1 .. -*- coding: utf-8-with-signature -*-
3 ==================================
4 User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
5 ==================================
7 Release 1.10.0 (2013-05-01)
8 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''
13 - The Welcome page has been redesigned. This is a preview of the design style
14 that is likely to be used in other parts of the WUI in future Tahoe-LAFS
15 versions. (`#1713`_, `#1457`_, `#1735`_)
16 - A new extensible Introducer protocol has been added, as the basis for
17 future improvements such as accounting. Compatibility with older nodes is
18 not affected. When server, introducer, and client are all upgraded, the
19 welcome page will show node IDs that start with "v0-" instead of the old
20 tubid. See `<docs/nodekeys.rst>`__ for details. (`#466`_)
21 - The web-API has a new ``relink`` operation that supports directly moving
22 files between directories. (`#1579`_)
27 - The ``introducer.furl`` for new Introducers is now unguessable. In previous
28 releases, this FURL used a predictable swissnum, allowing a network
29 eavesdropper who observes any node connecting to the Introducer to access
30 the Introducer themselves, and thus use servers or offer storage service to
31 clients (i.e. "join the grid"). In the new code, the only way to join a
32 grid is to be told the ``introducer.furl`` by someone who already knew it.
33 Note that pre-existing introducers are not changed. To force an introducer
34 to generate a new FURL, delete the existing ``introducer.furl`` file and
35 restart it. After doing this, the ``[client]introducer.furl`` setting of
36 every client and server that should connect to that introducer must be
37 updated. Note that other users of a shared machine may be able to read
38 ``introducer.furl`` from your ``tahoe.cfg`` file unless you configure the
39 file permissions to prevent them. (`#1802`_)
40 - Both ``introducer.furl`` and ``helper.furl`` are now censored from the
41 Welcome page, to prevent users of your gateway from learning enough to
42 create gateway nodes of their own. For existing guessable introducer
43 FURLs, the ``introducer`` swissnum is still displayed to show that a
44 guessable FURL is in use. (`#860`_)
46 Command-line Syntax Changes
47 ---------------------------
49 - Global options to ``tahoe``, such as ``-d``/``--node-directory``, must now
50 come before rather than after the command name (for example,
51 ``tahoe -d BASEDIR cp -r foo: bar:`` ). (`#166`_)
56 - In earlier versions, if a connection problem caused a download failure for
57 an immutable file, subsequent attempts to download the same file could also
58 fail. This is now fixed. (`#1679`_)
59 - Filenames in WUI directory pages are now displayed correctly when they
60 contain characters that require HTML escaping. (`#1143`_)
61 - Non-ASCII node nicknames no longer cause WUI errors. (`#1298`_)
62 - Checking a LIT file using ``tahoe check`` no longer results in an
64 - The SFTP frontend now works with recent versions of Twisted, rather than
65 giving errors or warnings about use of ``IFinishableConsumer``. (`#1926`_,
67 - ``tahoe cp --verbose`` now counts the files being processed correctly.
69 - Exceptions no longer trigger an unhelpful crash reporter on Ubuntu 12.04
70 ("Precise") or later. (`#1746`_)
71 - The error message displayed when a CLI tool cannot connect to a gateway has
72 been improved. (`#974`_)
73 - Other minor fixes: `#1781`_, `#1812`_, `#1915`_, `#1484`_, `#1525`_
75 Compatibility and Dependencies
76 ------------------------------
78 - Python >= 2.6, except Python 3 (`#1658`_)
79 - Twisted >= 11.0.0 (`#1771`_)
80 - mock >= 0.8 (for unit tests)
81 - pycryptopp >= 0.6.0 (for Ed25519 signatures)
82 - zope.interface >= 3.6.0 (except 3.6.3 or 3.6.4)
87 - The ``flogtool`` utility, used to read detailed event logs, can now be
88 accessed as ``tahoe debug flogtool`` even when Foolscap is not installed
89 system-wide. (`#1693`_)
90 - The provisioning/reliability pages were removed from the main client's web
91 interface, and moved into a standalone web-based tool. Use the ``run.py``
92 script in ``misc/operations_helpers/provisioning/`` to access them.
93 - Web clients can now cache (ETag) immutable directory pages. (`#443`_)
94 - `<docs/convergence_secret.rst>`__ was added to document the adminstration
95 of convergence secrets. (`#1761`_)
97 Precautions when Upgrading
98 --------------------------
100 - When upgrading a grid from a recent revision of trunk, follow the
101 precautions from this `message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`_, to ensure
102 that announcements to the Introducer are recognized after the upgrade.
103 This is not necessary when upgrading from a previous release like 1.9.2.
105 .. _`#166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/166
106 .. _`#443`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/443
107 .. _`#466`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/466
108 .. _`#860`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/860
109 .. _`#974`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/974
110 .. _`#1143`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1143
111 .. _`#1298`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1298
112 .. _`#1457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1457
113 .. _`#1484`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484
114 .. _`#1525`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525
115 .. _`#1564`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1564
116 .. _`#1579`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1579
117 .. _`#1658`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1658
118 .. _`#1679`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679
119 .. _`#1693`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1693
120 .. _`#1713`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1713
121 .. _`#1735`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1735
122 .. _`#1746`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746
123 .. _`#1758`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1758
124 .. _`#1761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1761
125 .. _`#1771`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1771
126 .. _`#1781`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1781
127 .. _`#1783`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1783
128 .. _`#1802`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1802
129 .. _`#1805`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1805
130 .. _`#1812`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812
131 .. _`#1915`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1915
132 .. _`#1926`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926
133 .. _`message to the tahoe-dev mailing list`:
134 https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-March/008096.html
137 Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
138 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
143 - Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
144 (`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
145 `#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
146 - FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
147 still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
148 - The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
149 now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
151 - If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
152 gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
153 "catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
154 - OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
155 - The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
156 computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
158 Configuration/Behavior Changes
159 ------------------------------
161 - The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
162 is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
163 the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
169 - Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
172 Compatibility and Dependencies
173 ------------------------------
175 - foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
176 with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
177 - Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
179 .. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
180 .. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
181 .. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
182 .. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
183 .. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
184 .. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
185 .. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
186 .. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
187 .. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
188 .. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
189 .. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
190 .. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
191 .. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
192 .. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
193 .. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
194 .. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
195 .. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
198 Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
199 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
201 Security-related Bugfix
202 -----------------------
204 - Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
205 retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
207 .. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
210 Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
211 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
216 - The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
217 Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
218 efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
219 instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
220 format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
221 versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
222 Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
223 mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
224 `<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
225 - A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
226 a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
227 `<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
228 - A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
229 files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
230 directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
231 to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
232 only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
234 - The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
235 pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
236 'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
237 can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
239 Configuration/Behavior Changes
240 ------------------------------
242 - Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
243 be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
244 These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
245 - Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
246 containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
247 filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
248 ``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
249 symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
250 - ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
251 creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
252 - The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
253 listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
258 - The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
259 detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
261 - Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
262 ``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
263 Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
264 - The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
265 block fetches. (`#1395`_)
266 - Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
267 5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
272 - The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
273 source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
274 Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
275 - The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
276 ``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
277 Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
278 - The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
279 with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
280 (any version of each):
282 * Academic Free License
283 * Apple Public Source License
284 * BitTorrent Open Source License
285 * Lucent Public License
286 * Jabber Open Source License
287 * Common Development and Distribution License
288 * Microsoft Public License
289 * Microsoft Reciprocal License
290 * Sun Industry Standards Source License
291 * Open Software License
293 Compatibility and Dependencies
294 ------------------------------
296 - To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
297 3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
298 version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
299 - The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
300 longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
301 required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
302 patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
304 - An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
305 dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
310 - A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
312 - The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
313 of share files. (`#1391`_)
314 - Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
315 - Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
316 #1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
318 .. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
319 .. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
320 .. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
321 .. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
322 .. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
323 .. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
324 .. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
325 .. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
326 .. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
327 .. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
328 .. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
329 .. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
330 .. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
331 .. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
332 .. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
333 .. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
334 .. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
335 .. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
336 .. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
339 Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
340 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
342 Security-related Bugfix
343 -----------------------
345 - Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
346 delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
347 - Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
348 extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
349 file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
350 corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
351 exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
353 .. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
356 Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
357 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
359 Compatibility and Dependencies
360 ------------------------------
362 - Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
363 well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
364 failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
365 StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
366 - Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
367 dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
368 (which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
369 reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
375 - the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
377 - documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
378 - "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
379 - the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
381 - tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
382 "python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
383 - "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
384 - the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
385 to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
386 - "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
387 where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
389 .. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
390 .. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
391 .. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
392 .. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
393 .. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
394 .. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
397 Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
398 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
400 Bugfixes and Improvements
401 -------------------------
403 - Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
404 shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
405 threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
407 - Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
408 file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
409 - Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
410 downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
412 - Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
413 involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
414 - Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
415 console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
416 - Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
417 'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
418 - The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
419 use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
420 These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
421 caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
422 the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
423 - The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
424 fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
425 - 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
427 - The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
428 more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
429 script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
434 - The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
435 accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
436 platforms. (`#1262`_)
441 - We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
442 systems can install without having a compiler.
443 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
444 - Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
445 version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
447 - Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
448 high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
449 the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
450 version number. (`#1233`_)
455 - All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
457 - Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
458 Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
461 .. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
462 .. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
463 .. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
464 .. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
465 .. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
466 .. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
467 .. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
468 .. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
469 .. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
470 .. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
471 .. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
472 .. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
473 .. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
474 .. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
475 .. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
478 Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
479 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
484 - A completely new downloader which improves performance and
485 robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
486 servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
487 fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
488 allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
489 downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
490 beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
491 unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
492 requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
493 previous one would send a small request to every server for every
494 download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
496 - Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
497 Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
500 Bugfixes and Improvements
501 -------------------------
503 - Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
504 node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
506 - The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
507 home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
508 - Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
510 - Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
511 1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
512 clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
513 - Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
514 documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
515 `#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
520 - on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
521 - pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
523 .. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
524 .. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
525 .. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
526 .. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
527 .. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
528 .. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
529 .. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
530 .. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
531 .. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
532 .. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
533 .. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
534 .. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
535 .. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
536 .. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
537 .. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
538 .. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
539 .. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
540 .. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
541 .. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
542 .. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
543 .. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
544 .. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
545 .. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
547 Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
548 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
550 Bugfixes and Improvements
551 -------------------------
553 - Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
554 that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
555 - Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
556 refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
557 - Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
559 - Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
561 - Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
563 - The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
564 contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
565 - Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
566 - Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
568 - Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
569 utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
570 - Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
575 - Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
576 (`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
578 .. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
579 .. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
580 .. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
581 .. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
582 .. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
583 .. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
584 .. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
585 .. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
586 .. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
587 .. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
588 .. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
589 .. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
590 .. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
593 Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
594 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
599 - SFTP support (`#1037`_)
600 Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
601 has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
602 Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
603 well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
605 - support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
606 Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
607 characters on all supported platforms:
609 - when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
610 run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
612 - when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
613 run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
615 - when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
616 "tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
617 - when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
619 - Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
620 Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
621 distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
622 the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
623 This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
624 "servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
625 coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
626 3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
627 value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
628 will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
629 shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
630 file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
631 previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
632 pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
633 uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
635 Bugfixes and Improvements
636 -------------------------
638 - Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
639 some servers fail. (`#608`_)
640 - python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
642 - Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
643 - Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
644 - CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
645 - HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
647 - MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
649 - ImportError: No module named
650 setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
651 - Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
652 - Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
653 CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
654 - Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
655 - Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
656 - Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
657 - the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
658 - The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
659 by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
660 - Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
661 names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
663 - Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
669 - The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
670 allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
676 - the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
677 (2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
681 - mock (only required by unit tests)
683 .. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
684 .. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
685 .. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
686 .. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
687 .. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
688 .. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
689 .. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
690 .. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
691 .. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
692 .. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
693 .. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
694 .. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
695 .. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
696 .. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
697 .. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
698 .. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
699 .. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
700 .. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
701 .. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
702 .. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
703 .. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
704 .. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
705 .. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
706 .. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
707 .. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
709 Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
710 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
715 - Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
717 Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
718 UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
719 a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
720 would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
723 Usability Improvements
724 ----------------------
726 - Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
728 - The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
729 that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
730 has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
731 are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
733 Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
734 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
739 - Immutable Directories
741 Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
742 directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
743 normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
744 children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
745 immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
746 immutable directories).
748 These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
749 provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
750 after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
751 They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
752 and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
753 with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
754 read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
756 Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
757 immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
758 directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
759 cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
760 the listing of that directory.
762 Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
765 The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
766 directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
768 - "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
771 The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
772 directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
773 directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
774 not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
775 "DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
776 read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
777 release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
779 In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
780 it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
781 existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
782 that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
783 been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
784 could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
785 were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
786 backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
787 the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
788 considerably. (`#606`_)
790 A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
791 backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
792 Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
793 link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
794 directories and stat() all your local files.
796 If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
797 that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
798 time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
799 read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
800 the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
801 too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
802 your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
803 should take a tiny fraction of the time.
805 As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
806 directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
807 earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
810 The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
811 objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
812 that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
813 throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
814 skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
815 in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
816 time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
818 - "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
821 The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
822 processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
823 "node" process, which has several components that can be
824 activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
825 is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
826 functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
827 future release will make it optional. There are three special
828 purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
829 node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
831 So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
832 and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
833 the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
834 "tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
835 service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
836 a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
838 "tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
839 without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
840 --no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
841 use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
842 *server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
843 node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
844 create-node" instead.
846 In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
847 will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
848 of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
849 arguments to "tahoe create-node".
851 - Performance Improvements
853 Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
854 located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
855 previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
856 to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
857 downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
858 would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
859 the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
860 among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
861 as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
862 sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
863 grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
864 never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
865 negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
866 such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
867 can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
868 downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
869 measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
870 might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
871 heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
876 - The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
877 and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
878 faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
879 (it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
882 - The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
883 webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
884 old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
885 remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
887 - The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
888 plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
891 - The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
892 storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
893 below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
896 - "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
897 suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
900 - "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
903 - "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
905 - "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
906 instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
908 - "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
909 previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
911 - Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
912 "tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
913 binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
914 removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
915 additional licensing text was added.
917 - Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
919 - The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
920 stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
922 - The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
923 has been improved. (`#773`_)
925 For other changes not mentioned here, see
926 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
927 To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
928 <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
930 .. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
931 .. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
932 .. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
933 .. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
934 .. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
935 .. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
936 .. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
937 .. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
938 .. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
939 .. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
940 .. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
941 .. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
942 .. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
943 .. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
944 .. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
945 .. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
946 .. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
947 .. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
948 .. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
949 .. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
950 .. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
951 .. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
952 .. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
953 .. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
954 .. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
955 .. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
956 .. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
957 .. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
958 .. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
959 .. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
960 .. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
962 Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
963 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
968 - Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
969 upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
971 - Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
972 algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
973 encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
975 - The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
976 significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
977 easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
978 "Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
979 leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
981 - The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
982 directories. (`#705`_)
984 - The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
985 now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
988 - The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
989 possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
990 that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
991 mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
992 proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
994 - This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
995 contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
996 directories from the future. This should improve the user
997 experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
998 future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
999 seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
1000 unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
1001 read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
1006 - deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
1007 the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
1008 directories and mutable files are checked, but not
1009 repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
1010 repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
1011 repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
1012 rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
1014 - A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
1015 (and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
1018 - The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
1019 removing the Helper's ability to mount a
1020 partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
1022 Platform/packaging changes
1023 --------------------------
1025 - Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
1026 an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
1028 - Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
1029 on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
1030 may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
1031 data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
1032 identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
1033 Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
1035 - Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
1036 comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
1037 using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
1038 the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
1040 - Several minor documentation updates were made.
1042 - To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
1043 Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
1044 related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
1046 - The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
1047 upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
1048 efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
1055 - no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
1056 - avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
1057 - python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
1061 .. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
1062 .. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
1063 .. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
1064 .. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
1065 .. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
1066 .. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
1067 .. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
1068 .. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
1069 .. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
1071 Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
1072 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1077 - The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
1078 collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
1079 deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
1080 clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
1081 (generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
1082 are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
1083 lease. The process is described in detail in
1084 `garbage-collection.rst`_.
1086 The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
1087 adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
1088 for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
1090 Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
1091 the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
1092 code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
1093 fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
1094 exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
1095 Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
1096 crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
1098 Security/Usability Problems Fixed
1099 ---------------------------------
1101 - A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
1102 previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
1103 before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
1104 "alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
1105 to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
1107 - The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
1108 of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
1109 secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
1110 approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
1111 might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
1112 was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
1113 hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
1118 - In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
1119 text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
1120 generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
1121 regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
1122 clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
1124 - The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
1125 way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
1126 instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
1129 - The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
1130 from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
1131 two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
1132 estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
1133 grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
1134 freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
1135 present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
1136 whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
1139 - When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
1140 shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
1141 links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
1143 - A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
1144 statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
1145 are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
1146 tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
1147 repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
1148 page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
1149 docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
1154 - "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
1155 argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
1156 of garbage collection.
1158 - In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
1159 HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
1161 - "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
1162 reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
1164 - "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
1165 certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
1166 metadata) during backup.
1168 - On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
1169 which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
1171 - The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
1172 it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
1175 - The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
1176 of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
1177 created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
1178 "tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
1179 read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
1180 backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
1181 similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
1182 the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
1183 faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
1184 more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
1185 be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
1186 backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
1188 - "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
1189 which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
1190 directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
1191 the results of a "consolidation" operation.
1196 - The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
1197 assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
1198 instance of RuntimeError.
1200 - Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
1201 speeding them up considerably.
1203 - Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
1204 individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
1205 are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
1206 with hundreds of entries.
1208 - The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
1209 slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
1212 .. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
1213 .. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
1214 .. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
1216 Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
1217 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1219 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1220 -------------------------
1222 - The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
1223 verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
1224 act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
1225 given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
1226 the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
1227 of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
1228 share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
1229 checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
1230 cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
1233 - This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
1234 partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
1235 shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
1236 ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
1237 replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
1238 permanent drive failure.
1240 - The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
1241 shares. The limitations are:
1243 - Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
1244 all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
1245 verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
1246 - The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
1247 and most fields of the shares are validated.
1248 - The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
1249 replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
1250 repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
1251 corrupted shares will be left in place.
1252 - read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
1253 by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
1254 insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
1255 halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
1257 - Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
1258 operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
1259 should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
1260 'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
1263 - If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
1264 the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
1265 file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
1266 so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
1267 investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
1268 mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
1269 gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
1270 indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
1271 part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
1272 considered highly unusual.
1274 - By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
1275 objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
1276 failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
1278 - This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
1279 individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
1280 with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
1281 initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
1282 directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
1283 everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
1284 "output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
1285 status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
1286 statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
1287 of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
1288 button will appear on the results page.
1290 - The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
1291 check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
1292 display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
1293 encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
1294 deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
1295 a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
1301 - The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
1302 efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
1303 pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
1304 snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
1305 will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
1306 such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
1307 and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
1308 will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
1309 to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
1310 addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
1311 files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
1312 time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
1313 (when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
1314 to run from a daily cronjob.
1316 Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
1317 with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1318 1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
1319 $target/Latest) from working.
1324 - The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
1325 lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
1326 shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
1327 3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
1328 too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
1329 is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
1330 tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
1331 too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
1332 support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
1333 they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
1334 capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
1335 upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
1340 - Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
1341 configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
1342 into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
1343 filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
1344 filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
1345 cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
1346 connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
1347 tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
1348 uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
1349 configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
1354 - This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
1355 combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
1356 you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
1357 the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
1358 on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
1361 - The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
1362 unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
1363 local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
1364 resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
1365 directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
1366 behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
1367 into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
1369 - "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
1370 put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
1371 and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
1373 - The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
1374 means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
1375 a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
1376 default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
1377 "tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
1379 - Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
1382 - tahoe debug dump-cap
1383 - tahoe debug dump-share
1384 - tahoe debug find-shares
1385 - tahoe debug catalog-shares
1386 - tahoe debug corrupt-share
1388 The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
1389 of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
1390 verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
1393 The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
1394 characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
1395 might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
1396 characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
1397 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
1402 - The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
1403 in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
1404 3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
1405 browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
1406 8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
1407 8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
1408 against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
1409 you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
1410 changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
1411 but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
1412 these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
1413 nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
1414 tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
1416 - All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
1417 start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
1418 approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
1419 synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
1420 instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
1421 deep-check" operations have been removed.
1423 - The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
1424 results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
1425 produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
1426 several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
1427 choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
1428 verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
1429 "when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
1430 deep-check operations.
1432 - The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
1433 via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
1434 currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
1435 frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
1436 easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
1439 - Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
1440 response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
1441 will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
1442 still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
1443 "same-origin policy".
1445 - The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
1446 into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
1447 an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
1448 button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
1449 events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
1450 can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
1451 can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
1452 data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
1453 processing by operations staff.
1455 - The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
1456 usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
1457 exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
1458 actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
1459 mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
1460 returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
1462 - The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
1463 header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
1464 media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
1465 grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
1466 BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
1467 files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
1468 cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
1470 - Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
1471 contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
1472 page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
1473 object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
1474 deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
1475 the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
1476 result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
1477 several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
1479 - Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
1480 cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
1481 wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
1482 such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
1483 mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
1484 the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
1485 target) of a t=rename command.
1490 - Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
1491 "[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
1492 pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
1493 development headers are already installed on your system, this can
1494 occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
1495 default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
1496 the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
1497 unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
1500 - The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
1501 regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
1502 else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
1503 download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
1504 index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
1505 contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
1506 twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
1507 any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
1508 you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
1509 other bandwidth-limited environments.
1511 - Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
1512 contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
1514 https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
1515 unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
1516 the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
1517 instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
1518 build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
1521 - Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
1522 "tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
1523 misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
1524 2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
1525 7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
1526 the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
1527 a 'lazy' one should now be small.
1529 - The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
1530 which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
1531 with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
1532 complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
1533 Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
1535 - Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
1536 "setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
1537 to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
1538 support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
1539 to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
1540 installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
1541 Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
1543 - Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
1544 although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
1545 has received more thorough testing and deployment.
1547 - Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
1548 assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
1549 is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
1551 Grid Management Tools
1552 ---------------------
1554 - Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
1555 mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
1557 - The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
1558 (startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
1559 of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
1560 storage servers), and will periodically fetch
1561 disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
1562 this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
1563 available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
1564 of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
1565 before the grid is completely full.
1567 - The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
1568 (tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
1569 disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
1571 - To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
1572 (visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
1573 disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
1574 an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
1575 for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
1576 BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
1577 number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
1578 that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
1579 than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
1580 report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
1582 - The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
1583 allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
1584 'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
1585 with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
1586 provides information on how much space could be recovered once
1587 Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
1589 Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
1590 -------------------------------------------------------
1592 - The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
1593 named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
1594 previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
1595 compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
1596 advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
1597 directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
1598 create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
1599 values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
1601 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
1602 "disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
1604 - tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
1605 "shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
1606 default parameters are still 3-of-10.
1608 - The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
1609 upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
1610 to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
1611 control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
1612 space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
1613 the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
1614 drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
1615 parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
1616 immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
1617 not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
1618 prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
1623 - Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
1624 support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
1625 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
1627 - The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
1628 Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
1629 identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
1632 - Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
1633 exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
1634 (by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
1637 - Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
1638 file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
1639 reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
1640 command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
1641 documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
1642 in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
1644 - If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
1645 report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
1646 accept the report. These reports are written to files in
1647 BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
1649 - The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
1650 allowing non-ascii nicknames.
1652 - The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
1653 pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
1654 nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
1655 a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
1658 - The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
1660 .. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
1661 .. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
1662 .. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
1663 .. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
1665 Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)
1666 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1671 - This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree"
1672 mandatory. Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether
1673 their file would have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A
1674 malicious uploader could use this to create a readcap that would
1675 download as one file or a different one, depending upon which shares
1676 the client fetched first, with no errors raised. There are other
1677 integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing a storage
1678 server or other party from violating the integrity properties of the
1679 read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who
1680 gives you a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file
1681 with Tahoe 1.2.0 or later, you will not be vulnerable to this
1684 This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all
1685 existing versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in
1691 - Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5
1692 or newer, since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with
1693 specific compiler versions that could sometimes result in incorrect
1694 encryption behavior. Both packages are included in the Tahoe source
1695 tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and should be built automatically
1701 - Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated
1702 links to other directories. They have also stopped using absolute
1703 links in forms and pages (which interfered with the use of a
1704 front-end load-balancing proxy).
1706 - The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction
1707 with larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The
1708 button triggers an immediate check as before, but the outcome is
1709 shown on its own page, and does not get stored anywhere. As a
1710 result, the web directory page no longer shows historical checker
1713 - A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to
1714 initiate a recursive check of the given directory and all files and
1715 directories reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work,
1716 and has no intermediate progress information or feedback about the
1717 process. In addition, the results of the deep-check are extremely
1718 limited. A later release will improve this behavior.
1720 - The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode)
1721 filenames in the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To
1722 achieve maximum compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the
1723 server does not try to figure out the character set of the inbound
1724 filename. It just echoes the same bytes back to the browser in the
1725 Content-Disposition header. This seems to make both IE7 and Firefox
1728 Checker/Verifier/Repairer
1729 -------------------------
1731 - Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file
1732 health, examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that
1733 are not fully healthy. This release adds a mutable
1734 checker/verifier/repairer, although testing is very limited, and
1735 there are no web interfaces to trigger repair yet. The "Check"
1736 button next to each file or directory on the wapi page will perform
1737 a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
1738 recursively check all files and directories reachable from there
1739 (which may take a very long time).
1741 Future releases will improve access to this functionality.
1743 Operations/Packaging
1744 --------------------
1746 - A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile
1747 target. This is intended (with the help of a pre-configured node
1748 directory) to check upon the health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and
1749 downloading a few files. This can be used as a monitoring tool for a
1750 deployed grid, to be run periodically and to signal an error if it
1751 ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing, to verify that
1752 the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by an
1755 - The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated
1756 debian packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they
1757 can be symlinked directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .
1759 - Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a
1760 Makefile target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been
1761 added to `debian.rst`_ about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu
1764 - Storage servers now measure operation rates and
1765 latency-per-operation, and provides results through the /statistics
1766 web page as well as the stats gatherer. Munin plugins have been
1772 - Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual
1773 events to their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident
1774 files can be examined by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an
1775 external log-gatherer for further analysis. Note that Tahoe now
1776 requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8 had a bug that complained about
1777 "OSError: File exists" when trying to create the incidents/
1778 directory for a second time.
1780 - If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
1781 directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging
1782 forever. Earlier releases would not only hang (causing the wapi
1783 directory listing to get stuck half-way through), but the internal
1784 dirnode serialization would cause all subsequent attempts to
1785 retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as well. `#463`_
1787 - A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
1788 "stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about
1789 "self._paused_at not defined" whenever a file download was stopped
1790 from the web browser end.
1792 .. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
1793 .. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
1794 .. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
1796 Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)
1797 ''''''''''''''''''''''''''
1799 CLI: new "alias" model
1800 ----------------------
1802 - The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which
1803 directories in the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a
1804 colon-suffixed alias. The new commands look like:
1806 - tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
1807 - tahoe ls work:subdir
1809 - More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked
1810 files and directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid,
1811 hardlinks, and retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the
1812 'ls' command. Please read `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
1814 wapi: new pages, new commands
1815 -----------------------------
1817 - Several new pages were added to the web API:
1819 - /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
1820 - /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
1821 - /file : for easy file-download URLs, see `#221`_
1822 - /cap == /uri : future compatibility
1824 - The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were
1825 removed. These required special configuration to enable anyways, but
1826 this feature was a security problem, and was mostly obviated by the
1827 new "cp -r" command.
1829 - Several new options to the GET command were added:
1831 - t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
1832 - t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size distribution, total size, etc
1834 - POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause
1837 - Most wapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true
1839 - "POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to
1840 create multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .
1842 - PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT
1843 /uri/DIRCAP/child") will modify the file in-place.
1845 - more munin graphs in misc/munin/
1848 - tahoe-rootdir-space
1849 - tahoe_estimate_files
1850 - mutable files published/retrieved
1859 - setuptools (now required at runtime)
1861 New Mutable-File Code
1862 ---------------------
1864 - The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has
1865 been completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a
1866 modify() method) and is less likely to lose data when several
1867 uncoordinated writers change a file at the same time.
1869 - In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own
1870 writes. If you make two concurrent directory-modifying wapi calls to
1871 a single tahoe node, it will internally make one of them wait for
1872 the other to complete. This prevents auto-collision (`#391`_).
1874 - The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish
1875 better. Earlier releases might believe that a mutable file was
1876 published when in fact it failed.
1881 - The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured
1882 every 60 seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the
1883 /statistics web page and via the stats-gathering interface.
1885 - Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being
1886 offline (`#374`_). When a client is offline for a long time, it
1887 scales back reconnection attempts to approximately once per hour, so
1888 it may take a while to make the first attempt, but once any attempt
1889 succeeds, the other server connections will be retried immediately.
1891 - A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move
1892 RSA key generation out from, say, a wapi node, into a separate
1893 process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
1894 node which is being used for directory creation will be unavailable
1895 for anything else during this time. The Key Generator process will
1896 pre-compute a small pool of keys, to speed things up further. This
1897 also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs, or SMP hosts.
1899 - The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup
1900 (to measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit"
1901 parameter has been configured (to limit how much space is
1902 used). Large storage servers should turn off sizelimit until a later
1903 release improves the space-management code, since "du -s" on a
1904 terabyte filesystem can take hours.
1906 - The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to
1907 avoid buildups of obsolete announcements.
1909 - Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default
1910 3-of-10 encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the
1911 four-byte share-size field on the storage servers (`#439`_). A later
1912 release will remove this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB
1913 uploads, but the resulting file would be unretrievable.
1915 - The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
1916 docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .
1918 - The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions
1919 would corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in
1920 linear order. The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this
1921 order. This has been fixed.
1923 .. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
1924 .. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
1925 .. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
1926 .. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
1927 .. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst