#729`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
606 .. _`#741`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
607 .. _`#760`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
608 .. _`#761`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
609 .. _`#768`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
610 .. _`#773`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
611 .. _`#786`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
612 .. _`#828`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
613 .. _`#833`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
614 .. _`#859`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
615 .. _`#874`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
616 .. _`#875`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
617 .. _`#931`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
618 .. _`#837`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
619 .. _`#850`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
620 .. _`#927`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
621 .. _`#928`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
622 .. _`#939`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
623 .. _`#948`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
624 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
626 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
627 --------------------------
632 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
633 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
635 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
636 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
637 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
639 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
640 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
641 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
642 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
643 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
645 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
646 directories. (`#705`_)
648 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
649 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
652 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
653 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
654 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
655 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
656 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
658 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
659 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
660 directories from the future. This should improve the user
661 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
662 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
663 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
664 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
665 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
670 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
671 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
672 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
673 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
674 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
675 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
676 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
678 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
679 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
682 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
683 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
684 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
686 Platform/packaging changes
687 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
689 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
690 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
692 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
693 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
694 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
695 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
696 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
697 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
699 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
700 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
701 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
702 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
704 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
706 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
707 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
708 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
710 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
711 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
712 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
719 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
720 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
721 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
725 .. _#392: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
726 .. _#625: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
727 .. _#653: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
728 .. _#683: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
729 .. _#694: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
730 .. _#705: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
731 .. _#722: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
732 .. _#750: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
733 .. _#752: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
735 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
736 --------------------------
741 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
742 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
743 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
744 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
745 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
746 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
747 lease. The process is described in detail in
748 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
750 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
751 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
752 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
754 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
755 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
756 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
757 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
758 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
759 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
760 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
762 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
763 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
765 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
766 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
767 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
768 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
769 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
771 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
772 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
773 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
774 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
775 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
776 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
777 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
782 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
783 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
784 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
785 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
786 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
788 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
789 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
790 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
793 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
794 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
795 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
796 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
797 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
798 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
799 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
800 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
803 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
804 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
805 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
807 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
808 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
809 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
810 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
811 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
812 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
813 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
818 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
819 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
820 of garbage collection.
822 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
823 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
825 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
826 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
828 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
829 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
830 metadata) during backup.
832 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
833 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
835 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
836 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
839 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
840 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
841 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
842 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
843 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
844 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
845 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
846 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
847 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
848 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
849 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
850 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
852 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
853 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
854 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
855 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
860 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
861 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
862 instance of RuntimeError.
864 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
865 speeding them up considerably.
867 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
868 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
869 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
870 with hundreds of entries.
872 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
873 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
876 .. _#442: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
877 .. _#645: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
878 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
880 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
881 --------------------------
883 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
884 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
886 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
887 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
888 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
889 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
890 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
891 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
892 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
893 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
894 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
897 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
898 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
899 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
900 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
901 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
902 permanent drive failure.
904 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
905 shares. The limitations are:
907 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
908 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
909 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
910 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
911 and most fields of the shares are validated.
912 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
913 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
914 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
915 corrupted shares will be left in place.
916 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
917 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
918 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
919 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
921 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
922 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
923 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
924 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
927 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
928 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
929 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
930 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
931 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
932 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
933 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
934 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
935 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
936 considered highly unusual.
938 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
939 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
940 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
942 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
943 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
944 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
945 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
946 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
947 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
948 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
949 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
950 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
951 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
952 button will appear on the results page.
954 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
955 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
956 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
957 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
958 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
959 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
965 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
966 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
967 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
968 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
969 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
970 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
971 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
972 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
973 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
974 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
975 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
976 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
977 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
978 to run from a daily cronjob.
980 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
981 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
982 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
983 $target/Latest) from working.
988 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
989 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
990 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
991 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
992 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
993 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
994 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
995 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
996 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
997 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
998 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
999 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1004 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1005 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1006 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1007 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1008 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1009 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1010 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1011 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1012 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1013 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1018 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1019 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1020 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1021 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1022 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1025 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1026 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1027 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1028 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1029 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1030 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1031 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1033 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1034 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1035 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1037 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1038 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1039 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1040 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1041 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1043 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1046 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1047 - tahoe debug dump-share
1048 - tahoe debug find-shares
1049 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1050 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1052 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1053 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1054 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1057 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1058 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1059 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1060 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1061 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/565 for details.
1066 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1067 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1068 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1069 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1070 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1071 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1072 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1073 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1074 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1075 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1076 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1077 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1078 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1080 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1081 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1082 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1083 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1084 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1085 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1087 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1088 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1089 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1090 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1091 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1092 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1093 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1094 deep-check operations.
1096 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1097 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1098 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1099 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1100 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1103 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1104 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1105 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1106 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1107 "same-origin policy".
1109 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1110 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1111 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1112 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1113 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1114 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1115 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1116 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1117 processing by operations staff.
1119 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1120 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1121 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1122 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1123 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1124 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1126 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1127 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1128 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1129 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1130 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1131 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1132 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1134 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1135 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1136 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1137 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1138 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1139 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1140 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1141 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1143 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1144 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1145 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1146 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1147 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1148 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1149 target) of a t=rename command.
1154 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1155 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1156 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1157 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1158 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1159 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1160 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1161 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1164 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1165 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1166 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1167 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1168 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1169 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1170 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1171 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1172 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1173 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1175 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1176 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1178 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1179 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1180 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1181 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1182 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1185 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1186 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1187 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1188 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1189 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1190 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1191 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1193 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1194 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1195 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1196 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1197 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1199 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1200 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1201 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1202 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1203 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1204 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1205 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1207 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1208 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1209 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1211 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1212 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1213 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1215 Grid Management Tools
1216 '''''''''''''''''''''
1218 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1219 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1221 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1222 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1223 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1224 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1225 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1226 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1227 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1228 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1229 before the grid is completely full.
1231 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1232 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1233 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1235 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1236 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1237 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1238 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1239 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1240 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1241 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1242 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1243 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1244 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1246 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1247 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1248 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1249 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1250 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1251 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1253 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1254 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1256 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1257 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1258 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1259 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1260 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1261 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1262 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1263 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1265 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1266 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1268 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1269 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1270 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1272 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1273 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1274 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1275 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1276 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1277 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1278 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1279 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1280 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1281 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1282 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1287 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1288 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1289 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning .
1291 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1292 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1293 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1296 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1297 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1298 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1301 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1302 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1303 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1304 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1305 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1306 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1308 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1309 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1310 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1311 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1313 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1314 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1316 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1317 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1318 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1319 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1322 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1324 .. _#512: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1325 .. _#518: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1326 .. _#521: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1327 .. _#531: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1329 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1330 --------------------------
1335 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1336 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1337 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1338 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1339 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1340 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1341 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1342 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1343 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1344 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1345 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1348 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1349 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1355 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1356 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1357 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1358 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1359 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1365 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1366 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1367 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1368 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1370 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1371 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1372 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1373 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1374 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1377 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1378 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1379 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1380 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1381 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1382 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1384 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1385 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1386 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1387 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1388 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1389 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1392 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1393 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1395 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1396 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1397 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1398 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1399 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1400 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1401 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1402 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1403 (which may take a very long time).
1405 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1407 Operations/Packaging
1408 ''''''''''''''''''''
1410 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1411 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1412 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1413 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1414 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1415 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1416 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1419 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1420 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1421 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1423 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1424 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1425 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1428 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1429 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1430 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1436 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1437 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1438 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1439 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1440 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1441 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1442 directory for a second time.
1444 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1445 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1446 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1447 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1448 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1449 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1451 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1452 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1453 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1454 from the web browser end.
1456 .. _#463: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1457 .. _#491: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1458 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1460 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1461 --------------------------
1463 CLI: new "alias" model
1464 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1466 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1467 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1468 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1470 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1471 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1473 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1474 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1475 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1476 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1478 wapi: new pages, new commands
1479 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1481 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1483 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1484 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1485 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1486 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1488 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1489 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1490 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1491 new "cp -r" command.
1493 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1495 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1496 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1498 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1501 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1503 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1504 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1506 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1507 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1509 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1512 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1513 - tahoe_estimate_files
1514 - mutable files published/retrieved
1523 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1525 New Mutable-File Code
1526 '''''''''''''''''''''
1528 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1529 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1530 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1531 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1533 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1534 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1535 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1536 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1538 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1539 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1540 published when in fact it failed.
1545 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1546 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1547 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1549 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1550 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1551 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1552 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1553 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1555 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1556 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1557 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1558 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1559 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1560 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1561 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1563 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1564 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1565 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1566 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1567 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1568 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1570 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1571 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1573 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1574 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1575 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1576 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1577 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1579 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1580 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1582 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1583 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1584 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1585 order. This has been fixed.
1587 .. _#221: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1588 .. _#374: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1589 .. _#391: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1590 .. _#439: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1591 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst