1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.10.0 (2013-05-01)
6 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
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 extensible Introducer protocol has been added, as the basis for
15 future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older nodes is
16 not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all upgraded, the
17 welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead of the old
18 tubid. See `<docs/nodekeys.rst>`__ for details. (`#466`_)
19 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
20 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
25 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
26 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
27 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
28 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
29 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
30 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
31 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
32 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
33 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
34 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
36 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
37 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
38 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
39 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
40 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
42 Command-line Syntax Changes
43 ---------------------------
45 - Global options to ``tahoe``, such as ``-d``/``--node-directory``, must now
46 come before rather than after the command name (for example,
47 ``tahoe -d BASEDIR cp -r foo: bar:`` ). (`#166`_)
52 - In earlier versions, if a connection problem caused a download failure for
53 an immutable file, subsequent attempts to download the same file could also
54 fail. This is now fixed. (`#1679`_)
55 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
56 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
57 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
58 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
60 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
61 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
63 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` now counts the files being processed correctly.
65 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
66 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
67 - The error message displayed when a CLI tool cannot connect to a gateway has
68 been improved. (`#974`_)
69 - Other minor fixes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_, `#1915`_, `#1484`_, `#1525`_
71 Compatibility and Dependencies
72 ------------------------------
74 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
75 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
76 - mock >= 0.8 (for unit tests)
77 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for Ed25519 signatures)
82 - The flogtool utility, used to read detailed event logs, can now be accessed
83 as ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when Foolscap is not installed
84 system-wide. (`#1693`_)
85 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
86 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool. Use the ``run.py``
87 script in misc/operations_helpers/provisioning to access them.
88 - Web clients can now cache (ETag) immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
89 - `<docs/convergence_secret.rst>`__ was added to document the adminstration
90 of convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
92 Precautions when Upgrading
93 --------------------------
95 - When upgrading a grid from a recent version of trunk, follow the
96 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
97 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
98 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release.
100 .. _`#166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/166
101 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
102 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
103 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
104 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
105 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
106 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
107 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
108 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
109 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
110 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
111 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
112 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
113 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
114 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
115 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
116 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
117 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
118 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
119 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
120 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
121 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
122 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
123 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
124 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
125 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
126 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
127 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
128 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
129 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
132 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
133 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
138 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
139 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
140 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
141 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
142 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
143 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
144 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
146 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
147 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
148 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
149 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
150 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
151 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
153 Configuration/Behavior Changes
154 ------------------------------
156 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
157 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
158 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
164 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
167 Compatibility and Dependencies
168 ------------------------------
170 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
171 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
172 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
174 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
175 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
176 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
177 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
178 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
179 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
180 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
181 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
182 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
183 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
184 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
185 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
186 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
187 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
188 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
189 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
190 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
193 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
194 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
196 Security-related Bugfix
197 -----------------------
199 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
200 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
202 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
205 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
206 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
211 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
212 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
213 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
214 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
215 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
216 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
217 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
218 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
219 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
220 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
221 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
222 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
223 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
224 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
225 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
226 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
227 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
229 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
230 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
231 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
232 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
234 Configuration/Behavior Changes
235 ------------------------------
237 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
238 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
239 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
240 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
241 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
242 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
243 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
244 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
245 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
246 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
247 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
248 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
253 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
254 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
256 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
257 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
258 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
259 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
260 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
261 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
262 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
267 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
268 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
269 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
270 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
271 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
272 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
273 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
274 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
275 (any version of each):
277 * Academic Free License
278 * Apple Public Source License
279 * BitTorrent Open Source License
280 * Lucent Public License
281 * Jabber Open Source License
282 * Common Development and Distribution License
283 * Microsoft Public License
284 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
285 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
286 * Open Software License
288 Compatibility and Dependencies
289 ------------------------------
291 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
292 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
293 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
294 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
295 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
296 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
297 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
299 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
300 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
305 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
307 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
308 of share files. (`#1391`_)
309 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
310 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
311 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
313 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
314 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
315 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
316 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
317 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
318 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
319 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
320 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
321 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
322 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
323 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
324 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
325 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
326 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
327 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
328 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
329 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
330 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
331 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
334 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
335 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
337 Security-related Bugfix
338 -----------------------
340 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
341 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
342 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
343 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
344 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
345 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
346 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
348 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
351 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
352 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
354 Compatibility and Dependencies
355 ------------------------------
357 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
358 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
359 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
360 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
361 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
362 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
363 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
364 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
370 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
372 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
373 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
374 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
376 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
377 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
378 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
379 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
380 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
381 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
382 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
384 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
385 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
386 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
387 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
388 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
389 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
392 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
393 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
395 Bugfixes and Improvements
396 -------------------------
398 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
399 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
400 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
402 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
403 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
404 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
405 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
407 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
408 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
409 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
410 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
411 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
412 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
413 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
414 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
415 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
416 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
417 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
418 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
419 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
420 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
422 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
423 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
424 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
429 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
430 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
431 platforms. (`#1262`_)
436 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
437 systems can install without having a compiler.
438 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
439 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
440 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
442 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
443 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
444 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
445 version number. (`#1233`_)
450 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
452 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
453 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
456 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
457 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
458 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
459 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
460 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
461 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
462 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
463 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
464 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
465 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
466 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
467 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
468 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
469 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
470 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
473 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
474 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
479 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
480 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
481 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
482 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
483 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
484 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
485 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
486 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
487 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
488 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
489 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
491 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
492 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
495 Bugfixes and Improvements
496 -------------------------
498 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
499 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
501 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
502 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
503 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
505 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
506 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
507 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
508 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
509 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
510 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
515 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
516 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
518 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
519 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
520 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
521 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
522 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
523 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
524 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
525 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
526 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
527 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
528 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
529 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
530 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
531 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
532 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
533 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
534 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
535 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
536 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
537 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
538 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
539 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
540 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
542 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
543 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
545 Bugfixes and Improvements
546 -------------------------
548 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
549 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
550 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
551 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
552 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
554 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
556 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
558 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
559 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
560 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
561 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
563 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
564 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
565 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
570 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
571 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
573 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
574 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
575 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
576 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
577 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
578 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
579 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
580 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
581 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
582 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
583 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
584 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
585 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
588 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
589 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
594 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
595 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
596 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
597 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
598 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
600 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
601 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
602 characters on all supported platforms:
604 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
605 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
607 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
608 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
610 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
611 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
612 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
614 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
615 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
616 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
617 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
618 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
619 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
620 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
621 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
622 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
623 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
624 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
625 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
626 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
627 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
628 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
630 Bugfixes and Improvements
631 -------------------------
633 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
634 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
635 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
637 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
638 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
639 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
640 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
642 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
644 - ImportError: No module named
645 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
646 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
647 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
648 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
649 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
650 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
651 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
652 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
653 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
654 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
655 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
656 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
658 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
664 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
665 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
671 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
672 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
676 - mock (only required by unit tests)
678 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
679 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
680 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
681 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
682 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
683 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
684 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
685 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
686 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
687 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
688 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
689 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
690 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
691 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
692 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
693 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
694 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
695 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
696 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
697 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
698 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
699 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
700 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
701 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
702 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
704 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
705 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
710 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
712 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
713 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
714 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
715 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
718 Usability Improvements
719 ----------------------
721 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
723 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
724 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
725 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
726 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
728 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
729 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
734 - Immutable Directories
736 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
737 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
738 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
739 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
740 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
741 immutable directories).
743 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
744 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
745 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
746 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
747 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
748 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
749 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
751 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
752 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
753 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
754 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
755 the listing of that directory.
757 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
760 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
761 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
763 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
766 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
767 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
768 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
769 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
770 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
771 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
772 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
774 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
775 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
776 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
777 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
778 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
779 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
780 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
781 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
782 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
783 considerably. (`#606`_)
785 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
786 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
787 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
788 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
789 directories and stat() all your local files.
791 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
792 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
793 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
794 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
795 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
796 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
797 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
798 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
800 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
801 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
802 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
805 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
806 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
807 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
808 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
809 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
810 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
811 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
813 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
816 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
817 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
818 "node" process, which has several components that can be
819 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
820 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
821 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
822 future release will make it optional. There are three special
823 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
824 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
826 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
827 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
828 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
829 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
830 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
831 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
833 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
834 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
835 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
836 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
837 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
838 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
839 create-node" instead.
841 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
842 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
843 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
844 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
846 - Performance Improvements
848 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
849 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
850 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
851 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
852 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
853 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
854 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
855 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
856 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
857 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
858 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
859 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
860 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
861 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
862 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
863 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
864 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
865 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
866 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
871 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
872 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
873 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
874 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
877 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
878 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
879 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
880 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
882 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
883 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
886 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
887 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
888 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
891 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
892 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
895 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
898 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
900 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
901 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
903 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
904 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
906 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
907 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
908 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
909 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
910 additional licensing text was added.
912 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
914 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
915 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
917 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
918 has been improved. (`#773`_)
920 For other changes not mentioned here, see
921 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
922 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
923 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
925 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
926 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
927 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
928 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
929 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
930 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
931 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
932 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
933 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
934 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
935 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
936 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
937 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
938 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
939 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
940 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
941 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
942 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
943 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
944 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
945 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
946 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
947 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
948 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
949 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
950 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
951 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
952 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
953 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
954 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
955 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
957 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
958 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
963 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
964 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
966 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
967 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
968 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
970 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
971 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
972 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
973 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
974 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
976 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
977 directories. (`#705`_)
979 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
980 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
983 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
984 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
985 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
986 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
987 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
989 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
990 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
991 directories from the future. This should improve the user
992 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
993 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
994 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
995 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
996 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1001 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1002 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1003 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1004 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1005 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1006 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1007 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1009 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1010 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1013 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1014 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1015 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1017 Platform/packaging changes
1018 --------------------------
1020 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1021 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1023 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1024 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1025 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1026 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1027 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1028 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1030 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1031 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1032 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1033 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1035 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1037 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1038 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1039 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1041 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1042 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1043 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1050 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1051 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1052 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1056 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1057 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1058 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1059 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1060 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1061 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1062 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1063 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1064 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1066 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1067 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1072 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1073 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1074 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1075 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1076 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1077 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1078 lease. The process is described in detail in
1079 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1081 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1082 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1083 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1085 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1086 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1087 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1088 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1089 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1090 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1091 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1093 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1094 ---------------------------------
1096 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1097 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1098 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1099 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1100 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1102 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1103 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1104 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1105 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1106 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1107 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1108 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1113 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1114 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1115 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1116 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1117 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1119 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1120 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1121 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1124 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1125 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1126 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1127 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1128 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1129 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1130 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1131 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1134 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1135 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1136 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1138 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1139 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1140 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1141 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1142 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1143 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1144 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1149 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1150 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1151 of garbage collection.
1153 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1154 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1156 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1157 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1159 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1160 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1161 metadata) during backup.
1163 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1164 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1166 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1167 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1170 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1171 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1172 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1173 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1174 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1175 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1176 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1177 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1178 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1179 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1180 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1181 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1183 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1184 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1185 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1186 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1191 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1192 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1193 instance of RuntimeError.
1195 - Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1196 speeding them up considerably.
1198 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1199 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1200 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1201 with hundreds of entries.
1203 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1204 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1207 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1208 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1209 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1211 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1212 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1214 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1215 -------------------------
1217 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1218 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1219 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1220 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1221 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1222 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1223 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1224 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1225 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1228 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1229 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1230 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1231 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1232 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1233 permanent drive failure.
1235 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1236 shares. The limitations are:
1238 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1239 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1240 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1241 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1242 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1243 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1244 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1245 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1246 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1247 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1248 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1249 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1250 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1252 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1253 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1254 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1255 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1258 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1259 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1260 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1261 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1262 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1263 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1264 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1265 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1266 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1267 considered highly unusual.
1269 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1270 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1271 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1273 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1274 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1275 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1276 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1277 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1278 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1279 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1280 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1281 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1282 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1283 button will appear on the results page.
1285 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1286 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1287 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1288 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1289 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1290 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1296 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1297 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1298 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1299 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1300 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1301 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1302 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1303 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1304 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1305 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1306 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1307 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1308 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1309 to run from a daily cronjob.
1311 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1312 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1313 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1314 $target/Latest) from working.
1319 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1320 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1321 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1322 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1323 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1324 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1325 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1326 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1327 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1328 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1329 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1330 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1335 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1336 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1337 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1338 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1339 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1340 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1341 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1342 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1343 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1344 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1349 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1350 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1351 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1352 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1353 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1356 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1357 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1358 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1359 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1360 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1361 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1362 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1364 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1365 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1366 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1368 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1369 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1370 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1371 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1372 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1374 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1377 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1378 - tahoe debug dump-share
1379 - tahoe debug find-shares
1380 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1381 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1383 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1384 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1385 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1388 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1389 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1390 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1391 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1392 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1397 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1398 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1399 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1400 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1401 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1402 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1403 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1404 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1405 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1406 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1407 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1408 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1409 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1411 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1412 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1413 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1414 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1415 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1416 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1418 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1419 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1420 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1421 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1422 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1423 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1424 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1425 deep-check operations.
1427 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1428 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1429 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1430 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1431 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1434 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1435 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1436 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1437 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1438 "same-origin policy".
1440 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1441 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1442 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1443 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1444 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1445 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1446 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1447 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1448 processing by operations staff.
1450 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1451 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1452 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1453 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1454 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1455 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1457 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1458 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1459 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1460 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1461 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1462 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1463 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1465 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1466 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1467 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1468 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1469 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1470 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1471 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1472 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1474 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1475 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1476 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1477 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1478 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1479 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1480 target) of a t=rename command.
1485 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1486 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1487 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1488 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1489 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1490 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1491 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1492 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1495 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1496 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1497 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1498 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1499 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1500 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1501 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1502 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1503 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1504 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1506 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1507 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1509 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1510 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1511 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1512 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1513 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1516 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1517 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1518 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1519 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1520 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1521 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1522 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1524 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1525 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1526 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1527 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1528 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1530 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1531 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1532 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1533 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1534 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1535 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1536 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1538 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1539 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1540 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1542 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1543 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1544 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1546 Grid Management Tools
1547 ---------------------
1549 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1550 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1552 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1553 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1554 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1555 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1556 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1557 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1558 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1559 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1560 before the grid is completely full.
1562 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1563 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1564 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1566 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1567 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1568 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1569 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1570 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1571 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1572 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1573 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1574 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1575 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1577 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1578 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1579 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1580 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1581 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1582 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1584 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1585 -------------------------------------------------------
1587 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1588 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1589 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1590 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1591 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1592 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1593 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1594 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1596 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1597 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1599 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1600 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1601 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1603 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1604 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1605 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1606 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1607 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1608 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1609 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1610 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1611 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1612 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1613 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1618 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1619 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1620 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1622 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1623 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1624 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1627 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1628 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1629 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1632 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1633 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1634 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1635 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1636 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1637 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1639 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1640 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1641 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1642 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1644 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1645 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1647 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1648 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1649 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1650 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1653 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1655 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1656 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1657 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1658 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1660 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1661 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1666 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1667 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1668 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1669 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1670 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1671 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1672 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1673 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1674 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1675 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1676 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1679 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1680 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1686 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1687 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1688 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1689 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1690 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1696 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1697 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1698 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1699 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1701 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1702 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1703 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1704 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1705 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1708 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1709 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1710 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1711 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1712 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1713 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1715 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1716 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1717 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1718 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1719 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1720 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1723 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1724 -------------------------
1726 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1727 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1728 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1729 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1730 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1731 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1732 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1733 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1734 (which may take a very long time).
1736 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1738 Operations/Packaging
1739 --------------------
1741 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1742 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1743 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1744 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1745 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1746 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1747 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1750 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1751 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1752 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1754 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1755 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1756 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1759 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1760 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1761 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1767 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1768 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1769 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1770 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1771 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1772 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1773 directory for a second time.
1775 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1776 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1777 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1778 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1779 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1780 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1782 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1783 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1784 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1785 from the web browser end.
1787 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1788 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1789 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1791 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1792 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1794 CLI: new "alias" model
1795 ----------------------
1797 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1798 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1799 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1801 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1802 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1804 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1805 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1806 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1807 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1809 wapi: new pages, new commands
1810 -----------------------------
1812 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1814 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1815 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1816 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1817 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1819 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1820 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1821 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1822 new "cp -r" command.
1824 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1826 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1827 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1829 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1832 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1834 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1835 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1837 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1838 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1840 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1843 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1844 - tahoe_estimate_files
1845 - mutable files published/retrieved
1854 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1856 New Mutable-File Code
1857 ---------------------
1859 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1860 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1861 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1862 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1864 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1865 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1866 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1867 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1869 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1870 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1871 published when in fact it failed.
1876 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1877 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1878 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1880 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1881 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1882 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1883 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1884 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1886 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1887 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1888 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1889 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1890 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1891 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1892 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1894 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1895 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1896 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1897 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1898 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1899 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1901 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1902 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1904 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1905 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1906 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1907 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1908 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1910 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1911 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1913 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1914 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1915 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1916 order. This has been fixed.
1918 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1919 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1920 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1921 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1922 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst