1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 * Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
7 Compatibility and Dependencies
8 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
10 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
11 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
12 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
13 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
14 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
15 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
16 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
17 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
23 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
25 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
26 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
27 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
29 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
30 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
31 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
32 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
33 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
34 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
35 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
37 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
38 .. _`#1208`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
39 .. _`#1282`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
40 .. _`#1286`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
41 .. _`#1287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
42 .. _`#1296`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
43 .. _`#1337`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
46 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
47 --------------------------
49 Bugfixes and Improvements
50 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
52 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
53 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
54 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
56 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
57 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
58 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
59 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
61 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
62 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
63 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
64 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
65 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
66 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
67 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
68 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
69 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
70 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
71 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
72 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
73 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
74 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
76 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
77 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
78 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
83 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
84 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
90 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
91 systems can install without having a compiler.
92 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
93 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
94 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
96 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
97 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
98 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
99 version number. (`#1233`_)
104 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
106 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
107 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
110 .. _`#71`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
111 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
112 .. _`#1212`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
113 .. _`#1045`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
114 .. _`#1190`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
115 .. _`#1216`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
116 .. _`#1223`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
117 .. _`#1224`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
118 .. _`#1225`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
119 .. _`#1232`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
120 .. _`#1233`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
121 .. _`#1241`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
122 .. _`#1253`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
123 .. _`#1255`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
124 .. _`#1262`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
127 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
128 --------------------------
133 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
134 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
135 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
136 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
137 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
138 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
139 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
140 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
141 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
142 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
143 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
145 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
146 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
149 Bugfixes and Improvements
150 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
152 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
153 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
155 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
156 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
157 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
159 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
160 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
161 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
162 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
163 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
164 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
169 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
170 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
172 .. _`#188`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
173 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
174 .. _`#288`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
175 .. _`#448`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
176 .. _`#685`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
177 .. _`#706`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
178 .. _`#715`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
179 .. _`#772`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
180 .. _`#798`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
181 .. _`#800`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
182 .. _`#890`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
183 .. _`#983`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
184 .. _`#990`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
185 .. _`#1055`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
186 .. _`#1074`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
187 .. _`#1108`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
188 .. _`#1155`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
189 .. _`#1170`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
190 .. _`#1191`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
191 .. _`#1127`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
192 .. _`#1129`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
193 .. _`#1131`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
194 .. _`#1166`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
195 .. _`#1175`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
197 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
198 --------------------------
200 Bugfixes and Improvements
201 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
203 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
204 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
205 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
206 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
207 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
209 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
211 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
213 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
214 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
215 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
216 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
218 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
219 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
220 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
225 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
226 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
228 .. _`#776`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
229 .. _`#923`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
230 .. _`#961`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
231 .. _`#967`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
232 .. _`#1051`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
233 .. _`#1067`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
234 .. _`#1072`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
235 .. _`#1083`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
236 .. _`#1097`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
237 .. _`#1098`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
238 .. _`#1099`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
239 .. _`#1117`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
240 .. _`#1118`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
243 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
244 --------------------------
249 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
250 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
251 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
252 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
253 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
255 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
256 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
257 characters on all supported platforms:
259 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
260 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
262 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
263 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
265 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
266 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
267 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
269 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
270 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
271 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
272 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
273 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
274 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
275 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
276 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
277 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
278 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
279 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
280 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
281 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
282 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
283 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
285 Bugfixes and Improvements
286 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
288 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
289 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
290 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
292 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
293 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
294 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
295 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
297 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
299 - ImportError: No module named
300 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
301 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
302 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
303 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
304 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
305 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
306 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
307 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
308 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
309 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
310 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
311 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
313 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
319 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
320 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
326 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
327 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
331 - mock (only required by unit tests)
333 .. _`#534`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
334 .. _`#608`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
335 .. _`#778`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
336 .. _`#803`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
337 .. _`#902`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
338 .. _`#911`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
339 .. _`#924`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
340 .. _`#937`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
341 .. _`#933`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
342 .. _`#968`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
343 .. _`#973`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
344 .. _`#1024`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
345 .. _`#1027`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
346 .. _`#1028`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
347 .. _`#1033`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
348 .. _`#1034`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
349 .. _`#1037`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
350 .. _`#1054`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
351 .. _`#1062`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
352 .. _`#1066`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
353 .. _`#1068`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
354 .. _`#1076`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
355 .. _`#1082`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
356 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
357 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
359 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
360 --------------------------
365 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
367 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
368 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
369 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
370 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
373 Usability Improvements
374 ''''''''''''''''''''''
376 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
378 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
379 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
380 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
381 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
383 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
384 --------------------------
389 - Immutable Directories
391 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
392 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
393 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
394 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
395 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
396 immutable directories).
398 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
399 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
400 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
401 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
402 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
403 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
404 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
406 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
407 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
408 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
409 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
410 the listing of that directory.
412 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
415 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
416 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
418 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
421 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
422 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
423 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
424 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
425 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
426 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
427 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
429 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
430 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
431 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
432 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
433 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
434 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
435 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
436 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
437 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
438 considerably. (`#606`_)
440 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
441 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
442 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
443 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
444 directories and stat() all your local files.
446 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
447 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
448 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
449 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
450 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
451 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
452 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
453 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
455 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
456 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
457 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
460 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
461 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
462 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
463 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
464 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
465 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
466 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
468 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
471 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
472 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
473 "node" process, which has several components that can be
474 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
475 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
476 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
477 future release will make it optional. There are three special
478 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
479 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
481 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
482 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
483 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
484 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
485 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
486 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
488 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
489 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
490 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
491 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
492 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
493 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
494 create-node" instead.
496 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
497 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
498 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
499 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
501 - Performance Improvements
503 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
504 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
505 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
506 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
507 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
508 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
509 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
510 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
511 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
512 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
513 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
514 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
515 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
516 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
517 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
518 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
519 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
520 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
521 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
526 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
527 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
528 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
529 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
532 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
533 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
534 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
535 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
537 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
538 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
541 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
542 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
543 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
546 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
547 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
550 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
553 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
555 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
556 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
558 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
559 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
561 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
562 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
563 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
564 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
565 additional licensing text was added.
567 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
569 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
570 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
572 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
573 has been improved. (`#773`_)
575 For other changes not mentioned here, see
576 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
577 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
578 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
580 .. _`#121`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
581 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
582 .. _`#381`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
583 .. _`#457`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
584 .. _`#533`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
585 .. _`#577`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
586 .. _`#606`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
587 .. _`#607`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
588 .. _`#637`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
589 .. _`#641`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
590 .. _`#646`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
591 .. _`#681`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
592 .. _`#729`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
593 .. _`#741`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
594 .. _`#760`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
595 .. _`#761`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
596 .. _`#768`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
597 .. _`#773`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
598 .. _`#786`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
599 .. _`#828`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
600 .. _`#833`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
601 .. _`#859`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
602 .. _`#874`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
603 .. _`#875`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
604 .. _`#931`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
605 .. _`#837`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
606 .. _`#850`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
607 .. _`#927`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
608 .. _`#928`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
609 .. _`#939`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
610 .. _`#948`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
611 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
613 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
614 --------------------------
619 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
620 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
622 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
623 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
624 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
626 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
627 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
628 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
629 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
630 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
632 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
633 directories. (`#705`_)
635 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
636 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
639 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
640 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
641 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
642 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
643 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
645 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
646 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
647 directories from the future. This should improve the user
648 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
649 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
650 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
651 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
652 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
657 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
658 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
659 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
660 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
661 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
662 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
663 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
665 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
666 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
669 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
670 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
671 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
673 Platform/packaging changes
674 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
676 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
677 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
679 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
680 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
681 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
682 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
683 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
684 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
686 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
687 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
688 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
689 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
691 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
693 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
694 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
695 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
697 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
698 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
699 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
706 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
707 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
708 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
712 .. _#392: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
713 .. _#625: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
714 .. _#653: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
715 .. _#683: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
716 .. _#694: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
717 .. _#705: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
718 .. _#722: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
719 .. _#750: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
720 .. _#752: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
722 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
723 --------------------------
728 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
729 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
730 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
731 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
732 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
733 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
734 lease. The process is described in detail in
735 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
737 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
738 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
739 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
741 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
742 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
743 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
744 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
745 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
746 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
747 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
749 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
750 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
752 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
753 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
754 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
755 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
756 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
758 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
759 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
760 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
761 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
762 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
763 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
764 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
769 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
770 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
771 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
772 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
773 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
775 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
776 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
777 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
780 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
781 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
782 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
783 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
784 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
785 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
786 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
787 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
790 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
791 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
792 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
794 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
795 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
796 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
797 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
798 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
799 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
800 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
805 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
806 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
807 of garbage collection.
809 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
810 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
812 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
813 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
815 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
816 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
817 metadata) during backup.
819 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
820 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
822 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
823 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
826 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
827 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
828 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
829 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
830 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
831 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
832 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
833 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
834 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
835 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
836 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
837 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
839 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
840 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
841 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
842 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
847 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
848 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
849 instance of RuntimeError.
851 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
852 speeding them up considerably.
854 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
855 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
856 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
857 with hundreds of entries.
859 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
860 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
863 .. _#442: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
864 .. _#645: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
865 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
867 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
868 --------------------------
870 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
871 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
873 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
874 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
875 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
876 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
877 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
878 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
879 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
880 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
881 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
884 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
885 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
886 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
887 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
888 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
889 permanent drive failure.
891 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
892 shares. The limitations are:
894 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
895 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
896 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
897 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
898 and most fields of the shares are validated.
899 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
900 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
901 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
902 corrupted shares will be left in place.
903 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
904 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
905 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
906 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
908 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
909 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
910 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
911 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
914 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
915 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
916 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
917 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
918 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
919 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
920 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
921 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
922 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
923 considered highly unusual.
925 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
926 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
927 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
929 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
930 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
931 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
932 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
933 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
934 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
935 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
936 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
937 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
938 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
939 button will appear on the results page.
941 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
942 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
943 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
944 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
945 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
946 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
952 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
953 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
954 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
955 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
956 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
957 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
958 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
959 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
960 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
961 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
962 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
963 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
964 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
965 to run from a daily cronjob.
967 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
968 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
969 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
970 $target/Latest) from working.
975 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
976 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
977 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
978 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
979 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
980 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
981 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
982 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
983 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
984 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
985 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
986 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
991 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
992 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
993 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
994 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
995 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
996 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
997 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
998 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
999 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1000 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1005 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1006 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1007 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1008 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1009 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1012 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1013 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1014 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1015 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1016 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1017 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1018 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1020 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1021 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1022 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1024 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1025 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1026 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1027 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1028 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1030 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1033 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1034 - tahoe debug dump-share
1035 - tahoe debug find-shares
1036 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1037 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1039 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1040 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1041 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1044 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1045 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1046 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1047 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1048 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/565 for details.
1053 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1054 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1055 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1056 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1057 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1058 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1059 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1060 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1061 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1062 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1063 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1064 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1065 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1067 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1068 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1069 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1070 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1071 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1072 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1074 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1075 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1076 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1077 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1078 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1079 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1080 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1081 deep-check operations.
1083 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1084 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1085 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1086 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1087 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1090 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1091 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1092 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1093 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1094 "same-origin policy".
1096 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1097 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1098 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1099 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1100 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1101 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1102 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1103 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1104 processing by operations staff.
1106 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1107 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1108 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1109 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1110 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1111 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1113 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1114 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1115 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1116 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1117 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1118 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1119 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1121 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1122 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1123 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1124 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1125 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1126 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1127 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1128 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1130 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1131 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1132 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1133 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1134 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1135 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1136 target) of a t=rename command.
1141 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1142 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1143 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1144 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1145 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1146 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1147 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1148 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1151 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1152 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1153 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1154 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1155 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1156 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1157 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1158 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1159 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1160 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1162 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1163 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1165 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1166 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1167 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1168 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1169 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1172 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1173 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1174 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1175 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1176 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1177 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1178 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1180 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1181 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1182 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1183 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1184 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1186 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1187 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1188 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1189 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1190 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1191 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1192 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1194 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1195 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1196 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1198 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1199 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1200 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1202 Grid Management Tools
1203 '''''''''''''''''''''
1205 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1206 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1208 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1209 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1210 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1211 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1212 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1213 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1214 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1215 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1216 before the grid is completely full.
1218 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1219 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1220 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1222 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1223 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1224 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1225 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1226 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1227 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1228 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1229 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1230 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1231 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1233 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1234 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1235 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1236 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1237 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1238 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1240 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1241 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1243 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1244 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1245 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1246 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1247 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1248 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1249 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1250 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1252 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1253 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1255 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1256 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1257 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1259 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1260 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1261 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1262 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1263 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1264 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1265 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1266 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1267 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1268 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1269 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1274 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1275 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1276 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning .
1278 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1279 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1280 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1283 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1284 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1285 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1288 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1289 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1290 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1291 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1292 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1293 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1295 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1296 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1297 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1298 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1300 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1301 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1303 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1304 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1305 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1306 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1309 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1311 .. _#512: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1312 .. _#518: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1313 .. _#521: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1314 .. _#531: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1316 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1317 --------------------------
1322 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1323 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1324 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1325 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1326 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1327 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1328 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1329 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1330 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1331 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1332 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1335 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1336 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1342 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1343 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1344 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1345 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1346 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1352 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1353 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1354 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1355 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1357 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1358 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1359 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1360 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1361 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1364 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1365 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1366 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1367 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1368 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1369 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1371 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1372 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1373 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1374 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1375 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1376 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1379 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1380 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1382 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1383 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1384 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1385 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1386 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1387 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1388 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1389 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1390 (which may take a very long time).
1392 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1394 Operations/Packaging
1395 ''''''''''''''''''''
1397 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1398 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1399 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1400 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1401 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1402 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1403 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1406 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1407 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1408 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1410 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1411 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1412 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1415 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1416 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1417 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1423 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1424 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1425 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1426 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1427 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1428 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1429 directory for a second time.
1431 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1432 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1433 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1434 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1435 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1436 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1438 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1439 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1440 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1441 from the web browser end.
1443 .. _#463: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1444 .. _#491: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1445 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1447 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1448 --------------------------
1450 CLI: new "alias" model
1451 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1453 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1454 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1455 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1457 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1458 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1460 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1461 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1462 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1463 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1465 wapi: new pages, new commands
1466 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1468 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1470 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1471 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1472 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1473 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1475 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1476 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1477 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1478 new "cp -r" command.
1480 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1482 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1483 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1485 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1488 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1490 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1491 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1493 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1494 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1496 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1499 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1500 - tahoe_estimate_files
1501 - mutable files published/retrieved
1510 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1512 New Mutable-File Code
1513 '''''''''''''''''''''
1515 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1516 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1517 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1518 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1520 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1521 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1522 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1523 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1525 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1526 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1527 published when in fact it failed.
1532 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1533 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1534 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1536 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1537 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1538 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1539 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1540 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1542 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1543 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1544 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1545 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1546 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1547 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1548 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1550 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1551 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1552 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1553 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1554 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1555 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1557 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1558 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1560 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1561 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1562 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1563 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1564 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1566 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1567 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1569 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1570 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1571 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1572 order. This has been fixed.
1574 .. _#221: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1575 .. _#374: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1576 .. _#391: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1577 .. _#439: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1578 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst