2 ==================================
3 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
4 ==================================
6 Release 1.10 (2013-??-??)
11 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
12 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
13 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
14 - A new, more extensible Introducer protocol has been added, to act as the
15 basis for future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older
16 nodes is not affected. (`#466`_)
17 - The web-API has a new move operation that supports directly moving files
18 between directories. (`#1579`_)
23 - If an immutable file failed to download, e.g. due to a connection problem,
24 subsequent attempts to download the same file could also fail. (`#1679`_)
25 - The SFTP frontend works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
26 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
28 - Failure handling in the SFTP frontend has been improved. (`#1525`_)
29 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
31 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
32 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
33 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
34 - Error messages containing tracebacks may be slightly more readable.
36 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` counts the files being processed correctly.
38 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
39 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
41 Performance Improvements
42 ''''''''''''''''''''''''
44 - Allow web clients to cache immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
49 - docs/helper.rst has been brought up to date. (`#1915`_)
50 - docs/convergence_secret.rst was added to document the adminstration of
51 convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
56 - The flogtool utility, used to read logs, can now be accessed as
57 ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when foolscap is not installed system-wide.
60 Compatibility and Dependencies
61 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
63 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
64 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
67 Precautions when Upgrading
68 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
70 - When upgrading a grid from a recent version of trunk, follow the
71 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
72 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
73 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release.
75 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
76 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
77 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
78 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
79 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
80 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
81 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
82 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
83 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
84 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
85 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
86 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
87 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
88 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
89 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
90 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
91 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
92 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
93 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
94 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
95 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
96 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
97 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
98 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
100 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
101 --------------------------
106 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
107 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
108 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
109 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
110 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
111 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
112 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
114 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
115 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
116 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
117 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
118 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
119 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
121 Configuration/Behavior Changes
122 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
124 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
125 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
126 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
132 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
135 Compatibility and Dependencies
136 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
138 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
139 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
140 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
142 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
143 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
144 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
145 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
146 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
147 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
148 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
149 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
150 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
151 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
152 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
153 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
154 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
155 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
156 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
157 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
158 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
161 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
162 --------------------------
164 Security-related Bugfix
165 '''''''''''''''''''''''
167 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
168 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
170 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
173 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
174 --------------------------
179 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
180 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
181 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
182 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
183 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
184 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
185 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
186 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
187 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
188 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
189 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
190 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
191 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
192 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
193 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
194 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
195 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
197 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
198 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
199 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
200 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
202 Configuration/Behavior Changes
203 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
205 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
206 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
207 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
208 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
209 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
210 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
211 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
212 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
213 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
214 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
215 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
216 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
221 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
222 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
224 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
225 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
226 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
227 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
228 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
229 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
230 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
235 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
236 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
237 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
238 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
239 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
240 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
241 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
242 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
243 (any version of each):
245 * Academic Free License
246 * Apple Public Source License
247 * BitTorrent Open Source License
248 * Lucent Public License
249 * Jabber Open Source License
250 * Common Development and Distribution License
251 * Microsoft Public License
252 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
253 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
254 * Open Software License
256 Compatibility and Dependencies
257 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
259 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
260 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
261 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
262 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
263 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
264 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
265 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
267 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
268 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
273 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
275 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
276 of share files. (`#1391`_)
277 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
278 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
279 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
281 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
282 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
283 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
284 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
285 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
286 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
287 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
288 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
289 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
290 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
291 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
292 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
293 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
294 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
295 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
296 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
297 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
298 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
299 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
302 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
303 --------------------------
305 Security-related Bugfix
306 '''''''''''''''''''''''
308 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
309 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
310 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
311 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
312 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
313 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
314 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
316 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
319 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
320 --------------------------
322 Compatibility and Dependencies
323 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
325 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
326 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
327 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
328 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
329 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
330 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
331 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
332 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
338 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
340 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
341 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
342 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
344 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
345 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
346 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
347 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
348 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
349 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
350 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
352 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
353 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
354 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
355 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
356 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
357 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
360 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
361 --------------------------
363 Bugfixes and Improvements
364 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
366 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
367 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
368 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
370 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
371 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
372 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
373 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
375 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
376 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
377 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
378 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
379 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
380 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
381 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
382 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
383 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
384 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
385 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
386 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
387 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
388 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
390 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
391 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
392 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
397 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
398 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
399 platforms. (`#1262`_)
404 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
405 systems can install without having a compiler.
406 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
407 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
408 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
410 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
411 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
412 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
413 version number. (`#1233`_)
418 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
420 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
421 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
424 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
425 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
426 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
427 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
428 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
429 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
430 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
431 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
432 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
433 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
434 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
435 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
436 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
437 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
438 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
441 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
442 --------------------------
447 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
448 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
449 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
450 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
451 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
452 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
453 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
454 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
455 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
456 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
457 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
459 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
460 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
463 Bugfixes and Improvements
464 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
466 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
467 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
469 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
470 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
471 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
473 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
474 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
475 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
476 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
477 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
478 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
483 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
484 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
486 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
487 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
488 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
489 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
490 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
491 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
492 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
493 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
494 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
495 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
496 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
497 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
498 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
499 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
500 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
501 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
502 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
503 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
504 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
505 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
506 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
507 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
508 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
510 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
511 --------------------------
513 Bugfixes and Improvements
514 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
516 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
517 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
518 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
519 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
520 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
522 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
524 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
526 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
527 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
528 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
529 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
531 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
532 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
533 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
538 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
539 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
541 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
542 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
543 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
544 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
545 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
546 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
547 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
548 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
549 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
550 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
551 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
552 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
553 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
556 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
557 --------------------------
562 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
563 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
564 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
565 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
566 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
568 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
569 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
570 characters on all supported platforms:
572 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
573 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
575 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
576 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
578 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
579 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
580 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
582 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
583 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
584 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
585 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
586 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
587 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
588 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
589 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
590 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
591 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
592 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
593 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
594 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
595 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
596 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
598 Bugfixes and Improvements
599 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
601 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
602 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
603 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
605 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
606 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
607 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
608 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
610 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
612 - ImportError: No module named
613 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
614 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
615 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
616 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
617 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
618 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
619 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
620 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
621 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
622 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
623 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
624 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
626 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
632 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
633 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
639 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
640 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
644 - mock (only required by unit tests)
646 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
647 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
648 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
649 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
650 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
651 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
652 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
653 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
654 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
655 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
656 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
657 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
658 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
659 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
660 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
661 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
662 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
663 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
664 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
665 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
666 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
667 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
668 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
669 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
670 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
672 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
673 --------------------------
678 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
680 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
681 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
682 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
683 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
686 Usability Improvements
687 ''''''''''''''''''''''
689 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
691 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
692 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
693 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
694 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
696 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
697 --------------------------
702 - Immutable Directories
704 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
705 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
706 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
707 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
708 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
709 immutable directories).
711 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
712 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
713 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
714 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
715 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
716 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
717 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
719 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
720 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
721 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
722 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
723 the listing of that directory.
725 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
728 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
729 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
731 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
734 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
735 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
736 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
737 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
738 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
739 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
740 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
742 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
743 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
744 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
745 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
746 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
747 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
748 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
749 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
750 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
751 considerably. (`#606`_)
753 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
754 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
755 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
756 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
757 directories and stat() all your local files.
759 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
760 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
761 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
762 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
763 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
764 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
765 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
766 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
768 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
769 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
770 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
773 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
774 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
775 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
776 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
777 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
778 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
779 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
781 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
784 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
785 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
786 "node" process, which has several components that can be
787 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
788 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
789 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
790 future release will make it optional. There are three special
791 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
792 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
794 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
795 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
796 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
797 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
798 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
799 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
801 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
802 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
803 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
804 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
805 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
806 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
807 create-node" instead.
809 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
810 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
811 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
812 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
814 - Performance Improvements
816 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
817 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
818 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
819 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
820 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
821 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
822 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
823 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
824 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
825 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
826 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
827 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
828 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
829 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
830 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
831 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
832 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
833 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
834 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
839 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
840 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
841 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
842 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
845 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
846 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
847 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
848 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
850 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
851 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
854 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
855 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
856 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
859 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
860 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
863 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
866 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
868 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
869 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
871 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
872 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
874 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
875 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
876 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
877 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
878 additional licensing text was added.
880 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
882 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
883 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
885 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
886 has been improved. (`#773`_)
888 For other changes not mentioned here, see
889 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
890 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
891 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
893 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
894 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
895 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
896 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
897 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
898 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
899 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
900 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
901 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
902 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
903 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
904 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
905 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
906 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
907 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
908 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
909 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
910 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
911 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
912 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
913 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
914 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
915 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
916 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
917 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
918 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
919 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
920 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
921 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
922 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
923 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
925 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
926 --------------------------
931 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
932 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
934 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
935 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
936 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
938 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
939 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
940 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
941 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
942 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
944 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
945 directories. (`#705`_)
947 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
948 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
951 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
952 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
953 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
954 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
955 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
957 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
958 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
959 directories from the future. This should improve the user
960 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
961 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
962 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
963 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
964 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
969 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
970 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
971 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
972 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
973 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
974 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
975 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
977 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
978 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
981 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
982 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
983 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
985 Platform/packaging changes
986 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
988 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
989 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
991 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
992 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
993 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
994 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
995 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
996 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
998 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
999 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1000 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1001 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1003 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1005 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1006 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1007 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1009 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1010 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1011 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1018 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1019 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1020 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1024 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1025 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1026 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1027 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1028 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1029 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1030 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1031 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1032 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1034 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1035 --------------------------
1040 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1041 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1042 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1043 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1044 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1045 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1046 lease. The process is described in detail in
1047 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1049 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1050 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1051 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1053 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1054 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1055 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1056 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1057 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1058 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1059 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1061 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1062 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1064 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1065 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1066 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1067 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1068 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1070 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1071 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1072 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1073 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1074 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1075 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1076 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1081 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1082 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1083 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1084 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1085 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1087 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1088 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1089 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1092 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1093 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1094 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1095 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1096 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1097 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1098 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1099 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1102 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1103 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1104 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1106 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1107 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1108 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1109 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1110 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1111 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1112 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1117 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1118 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1119 of garbage collection.
1121 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1122 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1124 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1125 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1127 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1128 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1129 metadata) during backup.
1131 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1132 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1134 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1135 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1138 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1139 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1140 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1141 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1142 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1143 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1144 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1145 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1146 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1147 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1148 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1149 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1151 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1152 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1153 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1154 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1159 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1160 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1161 instance of RuntimeError.
1163 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1164 speeding them up considerably.
1166 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1167 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1168 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1169 with hundreds of entries.
1171 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1172 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1175 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1176 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1177 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1179 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1180 --------------------------
1182 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1183 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1185 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1186 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1187 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1188 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1189 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1190 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1191 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1192 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1193 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1196 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1197 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1198 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1199 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1200 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1201 permanent drive failure.
1203 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1204 shares. The limitations are:
1206 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1207 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1208 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1209 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1210 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1211 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1212 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1213 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1214 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1215 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1216 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1217 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1218 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1220 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1221 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1222 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1223 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1226 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1227 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1228 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1229 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1230 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1231 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1232 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1233 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1234 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1235 considered highly unusual.
1237 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1238 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1239 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1241 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1242 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1243 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1244 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1245 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1246 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1247 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1248 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1249 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1250 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1251 button will appear on the results page.
1253 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1254 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1255 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1256 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1257 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1258 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1264 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1265 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1266 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1267 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1268 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1269 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1270 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1271 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1272 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1273 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1274 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1275 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1276 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1277 to run from a daily cronjob.
1279 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1280 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1281 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1282 $target/Latest) from working.
1287 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1288 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1289 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1290 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1291 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1292 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1293 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1294 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1295 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1296 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1297 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1298 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1303 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1304 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1305 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1306 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1307 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1308 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1309 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1310 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1311 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1312 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1317 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1318 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1319 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1320 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1321 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1324 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1325 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1326 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1327 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1328 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1329 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1330 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1332 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1333 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1334 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1336 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1337 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1338 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1339 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1340 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1342 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1345 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1346 - tahoe debug dump-share
1347 - tahoe debug find-shares
1348 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1349 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1351 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1352 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1353 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1356 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1357 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1358 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1359 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1360 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1365 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1366 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1367 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1368 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1369 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1370 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1371 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1372 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1373 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1374 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1375 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1376 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1377 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1379 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1380 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1381 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1382 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1383 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1384 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1386 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1387 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1388 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1389 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1390 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1391 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1392 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1393 deep-check operations.
1395 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1396 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1397 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1398 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1399 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1402 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1403 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1404 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1405 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1406 "same-origin policy".
1408 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1409 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1410 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1411 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1412 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1413 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1414 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1415 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1416 processing by operations staff.
1418 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1419 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1420 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1421 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1422 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1423 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1425 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1426 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1427 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1428 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1429 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1430 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1431 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1433 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1434 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1435 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1436 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1437 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1438 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1439 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1440 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1442 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1443 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1444 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1445 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1446 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1447 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1448 target) of a t=rename command.
1453 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1454 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1455 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1456 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1457 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1458 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1459 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1460 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1463 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1464 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1465 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1466 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1467 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1468 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1469 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1470 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1471 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1472 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1474 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1475 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1477 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1478 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1479 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1480 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1481 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1484 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1485 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1486 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1487 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1488 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1489 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1490 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1492 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1493 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1494 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1495 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1496 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1498 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1499 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1500 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1501 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1502 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1503 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1504 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1506 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1507 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1508 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1510 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1511 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1512 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1514 Grid Management Tools
1515 '''''''''''''''''''''
1517 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1518 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1520 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1521 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1522 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1523 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1524 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1525 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1526 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1527 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1528 before the grid is completely full.
1530 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1531 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1532 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1534 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1535 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1536 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1537 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1538 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1539 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1540 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1541 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1542 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1543 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1545 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1546 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1547 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1548 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1549 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1550 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1552 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1553 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1555 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1556 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1557 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1558 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1559 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1560 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1561 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1562 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1564 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1565 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1567 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1568 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1569 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1571 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1572 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1573 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1574 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1575 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1576 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1577 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1578 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1579 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1580 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1581 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1586 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1587 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1588 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1590 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1591 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1592 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1595 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1596 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1597 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1600 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1601 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1602 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1603 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1604 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1605 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1607 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1608 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1609 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1610 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1612 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1613 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1615 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1616 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1617 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1618 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1621 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1623 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1624 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1625 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1626 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1628 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1629 --------------------------
1634 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1635 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1636 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1637 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1638 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1639 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1640 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1641 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1642 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1643 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1644 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1647 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1648 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1654 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1655 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1656 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1657 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1658 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1664 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1665 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1666 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1667 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1669 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1670 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1671 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1672 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1673 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1676 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1677 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1678 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1679 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1680 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1681 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1683 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1684 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1685 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1686 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1687 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1688 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1691 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1692 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1694 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1695 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1696 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1697 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1698 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1699 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1700 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1701 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1702 (which may take a very long time).
1704 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1706 Operations/Packaging
1707 ''''''''''''''''''''
1709 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1710 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1711 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1712 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1713 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1714 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1715 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1718 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1719 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1720 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1722 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1723 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1724 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1727 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1728 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1729 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1735 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1736 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1737 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1738 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1739 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1740 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1741 directory for a second time.
1743 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1744 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1745 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1746 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1747 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1748 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1750 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1751 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1752 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1753 from the web browser end.
1755 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1756 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1757 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1759 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1760 --------------------------
1762 CLI: new "alias" model
1763 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1765 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1766 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1767 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1769 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1770 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1772 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1773 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1774 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1775 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1777 wapi: new pages, new commands
1778 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1780 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1782 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1783 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1784 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1785 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1787 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1788 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1789 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1790 new "cp -r" command.
1792 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1794 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1795 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1797 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1800 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1802 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1803 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1805 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1806 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1808 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1811 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1812 - tahoe_estimate_files
1813 - mutable files published/retrieved
1822 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1824 New Mutable-File Code
1825 '''''''''''''''''''''
1827 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1828 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1829 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1830 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1832 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1833 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1834 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1835 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1837 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1838 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1839 published when in fact it failed.
1844 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1845 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1846 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1848 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1849 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1850 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1851 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1852 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1854 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1855 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1856 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1857 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1858 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1859 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1860 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1862 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1863 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1864 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1865 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1866 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1867 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1869 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1870 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1872 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1873 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1874 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1875 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1876 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1878 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1879 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1881 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1882 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1883 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1884 order. This has been fixed.
1886 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1887 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1888 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1889 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1890 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst