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 Compatibility and Dependencies
16 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
18 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1. This ensures
19 that we no longer require pywin32 on Windows, and that it is never
20 necessary to patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend.
23 .. _`#1274`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
24 .. _`#1392`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1392
25 .. _`#1409`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
26 .. _`#1438`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
29 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
30 --------------------------
32 Compatibility and Dependencies
33 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
35 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
36 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
37 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
38 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
39 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
40 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
41 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
42 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
48 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
50 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
51 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
52 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
54 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
55 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
56 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
57 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
58 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
59 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
60 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
62 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
63 .. _`#1208`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
64 .. _`#1282`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
65 .. _`#1286`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
66 .. _`#1287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
67 .. _`#1296`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
68 .. _`#1337`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
71 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
72 --------------------------
74 Bugfixes and Improvements
75 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
77 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
78 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
79 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
81 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
82 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
83 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
84 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
86 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
87 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
88 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
89 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
90 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
91 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
92 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
93 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
94 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
95 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
96 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
97 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
98 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
99 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
101 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
102 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
103 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
108 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
109 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
110 platforms. (`#1262`_)
115 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
116 systems can install without having a compiler.
117 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
118 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
119 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
121 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
122 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
123 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
124 version number. (`#1233`_)
129 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
131 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
132 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
135 .. _`#71`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
136 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
137 .. _`#1212`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
138 .. _`#1045`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
139 .. _`#1190`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
140 .. _`#1216`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
141 .. _`#1223`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
142 .. _`#1224`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
143 .. _`#1225`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
144 .. _`#1232`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
145 .. _`#1233`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
146 .. _`#1241`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
147 .. _`#1253`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
148 .. _`#1255`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
149 .. _`#1262`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
152 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
153 --------------------------
158 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
159 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
160 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
161 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
162 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
163 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
164 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
165 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
166 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
167 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
168 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
170 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
171 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
174 Bugfixes and Improvements
175 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
177 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
178 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
180 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
181 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
182 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
184 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
185 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
186 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
187 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
188 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
189 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
194 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
195 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
197 .. _`#188`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
198 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
199 .. _`#288`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
200 .. _`#448`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
201 .. _`#685`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
202 .. _`#706`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
203 .. _`#715`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
204 .. _`#772`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
205 .. _`#798`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
206 .. _`#800`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
207 .. _`#890`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
208 .. _`#983`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
209 .. _`#990`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
210 .. _`#1055`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
211 .. _`#1074`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
212 .. _`#1108`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
213 .. _`#1155`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
214 .. _`#1170`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
215 .. _`#1191`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
216 .. _`#1127`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
217 .. _`#1129`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
218 .. _`#1131`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
219 .. _`#1166`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
220 .. _`#1175`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
222 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
223 --------------------------
225 Bugfixes and Improvements
226 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
228 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
229 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
230 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
231 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
232 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
234 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
236 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
238 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
239 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
240 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
241 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
243 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
244 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
245 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
250 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
251 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
253 .. _`#776`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
254 .. _`#923`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
255 .. _`#961`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
256 .. _`#967`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
257 .. _`#1051`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
258 .. _`#1067`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
259 .. _`#1072`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
260 .. _`#1083`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
261 .. _`#1097`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
262 .. _`#1098`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
263 .. _`#1099`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
264 .. _`#1117`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
265 .. _`#1118`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
268 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
269 --------------------------
274 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
275 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
276 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
277 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
278 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
280 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
281 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
282 characters on all supported platforms:
284 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
285 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
287 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
288 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
290 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
291 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
292 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
294 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
295 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
296 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
297 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
298 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
299 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
300 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
301 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
302 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
303 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
304 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
305 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
306 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
307 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
308 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
310 Bugfixes and Improvements
311 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
313 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
314 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
315 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
317 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
318 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
319 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
320 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
322 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
324 - ImportError: No module named
325 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
326 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
327 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
328 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
329 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
330 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
331 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
332 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
333 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
334 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
335 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
336 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
338 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
344 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
345 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
351 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
352 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
356 - mock (only required by unit tests)
358 .. _`#534`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
359 .. _`#608`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
360 .. _`#778`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
361 .. _`#803`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
362 .. _`#902`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
363 .. _`#911`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
364 .. _`#924`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
365 .. _`#937`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
366 .. _`#933`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
367 .. _`#968`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
368 .. _`#973`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
369 .. _`#1024`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
370 .. _`#1027`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
371 .. _`#1028`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
372 .. _`#1033`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
373 .. _`#1034`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
374 .. _`#1037`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
375 .. _`#1054`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
376 .. _`#1062`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
377 .. _`#1066`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
378 .. _`#1068`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
379 .. _`#1076`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
380 .. _`#1082`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
381 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
382 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
384 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
385 --------------------------
390 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
392 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
393 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
394 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
395 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
398 Usability Improvements
399 ''''''''''''''''''''''
401 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
403 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
404 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
405 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
406 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
408 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
409 --------------------------
414 - Immutable Directories
416 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
417 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
418 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
419 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
420 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
421 immutable directories).
423 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
424 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
425 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
426 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
427 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
428 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
429 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
431 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
432 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
433 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
434 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
435 the listing of that directory.
437 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
440 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
441 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
443 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
446 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
447 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
448 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
449 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
450 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
451 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
452 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
454 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
455 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
456 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
457 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
458 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
459 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
460 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
461 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
462 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
463 considerably. (`#606`_)
465 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
466 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
467 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
468 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
469 directories and stat() all your local files.
471 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
472 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
473 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
474 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
475 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
476 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
477 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
478 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
480 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
481 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
482 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
485 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
486 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
487 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
488 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
489 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
490 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
491 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
493 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
496 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
497 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
498 "node" process, which has several components that can be
499 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
500 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
501 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
502 future release will make it optional. There are three special
503 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
504 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
506 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
507 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
508 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
509 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
510 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
511 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
513 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
514 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
515 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
516 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
517 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
518 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
519 create-node" instead.
521 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
522 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
523 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
524 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
526 - Performance Improvements
528 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
529 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
530 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
531 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
532 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
533 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
534 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
535 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
536 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
537 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
538 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
539 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
540 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
541 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
542 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
543 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
544 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
545 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
546 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
551 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
552 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
553 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
554 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
557 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
558 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
559 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
560 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
562 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
563 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
566 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
567 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
568 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
571 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
572 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
575 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
578 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
580 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
581 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
583 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
584 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
586 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
587 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
588 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
589 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
590 additional licensing text was added.
592 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
594 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
595 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
597 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
598 has been improved. (`#773`_)
600 For other changes not mentioned here, see
601 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
602 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
603 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
605 .. _`#121`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
606 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
607 .. _`#381`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
608 .. _`#457`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
609 .. _`#533`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
610 .. _`#577`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
611 .. _`#606`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
612 .. _`#607`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
613 .. _`#637`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
614 .. _`#641`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
615 .. _`#646`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
616 .. _`#681`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
617 .. _`#729`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
618 .. _`#741`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
619 .. _`#760`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
620 .. _`#761`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
621 .. _`#768`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
622 .. _`#773`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
623 .. _`#786`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
624 .. _`#828`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
625 .. _`#833`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
626 .. _`#859`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
627 .. _`#874`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
628 .. _`#875`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
629 .. _`#931`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
630 .. _`#837`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
631 .. _`#850`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
632 .. _`#927`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
633 .. _`#928`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
634 .. _`#939`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
635 .. _`#948`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
636 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
638 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
639 --------------------------
644 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
645 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
647 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
648 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
649 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
651 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
652 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
653 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
654 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
655 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
657 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
658 directories. (`#705`_)
660 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
661 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
664 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
665 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
666 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
667 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
668 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
670 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
671 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
672 directories from the future. This should improve the user
673 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
674 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
675 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
676 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
677 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
682 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
683 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
684 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
685 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
686 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
687 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
688 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
690 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
691 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
694 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
695 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
696 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
698 Platform/packaging changes
699 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
701 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
702 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
704 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
705 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
706 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
707 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
708 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
709 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
711 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
712 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
713 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
714 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
716 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
718 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
719 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
720 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
722 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
723 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
724 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
731 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
732 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
733 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
737 .. _#392: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
738 .. _#625: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
739 .. _#653: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
740 .. _#683: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
741 .. _#694: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
742 .. _#705: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
743 .. _#722: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
744 .. _#750: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
745 .. _#752: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
747 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
748 --------------------------
753 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
754 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
755 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
756 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
757 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
758 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
759 lease. The process is described in detail in
760 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
762 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
763 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
764 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
766 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
767 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
768 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
769 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
770 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
771 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
772 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
774 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
775 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
777 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
778 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
779 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
780 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
781 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
783 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
784 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
785 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
786 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
787 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
788 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
789 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
794 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
795 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
796 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
797 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
798 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
800 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
801 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
802 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
805 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
806 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
807 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
808 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
809 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
810 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
811 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
812 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
815 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
816 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
817 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
819 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
820 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
821 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
822 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
823 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
824 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
825 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
830 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
831 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
832 of garbage collection.
834 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
835 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
837 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
838 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
840 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
841 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
842 metadata) during backup.
844 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
845 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
847 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
848 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
851 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
852 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
853 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
854 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
855 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
856 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
857 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
858 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
859 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
860 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
861 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
862 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
864 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
865 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
866 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
867 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
872 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
873 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
874 instance of RuntimeError.
876 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
877 speeding them up considerably.
879 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
880 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
881 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
882 with hundreds of entries.
884 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
885 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
888 .. _#442: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
889 .. _#645: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
890 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
892 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
893 --------------------------
895 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
896 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
898 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
899 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
900 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
901 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
902 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
903 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
904 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
905 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
906 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
909 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
910 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
911 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
912 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
913 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
914 permanent drive failure.
916 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
917 shares. The limitations are:
919 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
920 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
921 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
922 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
923 and most fields of the shares are validated.
924 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
925 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
926 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
927 corrupted shares will be left in place.
928 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
929 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
930 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
931 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
933 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
934 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
935 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
936 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
939 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
940 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
941 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
942 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
943 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
944 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
945 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
946 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
947 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
948 considered highly unusual.
950 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
951 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
952 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
954 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
955 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
956 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
957 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
958 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
959 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
960 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
961 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
962 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
963 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
964 button will appear on the results page.
966 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
967 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
968 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
969 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
970 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
971 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
977 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
978 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
979 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
980 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
981 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
982 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
983 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
984 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
985 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
986 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
987 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
988 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
989 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
990 to run from a daily cronjob.
992 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
993 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
994 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
995 $target/Latest) from working.
1000 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1001 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1002 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1003 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1004 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1005 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1006 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1007 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1008 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1009 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1010 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1011 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1016 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1017 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1018 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1019 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1020 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1021 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1022 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1023 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1024 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1025 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1030 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1031 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1032 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1033 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1034 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1037 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1038 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1039 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1040 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1041 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1042 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1043 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1045 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1046 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1047 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1049 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1050 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1051 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1052 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1053 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1055 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1058 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1059 - tahoe debug dump-share
1060 - tahoe debug find-shares
1061 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1062 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1064 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1065 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1066 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1069 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1070 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1071 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1072 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1073 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/565 for details.
1078 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1079 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1080 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1081 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1082 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1083 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1084 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1085 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1086 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1087 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1088 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1089 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1090 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1092 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1093 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1094 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1095 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1096 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1097 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1099 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1100 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1101 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1102 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1103 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1104 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1105 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1106 deep-check operations.
1108 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1109 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1110 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1111 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1112 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1115 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1116 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1117 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1118 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1119 "same-origin policy".
1121 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1122 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1123 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1124 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1125 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1126 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1127 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1128 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1129 processing by operations staff.
1131 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1132 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1133 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1134 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1135 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1136 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1138 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1139 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1140 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1141 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1142 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1143 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1144 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1146 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1147 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1148 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1149 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1150 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1151 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1152 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1153 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1155 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1156 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1157 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1158 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1159 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1160 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1161 target) of a t=rename command.
1166 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1167 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1168 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1169 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1170 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1171 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1172 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1173 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1176 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1177 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1178 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1179 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1180 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1181 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1182 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1183 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1184 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1185 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1187 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1188 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1190 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1191 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1192 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1193 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1194 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1197 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1198 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1199 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1200 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1201 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1202 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1203 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1205 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1206 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1207 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1208 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1209 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1211 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1212 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1213 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1214 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1215 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1216 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1217 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1219 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1220 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1221 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1223 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1224 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1225 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1227 Grid Management Tools
1228 '''''''''''''''''''''
1230 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1231 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1233 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1234 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1235 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1236 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1237 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1238 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1239 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1240 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1241 before the grid is completely full.
1243 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1244 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1245 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1247 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1248 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1249 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1250 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1251 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1252 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1253 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1254 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1255 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1256 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1258 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1259 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1260 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1261 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1262 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1263 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1265 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1266 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1268 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1269 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1270 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1271 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1272 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1273 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1274 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1275 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1277 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1278 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1280 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1281 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1282 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1284 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1285 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1286 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1287 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1288 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1289 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1290 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1291 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1292 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1293 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1294 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1299 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1300 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1301 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning .
1303 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1304 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1305 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1308 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1309 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1310 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1313 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1314 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1315 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1316 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1317 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1318 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1320 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1321 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1322 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1323 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1325 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1326 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1328 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1329 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1330 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1331 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1334 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1336 .. _#512: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1337 .. _#518: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1338 .. _#521: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1339 .. _#531: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1341 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1342 --------------------------
1347 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1348 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1349 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1350 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1351 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1352 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1353 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1354 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1355 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1356 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1357 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1360 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1361 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1367 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1368 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1369 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1370 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1371 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1377 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1378 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1379 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1380 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1382 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1383 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1384 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1385 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1386 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1389 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1390 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1391 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1392 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1393 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1394 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1396 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1397 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1398 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1399 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1400 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1401 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1404 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1405 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1407 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1408 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1409 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1410 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1411 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1412 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1413 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1414 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1415 (which may take a very long time).
1417 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1419 Operations/Packaging
1420 ''''''''''''''''''''
1422 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1423 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1424 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1425 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1426 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1427 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1428 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1431 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1432 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1433 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1435 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1436 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1437 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1440 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1441 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1442 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1448 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1449 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1450 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1451 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1452 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1453 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1454 directory for a second time.
1456 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1457 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1458 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1459 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1460 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1461 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1463 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1464 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1465 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1466 from the web browser end.
1468 .. _#463: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1469 .. _#491: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1470 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1472 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1473 --------------------------
1475 CLI: new "alias" model
1476 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1478 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1479 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1480 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1482 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1483 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1485 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1486 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1487 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1488 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1490 wapi: new pages, new commands
1491 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1493 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1495 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1496 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1497 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1498 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1500 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1501 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1502 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1503 new "cp -r" command.
1505 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1507 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1508 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1510 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1513 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1515 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1516 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1518 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1519 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1521 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1524 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1525 - tahoe_estimate_files
1526 - mutable files published/retrieved
1535 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1537 New Mutable-File Code
1538 '''''''''''''''''''''
1540 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1541 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1542 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1543 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1545 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1546 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1547 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1548 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1550 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1551 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1552 published when in fact it failed.
1557 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1558 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1559 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1561 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1562 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1563 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1564 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1565 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1567 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1568 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1569 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1570 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1571 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1572 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1573 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1575 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1576 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1577 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1578 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1579 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1580 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1582 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1583 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1585 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1586 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1587 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1588 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1589 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1591 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1592 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1594 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1595 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1596 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1597 order. This has been fixed.
1599 .. _#221: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1600 .. _#374: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1601 .. _#391: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1602 .. _#439: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1603 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst