1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.9.0 (2011-??-??)
6 --------------------------
9 - Nodes now emit "None" for percentiles with higher implied precision
10 than the number of observations can support. Older stats gatherers
11 will throw an exception if they gather stats from a new storage
12 server and it sends a "None" for a percentile. (`#1392`_)
15 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
16 --------------------------
18 Compatibility and Dependencies
19 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
21 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
22 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
23 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
24 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
25 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
26 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
27 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
28 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
34 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
36 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
37 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
38 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
40 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
41 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
42 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
43 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
44 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
45 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
46 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
48 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
49 .. _`#1208`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
50 .. _`#1282`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
51 .. _`#1286`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
52 .. _`#1287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
53 .. _`#1296`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
54 .. _`#1337`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
57 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
58 --------------------------
60 Bugfixes and Improvements
61 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
63 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
64 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
65 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
67 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
68 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
69 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
70 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
72 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
73 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
74 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
75 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
76 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
77 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
78 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
79 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
80 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
81 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
82 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
83 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
84 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
85 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
87 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
88 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
89 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
94 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
95 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
101 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
102 systems can install without having a compiler.
103 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
104 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
105 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
107 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
108 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
109 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
110 version number. (`#1233`_)
115 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
117 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
118 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
121 .. _`#71`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
122 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
123 .. _`#1212`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
124 .. _`#1045`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
125 .. _`#1190`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
126 .. _`#1216`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
127 .. _`#1223`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
128 .. _`#1224`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
129 .. _`#1225`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
130 .. _`#1232`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
131 .. _`#1233`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
132 .. _`#1241`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
133 .. _`#1253`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
134 .. _`#1255`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
135 .. _`#1262`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
138 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
139 --------------------------
144 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
145 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
146 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
147 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
148 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
149 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
150 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
151 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
152 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
153 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
154 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
156 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
157 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
160 Bugfixes and Improvements
161 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
163 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
164 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
166 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
167 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
168 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
170 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
171 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
172 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
173 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
174 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
175 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
180 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
181 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
183 .. _`#188`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
184 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
185 .. _`#288`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
186 .. _`#448`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
187 .. _`#685`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
188 .. _`#706`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
189 .. _`#715`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
190 .. _`#772`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
191 .. _`#798`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
192 .. _`#800`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
193 .. _`#890`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
194 .. _`#983`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
195 .. _`#990`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
196 .. _`#1055`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
197 .. _`#1074`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
198 .. _`#1108`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
199 .. _`#1155`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
200 .. _`#1170`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
201 .. _`#1191`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
202 .. _`#1127`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
203 .. _`#1129`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
204 .. _`#1131`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
205 .. _`#1166`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
206 .. _`#1175`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
208 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
209 --------------------------
211 Bugfixes and Improvements
212 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
214 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
215 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
216 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
217 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
218 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
220 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
222 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
224 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
225 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
226 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
227 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
229 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
230 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
231 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
236 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
237 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
239 .. _`#776`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
240 .. _`#923`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
241 .. _`#961`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
242 .. _`#967`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
243 .. _`#1051`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
244 .. _`#1067`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
245 .. _`#1072`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
246 .. _`#1083`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
247 .. _`#1097`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
248 .. _`#1098`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
249 .. _`#1099`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
250 .. _`#1117`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
251 .. _`#1118`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
254 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
255 --------------------------
260 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
261 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
262 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
263 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
264 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
266 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
267 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
268 characters on all supported platforms:
270 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
271 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
273 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
274 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
276 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
277 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
278 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
280 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
281 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
282 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
283 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
284 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
285 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
286 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
287 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
288 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
289 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
290 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
291 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
292 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
293 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
294 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
296 Bugfixes and Improvements
297 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
299 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
300 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
301 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
303 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
304 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
305 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
306 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
308 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
310 - ImportError: No module named
311 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
312 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
313 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
314 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
315 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
316 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
317 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
318 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
319 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
320 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
321 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
322 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
324 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
330 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
331 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
337 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
338 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
342 - mock (only required by unit tests)
344 .. _`#534`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
345 .. _`#608`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
346 .. _`#778`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
347 .. _`#803`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
348 .. _`#902`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
349 .. _`#911`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
350 .. _`#924`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
351 .. _`#937`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
352 .. _`#933`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
353 .. _`#968`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
354 .. _`#973`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
355 .. _`#1024`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
356 .. _`#1027`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
357 .. _`#1028`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
358 .. _`#1033`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
359 .. _`#1034`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
360 .. _`#1037`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
361 .. _`#1054`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
362 .. _`#1062`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
363 .. _`#1066`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
364 .. _`#1068`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
365 .. _`#1076`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
366 .. _`#1082`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
367 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
368 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
370 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
371 --------------------------
376 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
378 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
379 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
380 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
381 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
384 Usability Improvements
385 ''''''''''''''''''''''
387 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
389 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
390 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
391 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
392 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
394 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
395 --------------------------
400 - Immutable Directories
402 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
403 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
404 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
405 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
406 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
407 immutable directories).
409 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
410 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
411 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
412 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
413 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
414 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
415 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
417 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
418 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
419 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
420 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
421 the listing of that directory.
423 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
426 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
427 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
429 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
432 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
433 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
434 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
435 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
436 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
437 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
438 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
440 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
441 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
442 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
443 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
444 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
445 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
446 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
447 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
448 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
449 considerably. (`#606`_)
451 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
452 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
453 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
454 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
455 directories and stat() all your local files.
457 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
458 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
459 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
460 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
461 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
462 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
463 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
464 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
466 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
467 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
468 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
471 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
472 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
473 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
474 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
475 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
476 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
477 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
479 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
482 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
483 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
484 "node" process, which has several components that can be
485 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
486 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
487 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
488 future release will make it optional. There are three special
489 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
490 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
492 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
493 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
494 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
495 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
496 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
497 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
499 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
500 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
501 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
502 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
503 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
504 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
505 create-node" instead.
507 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
508 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
509 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
510 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
512 - Performance Improvements
514 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
515 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
516 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
517 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
518 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
519 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
520 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
521 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
522 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
523 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
524 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
525 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
526 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
527 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
528 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
529 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
530 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
531 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
532 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
537 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
538 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
539 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
540 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
543 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
544 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
545 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
546 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
548 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
549 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
552 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
553 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
554 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
557 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
558 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
561 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
564 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
566 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
567 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
569 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
570 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
572 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
573 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
574 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
575 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
576 additional licensing text was added.
578 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
580 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
581 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
583 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
584 has been improved. (`#773`_)
586 For other changes not mentioned here, see
587 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
588 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
589 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
591 .. _`#121`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
592 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
593 .. _`#381`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
594 .. _`#457`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
595 .. _`#533`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
596 .. _`#577`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
597 .. _`#606`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
598 .. _`#607`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
599 .. _`#637`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
600 .. _`#641`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
601 .. _`#646`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
602 .. _`#681`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
603 .. _`#729`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
604 .. _`#741`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
605 .. _`#760`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
606 .. _`#761`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
607 .. _`#768`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
608 .. _`#773`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
609 .. _`#786`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
610 .. _`#828`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
611 .. _`#833`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
612 .. _`#859`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
613 .. _`#874`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
614 .. _`#875`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
615 .. _`#931`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
616 .. _`#837`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
617 .. _`#850`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
618 .. _`#927`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
619 .. _`#928`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
620 .. _`#939`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
621 .. _`#948`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
622 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
624 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
625 --------------------------
630 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
631 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
633 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
634 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
635 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
637 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
638 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
639 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
640 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
641 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
643 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
644 directories. (`#705`_)
646 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
647 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
650 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
651 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
652 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
653 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
654 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
656 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
657 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
658 directories from the future. This should improve the user
659 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
660 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
661 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
662 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
663 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
668 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
669 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
670 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
671 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
672 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
673 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
674 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
676 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
677 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
680 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
681 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
682 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
684 Platform/packaging changes
685 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
687 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
688 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
690 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
691 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
692 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
693 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
694 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
695 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
697 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
698 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
699 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
700 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
702 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
704 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
705 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
706 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
708 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
709 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
710 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
717 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
718 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
719 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
723 .. _#392: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
724 .. _#625: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
725 .. _#653: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
726 .. _#683: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
727 .. _#694: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
728 .. _#705: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
729 .. _#722: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
730 .. _#750: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
731 .. _#752: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
733 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
734 --------------------------
739 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
740 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
741 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
742 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
743 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
744 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
745 lease. The process is described in detail in
746 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
748 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
749 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
750 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
752 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
753 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
754 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
755 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
756 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
757 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
758 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
760 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
761 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
763 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
764 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
765 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
766 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
767 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
769 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
770 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
771 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
772 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
773 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
774 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
775 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
780 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
781 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
782 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
783 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
784 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
786 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
787 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
788 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
791 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
792 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
793 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
794 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
795 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
796 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
797 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
798 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
801 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
802 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
803 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
805 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
806 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
807 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
808 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
809 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
810 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
811 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
816 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
817 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
818 of garbage collection.
820 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
821 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
823 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
824 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
826 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
827 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
828 metadata) during backup.
830 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
831 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
833 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
834 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
837 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
838 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
839 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
840 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
841 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
842 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
843 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
844 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
845 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
846 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
847 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
848 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
850 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
851 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
852 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
853 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
858 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
859 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
860 instance of RuntimeError.
862 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
863 speeding them up considerably.
865 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
866 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
867 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
868 with hundreds of entries.
870 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
871 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
874 .. _#442: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
875 .. _#645: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
876 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
878 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
879 --------------------------
881 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
882 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
884 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
885 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
886 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
887 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
888 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
889 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
890 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
891 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
892 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
895 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
896 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
897 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
898 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
899 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
900 permanent drive failure.
902 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
903 shares. The limitations are:
905 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
906 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
907 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
908 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
909 and most fields of the shares are validated.
910 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
911 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
912 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
913 corrupted shares will be left in place.
914 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
915 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
916 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
917 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
919 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
920 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
921 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
922 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
925 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
926 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
927 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
928 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
929 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
930 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
931 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
932 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
933 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
934 considered highly unusual.
936 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
937 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
938 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
940 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
941 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
942 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
943 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
944 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
945 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
946 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
947 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
948 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
949 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
950 button will appear on the results page.
952 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
953 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
954 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
955 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
956 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
957 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
963 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
964 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
965 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
966 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
967 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
968 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
969 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
970 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
971 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
972 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
973 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
974 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
975 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
976 to run from a daily cronjob.
978 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
979 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
980 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
981 $target/Latest) from working.
986 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
987 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
988 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
989 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
990 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
991 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
992 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
993 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
994 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
995 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
996 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
997 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1002 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1003 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1004 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1005 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1006 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1007 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1008 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1009 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1010 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1011 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1016 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1017 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1018 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1019 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1020 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1023 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1024 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1025 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1026 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1027 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1028 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1029 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1031 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1032 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1033 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1035 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1036 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1037 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1038 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1039 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1041 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1044 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1045 - tahoe debug dump-share
1046 - tahoe debug find-shares
1047 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1048 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1050 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1051 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1052 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1055 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1056 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1057 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1058 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1059 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/565 for details.
1064 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1065 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1066 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1067 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1068 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1069 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1070 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1071 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1072 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1073 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1074 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1075 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1076 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1078 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1079 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1080 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1081 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1082 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1083 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1085 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1086 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1087 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1088 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1089 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1090 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1091 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1092 deep-check operations.
1094 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1095 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1096 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1097 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1098 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1101 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1102 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1103 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1104 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1105 "same-origin policy".
1107 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1108 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1109 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1110 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1111 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1112 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1113 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1114 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1115 processing by operations staff.
1117 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1118 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1119 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1120 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1121 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1122 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1124 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1125 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1126 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1127 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1128 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1129 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1130 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1132 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1133 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1134 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1135 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1136 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1137 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1138 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1139 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1141 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1142 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1143 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1144 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1145 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1146 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1147 target) of a t=rename command.
1152 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1153 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1154 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1155 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1156 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1157 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1158 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1159 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1162 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1163 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1164 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1165 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1166 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1167 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1168 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1169 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1170 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1171 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1173 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1174 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1176 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1177 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1178 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1179 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1180 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1183 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1184 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1185 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1186 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1187 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1188 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1189 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1191 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1192 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1193 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1194 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1195 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1197 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1198 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1199 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1200 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1201 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1202 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1203 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1205 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1206 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1207 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1209 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1210 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1211 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1213 Grid Management Tools
1214 '''''''''''''''''''''
1216 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1217 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1219 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1220 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1221 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1222 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1223 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1224 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1225 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1226 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1227 before the grid is completely full.
1229 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1230 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1231 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1233 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1234 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1235 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1236 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1237 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1238 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1239 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1240 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1241 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1242 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1244 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1245 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1246 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1247 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1248 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1249 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1251 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1252 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1254 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1255 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1256 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1257 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1258 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1259 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1260 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1261 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1263 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1264 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1266 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1267 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1268 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1270 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1271 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1272 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1273 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1274 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1275 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1276 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1277 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1278 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1279 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1280 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1285 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1286 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1287 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning .
1289 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1290 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1291 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1294 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1295 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1296 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1299 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1300 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1301 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1302 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1303 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1304 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1306 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1307 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1308 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1309 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1311 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1312 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1314 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1315 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1316 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1317 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1320 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1322 .. _#512: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1323 .. _#518: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1324 .. _#521: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1325 .. _#531: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1327 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1328 --------------------------
1333 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1334 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1335 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1336 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1337 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1338 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1339 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1340 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1341 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1342 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1343 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1346 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1347 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1353 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1354 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1355 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1356 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1357 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1363 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1364 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1365 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1366 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1368 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1369 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1370 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1371 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1372 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1375 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1376 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1377 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1378 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1379 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1380 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1382 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1383 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1384 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1385 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1386 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1387 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1390 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1391 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1393 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1394 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1395 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1396 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1397 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1398 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1399 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1400 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1401 (which may take a very long time).
1403 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1405 Operations/Packaging
1406 ''''''''''''''''''''
1408 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1409 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1410 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1411 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1412 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1413 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1414 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1417 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1418 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1419 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1421 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1422 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1423 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1426 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1427 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1428 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1434 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1435 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1436 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1437 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1438 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1439 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1440 directory for a second time.
1442 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1443 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1444 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1445 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1446 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1447 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1449 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1450 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1451 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1452 from the web browser end.
1454 .. _#463: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1455 .. _#491: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1456 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1458 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1459 --------------------------
1461 CLI: new "alias" model
1462 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1464 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1465 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1466 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1468 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1469 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1471 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1472 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1473 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1474 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1476 wapi: new pages, new commands
1477 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1479 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1481 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1482 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1483 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1484 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1486 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1487 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1488 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1489 new "cp -r" command.
1491 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1493 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1494 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1496 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1499 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1501 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1502 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1504 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1505 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1507 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1510 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1511 - tahoe_estimate_files
1512 - mutable files published/retrieved
1521 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1523 New Mutable-File Code
1524 '''''''''''''''''''''
1526 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1527 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1528 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1529 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1531 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1532 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1533 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1534 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1536 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1537 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1538 published when in fact it failed.
1543 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1544 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1545 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1547 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1548 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1549 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1550 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1551 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1553 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1554 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1555 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1556 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1557 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1558 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1559 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1561 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1562 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1563 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1564 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1565 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1566 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1568 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1569 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1571 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1572 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1573 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1574 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1575 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1577 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1578 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1580 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1581 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1582 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1583 order. This has been fixed.
1585 .. _#221: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1586 .. _#374: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1587 .. _#391: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1588 .. _#439: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1589 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst