1 ==================================
2 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
3 ==================================
5 Release 1.9.0 (2011-??-??)
6 --------------------------
8 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
9 docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst for how to use sshfs. (`#1409`_)
10 - Nodes now emit "None" for percentiles with higher implied precision
11 than the number of observations can support. Older stats gatherers
12 will throw an exception if they gather stats from a new storage
13 server and it sends a "None" for a percentile. (`#1392`_)
15 Compatibility and Dependencies
16 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
18 - An incompatibility of zope.interface version 3.6.4 with Nevow has
19 been resolved. Tahoe-LAFS now requires one of the exact versions
20 v3.3.1, v3.5.3, or v3.6.1 of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
21 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1. This ensures
22 that we no longer require pywin32 on Windows, and that it is never
23 necessary to patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend.
26 .. _`#1274`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
27 .. _`#1392`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1392
28 .. _`#1409`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
29 .. _`#1435`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
30 .. _`#1438`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
33 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
34 --------------------------
36 Compatibility and Dependencies
37 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
39 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
40 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
41 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
42 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
43 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
44 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
45 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
46 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
52 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
54 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
55 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
56 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
58 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
59 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
60 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
61 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
62 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
63 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
64 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
66 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
67 .. _`#1208`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
68 .. _`#1282`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
69 .. _`#1286`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
70 .. _`#1287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
71 .. _`#1296`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
72 .. _`#1337`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
75 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
76 --------------------------
78 Bugfixes and Improvements
79 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
81 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
82 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
83 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
85 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
86 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
87 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
88 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
90 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
91 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
92 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
93 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
94 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
95 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
96 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
97 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
98 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
99 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
100 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
101 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
102 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
103 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
105 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
106 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
107 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
112 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
113 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
114 platforms. (`#1262`_)
119 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
120 systems can install without having a compiler.
121 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
122 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
123 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
125 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
126 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
127 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
128 version number. (`#1233`_)
133 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
135 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
136 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
139 .. _`#71`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
140 .. _`#174`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
141 .. _`#1212`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
142 .. _`#1045`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
143 .. _`#1190`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
144 .. _`#1216`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
145 .. _`#1223`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
146 .. _`#1224`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
147 .. _`#1225`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
148 .. _`#1232`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
149 .. _`#1233`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
150 .. _`#1241`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
151 .. _`#1253`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
152 .. _`#1255`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
153 .. _`#1262`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
156 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
157 --------------------------
162 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
163 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
164 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
165 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
166 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
167 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
168 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
169 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
170 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
171 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
172 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
174 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
175 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
178 Bugfixes and Improvements
179 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
181 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
182 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
184 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
185 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
186 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
188 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
189 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
190 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
191 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
192 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
193 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
198 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
199 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
201 .. _`#188`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
202 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
203 .. _`#288`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
204 .. _`#448`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
205 .. _`#685`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
206 .. _`#706`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
207 .. _`#715`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
208 .. _`#772`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
209 .. _`#798`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
210 .. _`#800`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
211 .. _`#890`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
212 .. _`#983`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
213 .. _`#990`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
214 .. _`#1055`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
215 .. _`#1074`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
216 .. _`#1108`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
217 .. _`#1155`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
218 .. _`#1170`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
219 .. _`#1191`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
220 .. _`#1127`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
221 .. _`#1129`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
222 .. _`#1131`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
223 .. _`#1166`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
224 .. _`#1175`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
226 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
227 --------------------------
229 Bugfixes and Improvements
230 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
232 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
233 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
234 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
235 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
236 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
238 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
240 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
242 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
243 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
244 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
245 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
247 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
248 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
249 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
254 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
255 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
257 .. _`#776`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
258 .. _`#923`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
259 .. _`#961`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
260 .. _`#967`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
261 .. _`#1051`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
262 .. _`#1067`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
263 .. _`#1072`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
264 .. _`#1083`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
265 .. _`#1097`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
266 .. _`#1098`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
267 .. _`#1099`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
268 .. _`#1117`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
269 .. _`#1118`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
272 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
273 --------------------------
278 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
279 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
280 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
281 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
282 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
284 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
285 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
286 characters on all supported platforms:
288 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
289 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
291 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
292 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
294 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
295 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
296 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
298 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
299 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
300 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
301 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
302 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
303 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
304 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
305 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
306 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
307 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
308 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
309 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
310 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
311 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
312 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
314 Bugfixes and Improvements
315 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
317 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
318 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
319 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
321 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
322 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
323 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
324 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
326 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
328 - ImportError: No module named
329 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
330 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
331 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
332 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
333 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
334 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
335 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
336 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
337 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
338 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
339 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
340 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
342 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
348 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
349 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
355 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
356 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
360 - mock (only required by unit tests)
362 .. _`#534`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
363 .. _`#608`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
364 .. _`#778`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
365 .. _`#803`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
366 .. _`#902`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
367 .. _`#911`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
368 .. _`#924`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
369 .. _`#937`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
370 .. _`#933`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
371 .. _`#968`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
372 .. _`#973`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
373 .. _`#1024`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
374 .. _`#1027`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
375 .. _`#1028`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
376 .. _`#1033`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
377 .. _`#1034`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
378 .. _`#1037`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
379 .. _`#1054`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
380 .. _`#1062`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
381 .. _`#1066`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
382 .. _`#1068`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
383 .. _`#1076`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
384 .. _`#1082`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
385 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
386 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
388 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
389 --------------------------
394 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
396 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
397 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
398 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
399 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
402 Usability Improvements
403 ''''''''''''''''''''''
405 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
407 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
408 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
409 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
410 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
412 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
413 --------------------------
418 - Immutable Directories
420 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
421 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
422 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
423 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
424 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
425 immutable directories).
427 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
428 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
429 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
430 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
431 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
432 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
433 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
435 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
436 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
437 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
438 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
439 the listing of that directory.
441 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
444 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
445 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
447 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
450 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
451 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
452 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
453 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
454 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
455 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
456 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
458 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
459 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
460 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
461 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
462 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
463 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
464 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
465 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
466 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
467 considerably. (`#606`_)
469 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
470 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
471 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
472 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
473 directories and stat() all your local files.
475 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
476 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
477 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
478 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
479 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
480 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
481 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
482 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
484 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
485 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
486 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
489 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
490 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
491 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
492 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
493 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
494 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
495 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
497 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
500 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
501 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
502 "node" process, which has several components that can be
503 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
504 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
505 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
506 future release will make it optional. There are three special
507 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
508 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
510 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
511 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
512 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
513 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
514 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
515 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
517 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
518 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
519 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
520 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
521 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
522 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
523 create-node" instead.
525 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
526 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
527 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
528 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
530 - Performance Improvements
532 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
533 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
534 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
535 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
536 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
537 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
538 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
539 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
540 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
541 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
542 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
543 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
544 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
545 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
546 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
547 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
548 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
549 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
550 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
555 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
556 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
557 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
558 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
561 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
562 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
563 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
564 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
566 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
567 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
570 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
571 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
572 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
575 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
576 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
579 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
582 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
584 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
585 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
587 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
588 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
590 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
591 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
592 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
593 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
594 additional licensing text was added.
596 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
598 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
599 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
601 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
602 has been improved. (`#773`_)
604 For other changes not mentioned here, see
605 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
606 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
607 <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
609 .. _`#121`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
610 .. _`#287`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
611 .. _`#381`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
612 .. _`#457`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
613 .. _`#533`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
614 .. _`#577`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
615 .. _`#606`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
616 .. _`#607`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
617 .. _`#637`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
618 .. _`#641`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
619 .. _`#646`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
620 .. _`#681`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
621 .. _`#729`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
622 .. _`#741`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
623 .. _`#760`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
624 .. _`#761`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
625 .. _`#768`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/768
626 .. _`#773`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
627 .. _`#786`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
628 .. _`#828`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
629 .. _`#833`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
630 .. _`#859`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
631 .. _`#874`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
632 .. _`#875`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
633 .. _`#931`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
634 .. _`#837`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
635 .. _`#850`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
636 .. _`#927`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
637 .. _`#928`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
638 .. _`#939`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
639 .. _`#948`: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
640 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
642 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
643 --------------------------
648 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
649 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
651 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
652 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
653 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
655 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
656 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
657 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
658 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
659 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
661 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
662 directories. (`#705`_)
664 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
665 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
668 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
669 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
670 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
671 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
672 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
674 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
675 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
676 directories from the future. This should improve the user
677 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
678 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
679 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
680 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
681 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
686 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
687 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
688 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
689 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
690 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
691 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
692 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
694 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
695 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
698 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
699 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
700 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
702 Platform/packaging changes
703 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
705 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
706 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
708 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
709 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
710 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
711 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
712 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
713 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
715 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
716 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
717 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
718 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
720 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
722 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
723 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
724 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
726 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
727 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
728 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
735 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
736 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
737 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
741 .. _#392: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
742 .. _#625: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
743 .. _#653: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
744 .. _#683: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
745 .. _#694: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
746 .. _#705: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
747 .. _#722: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
748 .. _#750: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
749 .. _#752: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
751 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
752 --------------------------
757 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
758 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
759 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
760 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
761 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
762 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
763 lease. The process is described in detail in
764 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
766 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
767 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
768 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
770 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
771 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
772 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
773 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
774 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
775 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
776 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
778 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
779 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
781 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
782 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
783 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
784 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
785 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
787 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
788 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
789 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
790 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
791 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
792 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
793 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
798 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
799 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
800 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
801 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
802 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
804 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
805 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
806 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
809 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
810 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
811 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
812 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
813 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
814 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
815 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
816 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
819 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
820 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
821 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
823 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
824 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
825 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
826 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
827 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
828 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
829 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
834 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
835 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
836 of garbage collection.
838 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
839 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
841 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
842 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
844 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
845 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
846 metadata) during backup.
848 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
849 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
851 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
852 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
855 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
856 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
857 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
858 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
859 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
860 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
861 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
862 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
863 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
864 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
865 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
866 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
868 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
869 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
870 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
871 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
876 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
877 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
878 instance of RuntimeError.
880 -Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
881 speeding them up considerably.
883 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
884 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
885 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
886 with hundreds of entries.
888 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
889 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
892 .. _#442: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
893 .. _#645: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
894 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
896 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
897 --------------------------
899 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
900 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
902 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
903 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
904 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
905 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
906 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
907 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
908 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
909 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
910 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
913 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
914 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
915 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
916 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
917 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
918 permanent drive failure.
920 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
921 shares. The limitations are:
923 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
924 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
925 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
926 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
927 and most fields of the shares are validated.
928 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
929 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
930 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
931 corrupted shares will be left in place.
932 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
933 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
934 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
935 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
937 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
938 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
939 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
940 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
943 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
944 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
945 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
946 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
947 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
948 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
949 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
950 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
951 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
952 considered highly unusual.
954 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
955 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
956 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
958 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
959 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
960 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
961 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
962 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
963 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
964 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
965 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
966 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
967 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
968 button will appear on the results page.
970 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
971 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
972 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
973 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
974 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
975 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
981 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
982 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
983 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
984 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
985 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
986 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
987 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
988 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
989 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
990 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
991 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
992 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
993 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
994 to run from a daily cronjob.
996 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
997 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
998 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
999 $target/Latest) from working.
1004 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1005 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1006 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1007 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1008 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1009 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1010 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1011 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1012 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1013 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1014 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1015 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1020 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1021 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1022 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1023 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1024 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1025 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1026 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1027 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1028 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1029 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1034 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1035 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1036 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1037 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1038 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1041 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1042 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1043 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1044 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1045 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1046 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1047 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1049 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1050 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1051 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1053 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1054 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1055 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1056 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1057 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1059 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1062 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1063 - tahoe debug dump-share
1064 - tahoe debug find-shares
1065 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1066 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1068 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1069 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1070 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1073 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1074 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1075 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1076 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1077 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/565 for details.
1082 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1083 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1084 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1085 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1086 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1087 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1088 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1089 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1090 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1091 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1092 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1093 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1094 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1096 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1097 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1098 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1099 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1100 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1101 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1103 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1104 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1105 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1106 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1107 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1108 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1109 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1110 deep-check operations.
1112 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1113 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1114 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1115 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1116 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1119 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1120 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1121 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1122 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1123 "same-origin policy".
1125 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1126 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1127 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1128 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1129 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1130 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1131 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1132 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1133 processing by operations staff.
1135 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1136 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1137 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1138 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1139 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1140 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1142 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1143 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1144 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1145 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1146 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1147 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1148 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1150 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1151 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1152 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1153 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1154 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1155 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1156 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1157 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1159 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1160 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1161 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1162 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1163 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1164 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1165 target) of a t=rename command.
1170 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1171 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1172 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1173 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1174 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1175 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1176 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1177 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1180 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1181 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1182 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1183 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1184 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1185 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1186 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1187 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1188 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1189 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1191 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1192 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1194 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1195 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1196 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1197 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1198 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1201 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1202 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1203 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1204 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1205 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1206 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1207 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1209 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1210 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1211 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1212 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1213 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1215 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1216 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1217 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1218 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1219 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1220 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1221 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1223 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1224 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1225 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1227 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1228 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1229 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1231 Grid Management Tools
1232 '''''''''''''''''''''
1234 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1235 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1237 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1238 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1239 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1240 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1241 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1242 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1243 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1244 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1245 before the grid is completely full.
1247 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1248 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1249 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1251 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1252 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1253 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1254 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1255 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1256 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1257 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1258 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1259 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1260 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1262 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1263 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1264 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1265 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1266 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1267 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1269 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1270 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1272 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1273 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1274 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1275 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1276 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1277 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1278 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1279 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1281 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1282 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1284 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1285 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1286 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1288 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1289 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1290 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1291 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1292 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1293 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1294 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1295 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1296 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1297 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1298 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1303 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1304 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1305 http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Versioning .
1307 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1308 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1309 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1312 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1313 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1314 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1317 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1318 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1319 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1320 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1321 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1322 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1324 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1325 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1326 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1327 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1329 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1330 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1332 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1333 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1334 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1335 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1338 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1340 .. _#512: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1341 .. _#518: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1342 .. _#521: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1343 .. _#531: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1345 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1346 --------------------------
1351 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1352 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1353 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1354 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1355 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1356 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1357 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1358 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1359 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1360 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1361 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1364 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1365 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1371 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1372 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1373 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1374 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1375 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1381 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1382 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1383 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1384 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1386 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1387 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1388 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1389 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1390 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1393 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1394 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1395 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1396 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1397 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1398 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1400 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1401 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1402 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1403 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1404 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1405 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1408 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1409 '''''''''''''''''''''''''
1411 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1412 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1413 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1414 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1415 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1416 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1417 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1418 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1419 (which may take a very long time).
1421 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1423 Operations/Packaging
1424 ''''''''''''''''''''
1426 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1427 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1428 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1429 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1430 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1431 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1432 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1435 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1436 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1437 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1439 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1440 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1441 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1444 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1445 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1446 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1452 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1453 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1454 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1455 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1456 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1457 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1458 directory for a second time.
1460 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1461 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1462 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1463 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1464 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1465 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1467 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1468 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1469 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1470 from the web browser end.
1472 .. _#463: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1473 .. _#491: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1474 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1476 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1477 --------------------------
1479 CLI: new "alias" model
1480 ''''''''''''''''''''''
1482 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1483 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1484 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1486 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1487 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1489 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1490 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1491 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1492 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1494 wapi: new pages, new commands
1495 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1497 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1499 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1500 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1501 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1502 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1504 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1505 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1506 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1507 new "cp -r" command.
1509 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1511 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1512 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1514 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1517 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1519 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1520 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1522 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1523 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1525 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1528 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1529 - tahoe_estimate_files
1530 - mutable files published/retrieved
1539 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1541 New Mutable-File Code
1542 '''''''''''''''''''''
1544 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1545 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1546 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1547 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1549 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1550 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1551 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1552 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1554 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1555 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1556 published when in fact it failed.
1561 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1562 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1563 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1565 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1566 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1567 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1568 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1569 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1571 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1572 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1573 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1574 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1575 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1576 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1577 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1579 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1580 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1581 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1582 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1583 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1584 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1586 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1587 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1589 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1590 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1591 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1592 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1593 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1595 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1596 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1598 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1599 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1600 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1601 order. This has been fixed.
1603 .. _#221: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1604 .. _#374: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1605 .. _#391: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1606 .. _#439: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1607 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst