tahoe-lafs/docs/NEWS

User visible changes in Tahoe.  -*- outline -*-

* Release 1.2.0 (2008-07-21)

** Security

This release makes the immutable-file "ciphertext hash tree" mandatory.
Previous releases allowed the uploader to decide whether their file would
have an integrity check on the ciphertext or not. A malicious uploader could
use this to create a readcap that would download as one file or a different
one, depending upon which shares the client fetched first, with no errors
raised. There are other integrity checks on the shares themselves, preventing
a storage server or other party from violating the integrity properties of
the read-cap: this failure was only exploitable by the uploader who gives you
a carefully constructed read-cap. If you download the file with Tahoe 1.2.0
or later, you will not be vulnerable to this problem. #491

This change does not introduce a compatibility issue, because all existing
versions of Tahoe will emit the ciphertext hash tree in their shares.

** Dependencies

Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9 . It also requires pycryptopp 0.5 or newer,
since earlier versions had a bug that interacted with specific compiler
versions that could sometimes result in incorrect encryption behavior. Both
packages are included in the Tahoe source tarball in misc/dependencies/ , and
should be built automatically when necessary.

** Web API

Web API directory pages should now contain properly-slash-terminated links to
other directories. They have also stopped using absolute links in forms and
pages (which interfered with the use of a front-end load-balancing proxy).

The behavior of the "Check This File" button changed, in conjunction with
larger internal changes to file checking/verification. The button triggers an
immediate check as before, but the outcome is shown on its own page, and does
not get stored anywhere. As a result, the web directory page no longer shows
historical checker results.

A new "Deep-Check" button has been added, which allows a user to initiate a
recursive check of the given directory and all files and directories
reachable from it. This can cause quite a bit of work, and has no
intermediate progress information or feedback about the process. In addition,
the results of the deep-check are extremely limited. A later release will
improve this behavior.

The web server's behavior with respect to non-ASCII (unicode) filenames in
the "GET save=true" operation has been improved. To achieve maximum
compatibility with variously buggy web browsers, the server does not try to
figure out the character set of the inbound filename. It just echoes the same
bytes back to the browser in the Content-Disposition header. This seems to
make both IE7 and Firefox work correctly.

** Checker/Verifier/Repairer

Tahoe is slowly acquiring convenient tools to check up on file health,
examine existing shares for errors, and repair files that are not fully
healthy. This release adds a mutable checker/verifier/repairer, although
testing is very limited, and there are no web interfaces to trigger repair
yet. The "Check" button next to each file or directory on the webapi page
will perform a file check, and the "deep check" button on each directory will
recursively check all files and directories reachable from there (which may
take a very long time).

Future releases will improve access to this functionality.

** Operations/Packaging

A "check-grid" script has been added, along with a Makefile target. This is
intended (with the help of a pre-configured node directory) to check upon the
health of a Tahoe grid, uploading and downloading a few files. This can be
used as a monitoring tool for a deployed grid, to be run periodically and to
signal an error if it ever fails. It also helps with compatibility testing,
to verify that the latest Tahoe code is still able to handle files created by
an older version.

The munin plugins from misc/munin/ are now copied into any generated debian
packages, and are made executable (and uncompressed) so they can be symlinked
directly from /etc/munin/plugins/ .

Ubuntu "Hardy" was added as a supported debian platform, with a Makefile
target to produce hardy .deb packages. Some notes have been added to
docs/debian.txt about building Tahoe on a debian/ubuntu system.

Storage servers now measure operation rates and latency-per-operation, and
provides results through the /statistics web page as well as the stats
gatherer. Munin plugins have been added to match.

** Other

Tahoe nodes now use Foolscap "incident logging" to record unusual events to
their NODEDIR/logs/incidents/ directory. These incident files can be examined
by Foolscap logging tools, or delivered to an external log-gatherer for
further analysis. Note that Tahoe now requires Foolscap-0.2.9, since 0.2.8
had a bug that complained about "OSError: File exists" when trying to create
the incidents/ directory for a second time.

If no servers are available when retrieving a mutable file (like a
directory), the node now reports an error instead of hanging forever. Earlier
releases would not only hang (causing the webapi directory listing to get
stuck half-way through), but the internal dirnode serialization would cause
all subsequent attempts to retrieve or modify the same directory to hang as
well. #463

A minor internal exception (reported in logs/twistd.log, in the
"stopProducing" method) was fixed, which complained about "self._paused_at
not defined" whenever a file download was stopped from the web browser end.


* Release 1.1.0 (2008-06-11)

** CLI: new "alias" model

The new CLI code uses an scp/rsync -like interface, in which directories in
the Tahoe storage grid are referenced by a colon-suffixed alias. The new
commands look like:
 tahoe cp local.txt tahoe:virtual.txt
 tahoe ls work:subdir

More functionality is available through the CLI: creating unlinked files and
directories, recursive copy in or out of the storage grid, hardlinks, and
retrieving the raw read- or write- caps through the 'ls' command. Please read
docs/CLI.txt for complete details.

** webapi: new pages, new commands

Several new pages were added to the web API:

 /helper_status : to describe what a Helper is doing
 /statistics : reports node uptime, CPU usage, other stats
 /file : for easy file-download URLs, see #221
 /cap == /uri : future compatibility

The localdir=/localfile= and t=download operations were removed. These
required special configuration to enable anyways, but this feature was a
security problem, and was mostly obviated by the new "cp -r" command.

Several new options to the GET command were added:

 t=deep-size : add up the size of all immutable files reachable from the directory
 t=deep-stats : return a JSON-encoded description of number of files, size
                distribution, total size, etc

POST is now preferred over PUT for most operations which cause side-effects.

Most webapi calls now accept overwrite=, and default to overwrite=true .

"POST /uri/DIRCAP/parent/child?t=mkdir" is now the preferred API to create
multiple directories at once, rather than ...?t=mkdir-p .

PUT to a mutable file ("PUT /uri/MUTABLEFILECAP", "PUT /uri/DIRCAP/child")
will modify the file in-place.

** more munin graphs in misc/munin/

  tahoe-introstats
  tahoe-rootdir-space
  tahoe_estimate_files
  mutable files published/retrieved
  tahoe_cpu_watcher
  tahoe_spacetime

** New Dependencies

  zfec 1.1.0
  foolscap 0.2.8
  pycryptopp 0.5
  setuptools (now required at runtime)

** New Mutable-File Code

The mutable-file handling code (mostly used for directories) has been
completely rewritten. The new scheme has a better API (with a modify()
method) and is less likely to lose data when several uncoordinated writers
change a file at the same time.

In addition, a single Tahoe process will coordinate its own writes. If you
make two concurrent directory-modifying webapi calls to a single tahoe node,
it will internally make one of them wait for the other to complete. This
prevents auto-collision (#391).

The new mutable-file code also detects errors during publish better. Earlier
releases might believe that a mutable file was published when in fact it
failed.

** other features

The node now monitors its own CPU usage, as a percentage, measured every 60
seconds. 1/5/15 minute moving averages are available on the /statistics web
page and via the stats-gathering interface.

Clients now accelerate reconnection to all servers after being offline
(#374). When a client is offline for a long time, it scales back reconnection
attempts to approximately once per hour, so it may take a while to make the
first attempt, but once any attempt succeeds, the other server connections
will be retried immediately.

A new "offloaded KeyGenerator" facility can be configured, to move RSA key
generation out from, say, a webapi node, into a separate process. RSA keys
can take several seconds to create, and so a webapi node which is being used
for directory creation will be unavailable for anything else during this
time. The Key Generator process will pre-compute a small pool of keys, to
speed things up further. This also takes better advantage of multi-core CPUs,
or SMP hosts.

The node will only use a potentially-slow "du -s" command at startup (to
measure how much space has been used) if the "sizelimit" parameter has been
configured (to limit how much space is used). Large storage servers should
turn off sizelimit until a later release improves the space-management code,
since "du -s" on a terabyte filesystem can take hours.

The Introducer now allows new announcements to replace old ones, to avoid
buildups of obsolete announcements.

Immutable files are limited to about 12GiB (when using the default 3-of-10
encoding), because larger files would be corrupted by the four-byte
share-size field on the storage servers (#439). A later release will remove
this limit. Earlier releases would allow >12GiB uploads, but the resulting
file would be unretrievable.

The docs/ directory has been rearranged, with old docs put in
docs/historical/ and not-yet-implemented ones in docs/proposed/ .

The Mac OS-X FUSE plugin has a significant bug fix: earlier versions would
corrupt writes that used seek() instead of writing the file in linear order.
The rsync tool is known to perform writes in this order. This has been fixed.