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tahoe-lafs/NEWS.rst
David-Sarah Hopwood d5c8580d8e NEWS.rst: add a missing dependency update for 1.9.2. 
Signed-off-by: David-Sarah Hopwood <david-sarah@jacaranda.org>
2012-11-20 05:59:00 +00:00

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==================================
User-Visible Changes in Tahoe-LAFS
==================================
Release 1.9.2 (2012-07-03)
----------------------------
Notable Bugfixes
''''''''''''''''
- Several regressions in support for reading (`#1636`_), writing/modifying
(`#1670`_, `#1749`_), verifying (`#1628`_) and repairing (`#1655`_, `#1669`_,
`#1676`_, `#1689`_) mutable files have been fixed.
- FTP can now list directories containing mutable files, although it
still does not support reading or writing mutable files. (`#680`_)
- The FTP frontend would previously show Jan 1 1970 for all timestamps;
now it shows the correct modification time of the directory entry.
(`#1688`_)
- If a node is configured to report incidents to a log gatherer, but the
gatherer is offline when some incidents occur, it would previously not
"catch up" with those incidents as intended. (`#1725`_)
- OpenBSD 5 is now supported. (`#1584`_)
- The ``count-good-share-hosts`` field of file check results is now
computed correctly. (`#1115`_)
Configuration/Behavior Changes
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
- The capability of the upload directory for the drop-upload frontend
is now specified in the file ``private/drop_upload_dircap`` under
the gateway's node directory, rather than in its ``tahoe.cfg``.
(`#1593`_)
Packaging Changes
'''''''''''''''''
- Tahoe-LAFS can be built correctly from a git repository as well as
from darcs.
Compatibility and Dependencies
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
- foolscap >= 0.6.3 is required, in order to make Tahoe-LAFS compatible
with Twisted >= 11.1.0. (`#1788`_)
- Versions 2.0.1 and 2.4 of PyCrypto are excluded. (`#1631`_, `#1574`_)
.. _`#680`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/680
.. _`#1115`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1115
.. _`#1574`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1574
.. _`#1584`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1584
.. _`#1593`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1593
.. _`#1628`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1628
.. _`#1631`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1631
.. _`#1636`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1636
.. _`#1655`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1655
.. _`#1669`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1669
.. _`#1670`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1670
.. _`#1676`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1676
.. _`#1688`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1688
.. _`#1689`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1689
.. _`#1725`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1725
.. _`#1749`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1749
.. _`#1788`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1788
Release 1.9.1 (2012-01-12)
--------------------------
Security-related Bugfix
'''''''''''''''''''''''
- Fix flaw that would allow servers to cause undetected corruption when
retrieving the contents of mutable files (both SDMF and MDMF). (`#1654`_)
.. _`#1654`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1654
Release 1.9.0 (2011-10-30)
--------------------------
New Features
''''''''''''
- The most significant new feature in this release is MDMF: "Medium-size
Distributed Mutable Files". Unlike standard SDMF files, these provide
efficient partial-access (reading and modifying small portions of the file
instead of the whole thing). MDMF is opt-in (it is not yet the default
format for mutable files), both to ensure compatibility with previous
versions, and because the algorithm does not yet meet memory-usage goals.
Enable it with ``--format=MDMF`` in the CLI (``tahoe put`` and ``tahoe
mkdir``), or the "format" radioboxes in the web interface. See
`<docs/specifications/mutable.rst>`__ for more details (`#393`_, `#1507`_)
- A "blacklist" feature allows blocking access to specific files through
a particular gateway. See the "Access Blacklist" section of
`<docs/configuration.rst>`__ for more details. (`#1425`_)
- A "drop-upload" feature has been added, which allows you to upload
files to a Tahoe-LAFS directory just by writing them to a local
directory. This feature is experimental and should not be relied on
to store the only copy of valuable data. It is currently available
only on Linux. See `<docs/frontends/drop-upload.rst>`__ for documentation.
(`#1429`_)
- The timeline of immutable downloads can be viewed using a zoomable and
pannable JavaScript-based visualization. This is accessed using the
'timeline' link on the File Download Status page for the download, which
can be reached from the Recent Uploads and Downloads page.
Configuration/Behavior Changes
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
- Prior to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, the configuration of some node options could
be specified using individual config files rather than via ``tahoe.cfg``.
These files now cause an error if present. (`#1385`_)
- Storage servers now calculate their remaining space based on the filesystem
containing the ``storage/shares/`` directory. Previously they looked at the
filesystem containing the ``storage/`` directory. This allows
``storage/shares/``, rather than ``storage/``, to be a mount point or a
symlink pointing to another filesystem. (`#1384`_)
- ``tahoe cp xyz MUTABLE`` will modify the existing mutable file instead of
creating a new one. (`#1304`_)
- The button for unlinking a file from its directory on a WUI directory
listing is now labelled "unlink" rather than "del". (`#1104`_)
Notable Bugfixes
''''''''''''''''
- The security bugfix for the vulnerability allowing deletion of shares,
detailed in the news for v1.8.3 below, is also included in this
release. (`#1528`_)
- Some cases of immutable upload, for example using the ``tahoe put`` and
``tahoe cp`` commands or SFTP, did not appear in the history of Recent
Uploads and Downloads. (`#1079`_)
- The memory footprint of the verifier has been reduced by serializing
block fetches. (`#1395`_)
- Large immutable downloads are now a little faster than in v1.8.3 (about
5% on a fast network). (`#1268`_)
Packaging Changes
'''''''''''''''''
- The files related to Debian packaging have been removed from the Tahoe
source tree, since they are now maintained as part of the official
Debian packages. (`#1454`_)
- The unmaintained FUSE plugins were removed from the source tree. See
``docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst`` for how to mount a Tahoe filesystem on
Unix via sshfs. (`#1409`_)
- The Tahoe licenses now give explicit permission to combine Tahoe-LAFS
with code distributed under the following additional open-source licenses
(any version of each):
* Academic Free License
* Apple Public Source License
* BitTorrent Open Source License
* Lucent Public License
* Jabber Open Source License
* Common Development and Distribution License
* Microsoft Public License
* Microsoft Reciprocal License
* Sun Industry Standards Source License
* Open Software License
Compatibility and Dependencies
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
- To resolve an incompatibility between Nevow and zope.interface (versions
3.6.3 and 3.6.4), Tahoe-LAFS now requires an earlier or later
version of zope.interface. (`#1435`_)
- The Twisted dependency has been raised to version 10.1 to ensure we no
longer require pywin32 on Windows, the new drop-upload feature has the
required support from Twisted on Linux, and that it is never necessary to
patch Twisted in order to use the FTP frontend. (`#1274`_, `#1429`_,
`#1438`_)
- An explicit dependency on pyOpenSSL has been added, replacing the indirect
dependency via the "secure_connections" option of foolscap. (`#1383`_)
Minor Changes
'''''''''''''
- A ``man`` page has been added (`#1420`_). All other docs are in ReST
format.
- The ``tahoe_files`` munin plugin reported an incorrect count of the number
of share files. (`#1391`_)
- Minor documentation updates: #627, #1104, #1225, #1297, #1342, #1404
- Other minor changes: #636, #1355, #1363, #1366, #1388, #1392, #1412, #1344,
#1347, #1359, #1389, #1441, #1442, #1446, #1474, #1503
.. _`#393`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/393
.. _`#1079`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1079
.. _`#1104`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1104
.. _`#1268`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1268
.. _`#1274`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1274
.. _`#1304`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1304
.. _`#1383`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1383
.. _`#1384`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1384
.. _`#1385`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1385
.. _`#1391`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1391
.. _`#1395`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1395
.. _`#1409`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1409
.. _`#1420`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1420
.. _`#1425`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1425
.. _`#1429`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1429
.. _`#1435`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1435
.. _`#1438`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1438
.. _`#1454`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1454
.. _`#1507`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1507
Release 1.8.3 (2011-09-13)
--------------------------
Security-related Bugfix
'''''''''''''''''''''''
- Fix flaw that would allow a person who knows a storage index of a file to
delete shares of that file. (`#1528`_)
- Remove corner cases in mutable file bounds management which could expose
extra lease info or old share data (from prior versions of the mutable
file) if someone with write authority to that mutable file exercised these
corner cases in a way that no actual Tahoe-LAFS client does. (Probably not
exploitable.) (`#1528`_)
.. _`#1528`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1528
Release 1.8.2 (2011-01-30)
--------------------------
Compatibility and Dependencies
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
- Tahoe is now compatible with Twisted-10.2 (released last month), as
well as with earlier versions. The previous Tahoe-1.8.1 release
failed to run against Twisted-10.2, raising an AttributeError on
StreamServerEndpointService (`#1286`_)
- Tahoe now depends upon the "mock" testing library, and the foolscap
dependency was raised to 0.6.1 . It no longer requires pywin32
(which was used only on windows). Future developers should note that
reactor.spawnProcess and derivatives may no longer be used inside
Tahoe code.
Other Changes
'''''''''''''
- the default reserved_space value for new storage nodes is 1 GB
(`#1208`_)
- documentation is now in reStructuredText (.rst) format
- "tahoe cp" should now handle non-ASCII filenames
- the unmaintained Mac/Windows GUI applications have been removed
(`#1282`_)
- tahoe processes should appear in top and ps as "tahoe", not
"python", on some unix platforms. (`#174`_)
- "tahoe debug trial" can be used to run the test suite (`#1296`_)
- the SFTP frontend now reports unknown sizes as "0" instead of "?",
to improve compatibility with clients like FileZilla (`#1337`_)
- "tahoe --version" should now report correct values in situations
where 1.8.1 might have been wrong (`#1287`_)
.. _`#1208`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1208
.. _`#1282`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1282
.. _`#1286`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1286
.. _`#1287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1287
.. _`#1296`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1296
.. _`#1337`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1337
Release 1.8.1 (2010-10-28)
--------------------------
Bugfixes and Improvements
'''''''''''''''''''''''''
- Allow the repairer to improve the health of a file by uploading some
shares, even if it cannot achieve the configured happiness
threshold. This fixes a regression introduced between v1.7.1 and
v1.8.0. (`#1212`_)
- Fix a memory leak in the ResponseCache which is used during mutable
file/directory operations. (`#1045`_)
- Fix a regression and add a performance improvement in the
downloader. This issue caused repair to fail in some special
cases. (`#1223`_)
- Fix a bug that caused 'tahoe cp' to fail for a grid-to-grid copy
involving a non-ASCII filename. (`#1224`_)
- Fix a rarely-encountered bug involving printing large strings to the
console on Windows. (`#1232`_)
- Perform ~ expansion in the --exclude-from filename argument to
'tahoe backup'. (`#1241`_)
- The CLI's 'tahoe mv' and 'tahoe ln' commands previously would try to
use an HTTP proxy if the HTTP_PROXY environment variable was set.
These now always connect directly to the WAPI, thus avoiding giving
caps to the HTTP proxy (and also avoiding failures in the case that
the proxy is failing or requires authentication). (`#1253`_)
- The CLI now correctly reports failure in the case that 'tahoe mv'
fails to unlink the file from its old location. (`#1255`_)
- 'tahoe start' now gives a more positive indication that the node has
started. (`#71`_)
- The arguments seen by 'ps' or other tools for node processes are now
more useful (in particular, they include the path of the 'tahoe'
script, rather than an obscure tool named 'twistd'). (`#174`_)
Removed Features
''''''''''''''''
- The tahoe start/stop/restart and node creation commands no longer
accept the -m or --multiple option, for consistency between
platforms. (`#1262`_)
Packaging
'''''''''
- We now host binary packages so that users on certain operating
systems can install without having a compiler.
<https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html>
- Use a newer version of a dependency if needed, even if an older
version is installed. This would previously cause a VersionConflict
error. (`#1190`_)
- Use a precompiled binary of a dependency if one with a sufficiently
high version number is available, instead of attempting to compile
the dependency from source, even if the source version has a higher
version number. (`#1233`_)
Documentation
'''''''''''''
- All current documentation in .txt format has been converted to .rst
format. (`#1225`_)
- Added docs/backdoors.rst declaring that we won't add backdoors to
Tahoe-LAFS, or add anything to facilitate government access to data.
(`#1216`_)
.. _`#71`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/71
.. _`#174`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/174
.. _`#1212`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1212
.. _`#1045`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1045
.. _`#1190`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1190
.. _`#1216`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1216
.. _`#1223`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1223
.. _`#1224`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1224
.. _`#1225`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1225
.. _`#1232`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1232
.. _`#1233`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1233
.. _`#1241`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1241
.. _`#1253`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1253
.. _`#1255`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1255
.. _`#1262`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1262
Release 1.8.0 (2010-09-23)
--------------------------
New Features
''''''''''''
- A completely new downloader which improves performance and
robustness of immutable-file downloads. It uses the fastest K
servers to download the data in K-way parallel. It automatically
fails over to alternate servers if servers fail in mid-download. It
allows seeking to arbitrary locations in the file (the previous
downloader which would only read the entire file sequentially from
beginning to end). It minimizes unnecessary round trips and
unnecessary bytes transferred to improve performance. It sends
requests to fewer servers to reduce the load on servers (the
previous one would send a small request to every server for every
download) (`#287`_, `#288`_, `#448`_, `#798`_, `#800`_, `#990`_,
`#1170`_, `#1191`_)
- Non-ASCII command-line arguments and non-ASCII outputs now work on
Windows. In addition, the command-line tool now works on 64-bit
Windows. (`#1074`_)
Bugfixes and Improvements
'''''''''''''''''''''''''
- Document and clean up the command-line options for specifying the
node's base directory. (`#188`_, `#706`_, `#715`_, `#772`_,
`#1108`_)
- The default node directory for Windows is ".tahoe" in the user's
home directory, the same as on other platforms. (`#890`_)
- Fix a case in which full cap URIs could be logged. (`#685`_,
`#1155`_)
- Fix bug in WUI in Python 2.5 when the system clock is set back to
1969. Now you can use Tahoe-LAFS with Python 2.5 and set your system
clock to 1969 and still use the WUI. (`#1055`_)
- Many improvements in code organization, tests, logging,
documentation, and packaging. (`#983`_, `#1074`_, `#1108`_,
`#1127`_, `#1129`_, `#1131`_, `#1166`_, `#1175`_)
Dependency Updates
''''''''''''''''''
- on x86 and x86-64 platforms, pycryptopp >= 0.5.20
- pycrypto 2.2 is excluded due to a bug
.. _`#188`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/188
.. _`#288`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/288
.. _`#448`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/448
.. _`#685`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/685
.. _`#706`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/706
.. _`#715`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/715
.. _`#772`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/772
.. _`#798`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/798
.. _`#800`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/800
.. _`#890`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/890
.. _`#983`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/983
.. _`#990`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/990
.. _`#1055`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1055
.. _`#1074`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1074
.. _`#1108`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1108
.. _`#1155`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1155
.. _`#1170`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1170
.. _`#1191`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1191
.. _`#1127`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1127
.. _`#1129`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1129
.. _`#1131`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1131
.. _`#1166`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1166
.. _`#1175`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1175
Release 1.7.1 (2010-07-18)
--------------------------
Bugfixes and Improvements
'''''''''''''''''''''''''
- Fix bug in which uploader could fail with AssertionFailure or report
that it had achieved servers-of-happiness when it hadn't. (`#1118`_)
- Fix bug in which servers could get into a state where they would
refuse to accept shares of a certain file (`#1117`_)
- Add init scripts for managing the gateway server on Debian/Ubuntu
(`#961`_)
- Fix bug where server version number was always 0 on the welcome page
(`#1067`_)
- Add new command-line command "tahoe unlink" as a synonym for "tahoe
rm" (`#776`_)
- The FTP frontend now encrypts its temporary files, protecting their
contents from an attacker who is able to read the disk. (`#1083`_)
- Fix IP address detection on FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 (`#1098`_)
- Fix minor layout issue in the Web User Interface with Internet
Explorer (`#1097`_)
- Fix rarely-encountered incompatibility between Twisted logging
utility and the new unicode support added in v1.7.0 (`#1099`_)
- Forward-compatibility improvements for non-ASCII caps (`#1051`_)
Code improvements
'''''''''''''''''
- Simplify and tidy-up directories, unicode support, test code
(`#923`_, `#967`_, `#1072`_)
.. _`#776`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/776
.. _`#923`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/923
.. _`#961`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/961
.. _`#967`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/967
.. _`#1051`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1051
.. _`#1067`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1067
.. _`#1072`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1072
.. _`#1083`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1083
.. _`#1097`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1097
.. _`#1098`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1098
.. _`#1099`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1099
.. _`#1117`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1117
.. _`#1118`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1118
Release 1.7.0 (2010-06-18)
--------------------------
New Features
''''''''''''
- SFTP support (`#1037`_)
Your Tahoe-LAFS gateway now acts like a full-fledged SFTP server. It
has been tested with sshfs to provide a virtual filesystem in Linux.
Many users have asked for this feature. We hope that it serves them
well! See the `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ document to get
started.
- support for non-ASCII character encodings (`#534`_)
Tahoe-LAFS now correctly handles filenames containing non-ASCII
characters on all supported platforms:
- when reading files in from the local filesystem (such as when you
run "tahoe backup" to back up your local files to a Tahoe-LAFS
grid);
- when writing files out to the local filesystem (such as when you
run "tahoe cp -r" to recursively copy files out of a Tahoe-LAFS
grid);
- when displaying filenames to the terminal (such as when you run
"tahoe ls"), subject to limitations of the terminal and locale;
- when parsing command-line arguments, except on Windows.
- Servers of Happiness (`#778`_)
Tahoe-LAFS now measures during immutable file upload to see how well
distributed it is across multiple servers. It aborts the upload if
the pieces of the file are not sufficiently well-distributed.
This behavior is controlled by a configuration parameter called
"servers of happiness". With the default settings for its erasure
coding, Tahoe-LAFS generates 10 shares for each file, such that any
3 of those shares are sufficient to recover the file. The default
value of "servers of happiness" is 7, which means that Tahoe-LAFS
will guarantee that there are at least 7 servers holding some of the
shares, such that any 3 of those servers can completely recover your
file. The new upload code also distributes the shares better than the
previous version in some cases and takes better advantage of
pre-existing shares (when a file has already been previously
uploaded). See the `architecture.rst`_ document [3] for details.
Bugfixes and Improvements
'''''''''''''''''''''''''
- Premature abort of upload if some shares were already present and
some servers fail. (`#608`_)
- python ./setup.py install -- can't create or remove files in install
directory. (`#803`_)
- Network failure => internal TypeError. (`#902`_)
- Install of Tahoe on CentOS 5.4. (`#933`_)
- CLI option --node-url now supports https url. (`#1028`_)
- HTML/CSS template files were not correctly installed under
Windows. (`#1033`_)
- MetadataSetter does not enforce restriction on setting "tahoe"
subkeys. (`#1034`_)
- ImportError: No module named
setuptools_darcs.setuptools_darcs. (`#1054`_)
- Renamed Title in xhtml files. (`#1062`_)
- Increase Python version dependency to 2.4.4, to avoid a critical
CPython security bug. (`#1066`_)
- Typo correction for the munin plugin tahoe_storagespace. (`#968`_)
- Fix warnings found by pylint. (`#973`_)
- Changing format of some documentation files. (`#1027`_)
- the misc/ directory was tied up. (`#1068`_)
- The 'ctime' and 'mtime' metadata fields are no longer written except
by "tahoe backup". (`#924`_)
- Unicode filenames in Tahoe-LAFS directories are normalized so that
names that differ only in how accents are encoded are treated as the
same. (`#1076`_)
- Various small improvements to documentation. (`#937`_, `#911`_,
`#1024`_, `#1082`_)
Removals
''''''''
- The 'tahoe debug consolidate' subcommand (for converting old
allmydata Windows client backups to a newer format) has been
removed.
Dependency Updates
''''''''''''''''''
- the Python version dependency is raised to 2.4.4 in some cases
(2.4.3 for Redhat-based Linux distributions, 2.4.2 for UCS-2 builds)
(`#1066`_)
- pycrypto >= 2.0.1
- pyasn1 >= 0.0.8a
- mock (only required by unit tests)
.. _`#534`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/534
.. _`#608`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/608
.. _`#778`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/778
.. _`#803`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/803
.. _`#902`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/902
.. _`#911`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/911
.. _`#924`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/924
.. _`#937`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/937
.. _`#933`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/933
.. _`#968`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/968
.. _`#973`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/973
.. _`#1024`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024
.. _`#1027`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1027
.. _`#1028`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1028
.. _`#1033`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1033
.. _`#1034`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1034
.. _`#1037`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1037
.. _`#1054`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1054
.. _`#1062`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1062
.. _`#1066`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1066
.. _`#1068`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1068
.. _`#1076`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1076
.. _`#1082`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1082
.. _architecture.rst: docs/architecture.rst
.. _FTP-and-SFTP.rst: docs/frontends/FTP-and-SFTP.rst
Release 1.6.1 (2010-02-27)
--------------------------
Bugfixes
''''''''
- Correct handling of Small Immutable Directories
Immutable directories can now be deep-checked and listed in the web
UI in all cases. (In v1.6.0, some operations, such as deep-check, on
a directory graph that included very small immutable directories,
would result in an exception causing the whole operation to abort.)
(`#948`_)
Usability Improvements
''''''''''''''''''''''
- Improved user interface messages and error reporting. (`#681`_,
`#837`_, `#939`_)
- The timeouts for operation handles have been greatly increased, so
that you can view the results of an operation up to 4 days after it
has completed. After viewing them for the first time, the results
are retained for a further day. (`#577`_)
Release 1.6.0 (2010-02-01)
--------------------------
New Features
''''''''''''
- Immutable Directories
Tahoe-LAFS can now create and handle immutable
directories. (`#607`_, `#833`_, `#931`_) These are read just like
normal directories, but are "deep-immutable", meaning that all their
children (and everything reachable from those children) must be
immutable objects (i.e. immutable or literal files, and other
immutable directories).
These directories must be created in a single webapi call that
provides all of the children at once. (Since they cannot be changed
after creation, the usual create/add/add sequence cannot be used.)
They have URIs that start with "URI:DIR2-CHK:" or "URI:DIR2-LIT:",
and are described on the human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI")
with a "DIR-IMM" abbreviation (as opposed to "DIR" for the usual
read-write directories and "DIR-RO" for read-only directories).
Tahoe-LAFS releases before 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an
immutable directory. 1.5.0 will tolerate their presence in a
directory listing (and display it as "unknown"). 1.4.1 and earlier
cannot tolerate them: a DIR-IMM child in any directory will prevent
the listing of that directory.
Immutable directories are repairable, just like normal immutable
files.
The webapi "POST t=mkdir-immutable" call is used to create immutable
directories. See `webapi.rst`_ for details.
- "tahoe backup" now creates immutable directories, backupdb has
dircache
The "tahoe backup" command has been enhanced to create immutable
directories (in previous releases, it created read-only mutable
directories) (`#828`_). This is significantly faster, since it does
not need to create an RSA keypair for each new directory. Also
"DIR-IMM" immutable directories are repairable, unlike "DIR-RO"
read-only mutable directories at present. (A future Tahoe-LAFS
release should also be able to repair DIR-RO.)
In addition, the backupdb (used by "tahoe backup" to remember what
it has already copied) has been enhanced to store information about
existing immutable directories. This allows it to re-use directories
that have moved but still contain identical contents, or that have
been deleted and later replaced. (The 1.5.0 "tahoe backup" command
could only re-use directories that were in the same place as they
were in the immediately previous backup.) With this change, the
backup process no longer needs to read the previous snapshot out of
the Tahoe-LAFS grid, reducing the network load
considerably. (`#606`_)
A "null backup" (in which nothing has changed since the previous
backup) will require only two Tahoe-side operations: one to add an
Archives/$TIMESTAMP entry, and a second to update the Latest/
link. On the local disk side, it will readdir() all your local
directories and stat() all your local files.
If you've been using "tahoe backup" for a while, you will notice
that your first use of it after upgrading to 1.6.0 may take a long
time: it must create proper immutable versions of all the old
read-only mutable directories. This process won't take as long as
the initial backup (where all the file contents had to be uploaded
too): it will require time proportional to the number and size of
your directories. After this initial pass, all subsequent passes
should take a tiny fraction of the time.
As noted above, Tahoe-LAFS versions earlier than 1.5.0 cannot list a
directory containing an immutable subdirectory. Tahoe-LAFS versions
earlier than 1.6.0 cannot read the contents of an immutable
directory.
The "tahoe backup" command has been improved to skip over unreadable
objects (like device files, named pipes, and files with permissions
that prevent the command from reading their contents), instead of
throwing an exception and terminating the backup process. It also
skips over symlinks, because these cannot be represented faithfully
in the Tahoe-side filesystem. A warning message will be emitted each
time something is skipped. (`#729`_, `#850`_, `#641`_)
- "create-node" command added, "create-client" now implies
--no-storage
The basic idea behind Tahoe-LAFS's client+server and client-only
processes is that you are creating a general-purpose Tahoe-LAFS
"node" process, which has several components that can be
activated. Storage service is one of these optional components, as
is the Helper, FTP server, and SFTP server. Web gateway
functionality is nominally on this list, but it is always active; a
future release will make it optional. There are three special
purpose servers that can't currently be run as a component in a
node: introducer, key-generator, and stats-gatherer.
So now "tahoe create-node" will create a Tahoe-LAFS node process,
and after creation you can edit its tahoe.cfg to enable or disable
the desired services. It is a more general-purpose replacement for
"tahoe create-client". The default configuration has storage
service enabled. For convenience, the "--no-storage" argument makes
a tahoe.cfg file that disables storage service. (`#760`_)
"tahoe create-client" has been changed to create a Tahoe-LAFS node
without a storage service. It is equivalent to "tahoe create-node
--no-storage". This helps to reduce the confusion surrounding the
use of a command with "client" in its name to create a storage
*server*. Use "tahoe create-client" to create a purely client-side
node. If you want to offer storage to the grid, use "tahoe
create-node" instead.
In the future, other services will be added to the node, and they
will be controlled through options in tahoe.cfg . The most important
of these services may get additional --enable-XYZ or --disable-XYZ
arguments to "tahoe create-node".
- Performance Improvements
Download of immutable files begins as soon as the downloader has
located the K necessary shares (`#928`_, `#287`_). In both the
previous and current releases, a downloader will first issue queries
to all storage servers on the grid to locate shares before it begins
downloading the shares. In previous releases of Tahoe-LAFS, download
would not begin until all storage servers on the grid had replied to
the query, at which point K shares would be chosen for download from
among the shares that were located. In this release, download begins
as soon as any K shares are located. This means that downloads start
sooner, which is particularly important if there is a server on the
grid that is extremely slow or even hung in such a way that it will
never respond. In previous releases such a server would have a
negative impact on all downloads from that grid. In this release,
such a server will have no impact on downloads, as long as K shares
can be found on other, quicker, servers. This also means that
downloads now use the "best-alacrity" servers that they talk to, as
measured by how quickly the servers reply to the initial query. This
might cause downloads to go faster, especially on grids with
heterogeneous servers or geographical dispersion.
Minor Changes
'''''''''''''
- The webapi acquired a new "t=mkdir-with-children" command, to create
and populate a directory in a single call. This is significantly
faster than using separate "t=mkdir" and "t=set-children" operations
(it uses one gateway-to-grid roundtrip, instead of three or
four). (`#533`_)
- The t=set-children (note the hyphen) operation is now documented in
webapi.rst, and is the new preferred spelling of the
old t=set_children (with an underscore). The underscore version
remains for backwards compatibility. (`#381`_, `#927`_)
- The tracebacks produced by errors in CLI tools should now be in
plain text, instead of HTML (which is unreadable outside of a
browser). (`#646`_)
- The [storage]reserved_space configuration knob (which causes the
storage server to refuse shares when available disk space drops
below a threshold) should work on Windows now, not just
UNIX. (`#637`_)
- "tahoe cp" should now exit with status "1" if it cannot figure out a
suitable target filename, such as when you copy from a bare
filecap. (`#761`_)
- "tahoe get" no longer creates a zero-length file upon
error. (`#121`_)
- "tahoe ls" can now list single files. (`#457`_)
- "tahoe deep-check --repair" should tolerate repair failures now,
instead of halting traversal. (`#874`_, `#786`_)
- "tahoe create-alias" no longer corrupts the aliases file if it had
previously been edited to have no trailing newline. (`#741`_)
- Many small packaging improvements were made to facilitate the
"tahoe-lafs" package being included in Ubuntu. Several mac/win32
binary libraries were removed, some figleaf code-coverage files were
removed, a bundled copy of darcsver-1.2.1 was removed, and
additional licensing text was added.
- Several DeprecationWarnings for python2.6 were silenced. (`#859`_)
- The checker --add-lease option would sometimes fail for shares
stored on old (Tahoe v1.2.0) servers. (`#875`_)
- The documentation for installing on Windows (docs/quickstart.rst)
has been improved. (`#773`_)
For other changes not mentioned here, see
<https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0&keywords=!~news-done>.
To include the tickets mentioned above, go to
<https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?milestone=1.6.0>.
.. _`#121`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/121
.. _`#287`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/287
.. _`#381`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/381
.. _`#457`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/457
.. _`#533`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/533
.. _`#577`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/577
.. _`#606`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/606
.. _`#607`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/607
.. _`#637`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/637
.. _`#641`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/641
.. _`#646`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/646
.. _`#681`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/681
.. _`#729`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/729
.. _`#741`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/741
.. _`#760`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/760
.. _`#761`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/761
.. _`#773`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/773
.. _`#786`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/786
.. _`#828`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/828
.. _`#833`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/833
.. _`#859`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/859
.. _`#874`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/874
.. _`#875`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/875
.. _`#931`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/931
.. _`#837`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/837
.. _`#850`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/850
.. _`#927`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/927
.. _`#928`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/928
.. _`#939`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/939
.. _`#948`: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/948
.. _webapi.rst: docs/frontends/webapi.rst
Release 1.5.0 (2009-08-01)
--------------------------
Improvements
''''''''''''
- Uploads of immutable files now use pipelined writes, improving
upload speed slightly (10%) over high-latency connections. (`#392`_)
- Processing large directories has been sped up, by removing a O(N^2)
algorithm from the dirnode decoding path and retaining unmodified
encrypted entries. (`#750`_, `#752`_)
- The human-facing web interface (aka the "WUI") received a
significant CSS makeover by Kevin Reid, making it much prettier and
easier to read. The WUI "check" and "deep-check" forms now include a
"Renew Lease" checkbox, mirroring the CLI --add-lease option, so
leases can be added or renewed from the web interface.
- The CLI "tahoe mv" command now refuses to overwrite
directories. (`#705`_)
- The CLI "tahoe webopen" command, when run without arguments, will
now bring up the "Welcome Page" (node status and mkdir/upload
forms).
- The 3.5MB limit on mutable files was removed, so it should be
possible to upload arbitrarily-sized mutable files. Note, however,
that the data format and algorithm remains the same, so using
mutable files still requires bandwidth, computation, and RAM in
proportion to the size of the mutable file. (`#694`_)
- This version of Tahoe-LAFS will tolerate directory entries that
contain filecap formats which it does not recognize: files and
directories from the future. This should improve the user
experience (for 1.5.0 users) when we add new cap formats in the
future. Previous versions would fail badly, preventing the user from
seeing or editing anything else in those directories. These
unrecognized objects can be renamed and deleted, but obviously not
read or written. Also they cannot generally be copied. (`#683`_)
Bugfixes
''''''''
- deep-check-and-repair now tolerates read-only directories, such as
the ones produced by the "tahoe backup" CLI command. Read-only
directories and mutable files are checked, but not
repaired. Previous versions threw an exception when attempting the
repair and failed to process the remaining contents. We cannot yet
repair these read-only objects, but at least this version allows the
rest of the check+repair to proceed. (`#625`_)
- A bug in 1.4.1 which caused a server to be listed multiple times
(and frequently broke all connections to that server) was
fixed. (`#653`_)
- The plaintext-hashing code was removed from the Helper interface,
removing the Helper's ability to mount a
partial-information-guessing attack. (`#722`_)
Platform/packaging changes
''''''''''''''''''''''''''
- Tahoe-LAFS now runs on NetBSD, OpenBSD, ArchLinux, and NixOS, and on
an embedded system based on an ARM CPU running at 266 MHz.
- Unit test timeouts have been raised to allow the tests to complete
on extremely slow platforms like embedded ARM-based NAS boxes, which
may take several hours to run the test suite. An ARM-specific
data-corrupting bug in an older version of Crypto++ (5.5.2) was
identified: ARM-users are encouraged to use recent
Crypto++/pycryptopp which avoids this problem.
- Tahoe-LAFS now requires a SQLite library, either the sqlite3 that
comes built-in with python2.5/2.6, or the add-on pysqlite2 if you're
using python2.4. In the previous release, this was only needed for
the "tahoe backup" command: now it is mandatory.
- Several minor documentation updates were made.
- To help get Tahoe-LAFS into Linux distributions like Fedora and
Debian, packaging improvements are being made in both Tahoe-LAFS and
related libraries like pycryptopp and zfec.
- The Crypto++ library included in the pycryptopp package has been
upgraded to version 5.6.0 of Crypto++, which includes a more
efficient implementation of SHA-256 in assembly for x86 or amd64
architectures.
dependency updates
''''''''''''''''''
- foolscap-0.4.1
- no python-2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (2.4.2 is good) (they contained a bug in base64.b32decode)
- avoid python-2.6 on windows with mingw: compiler issues
- python2.4 requires pysqlite2 (2.5,2.6 does not)
- no python-3.x
- pycryptopp-0.5.15
.. _#392: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/392
.. _#625: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/625
.. _#653: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/653
.. _#683: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/683
.. _#694: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/694
.. _#705: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/705
.. _#722: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/722
.. _#750: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/750
.. _#752: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/752
Release 1.4.1 (2009-04-13)
--------------------------
Garbage Collection
''''''''''''''''''
- The big feature for this release is the implementation of garbage
collection, allowing Tahoe storage servers to delete shares for old
deleted files. When enabled, this uses a "mark and sweep" process:
clients are responsible for updating the leases on their shares
(generally by running "tahoe deep-check --add-lease"), and servers
are allowed to delete any share which does not have an up-to-date
lease. The process is described in detail in
`garbage-collection.rst`_.
The server must be configured to enable garbage-collection, by
adding directives to the [storage] section that define an age limit
for shares. The default configuration will not delete any shares.
Both servers and clients should be upgraded to this release to make
the garbage-collection as pleasant as possible. 1.2.0 servers have
code to perform the update-lease operation but it suffers from a
fatal bug, while 1.3.0 servers have update-lease but will return an
exception for unknown storage indices, causing clients to emit an
Incident for each exception, slowing the add-lease process down to a
crawl. 1.1.0 servers did not have the add-lease operation at all.
Security/Usability Problems Fixed
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
- A super-linear algorithm in the Merkle Tree code was fixed, which
previously caused e.g. download of a 10GB file to take several hours
before the first byte of plaintext could be produced. The new
"alacrity" is about 2 minutes. A future release should reduce this
to a few seconds by fixing ticket `#442`_.
- The previous version permitted a small timing attack (due to our use
of strcmp) against the write-enabler and lease-renewal/cancel
secrets. An attacker who could measure response-time variations of
approximatly 3ns against a very noisy background time of about 15ms
might be able to guess these secrets. We do not believe this attack
was actually feasible. This release closes the attack by first
hashing the two strings to be compared with a random secret.
webapi changes
''''''''''''''
- In most cases, HTML tracebacks will only be sent if an "Accept:
text/html" header was provided with the HTTP request. This will
generally cause browsers to get an HTMLized traceback but send
regular text/plain tracebacks to non-browsers (like the CLI
clients). More errors have been mapped to useful HTTP error codes.
- The streaming webapi operations (deep-check and manifest) now have a
way to indicate errors (an output line that starts with "ERROR"
instead of being legal JSON). See `webapi.rst`_ for
details.
- The storage server now has its own status page (at /storage), linked
from the Welcome page. This page shows progress and results of the
two new share-crawlers: one which merely counts shares (to give an
estimate of how many files/directories are being stored in the
grid), the other examines leases and reports how much space would be
freed if GC were enabled. The page also shows how much disk space is
present, used, reserved, and available for the Tahoe server, and
whether the server is currently running in "read-write" mode or
"read-only" mode.
- When a directory node cannot be read (perhaps because of insufficent
shares), a minimal webapi page is created so that the "more-info"
links (including a Check/Repair operation) will still be accessible.
- A new "reliability" page was added, with the beginnings of work on a
statistical loss model. You can tell this page how many servers you
are using and their independent failure probabilities, and it will
tell you the likelihood that an arbitrary file will survive each
repair period. The "numpy" package must be installed to access this
page. A partial paper, written by Shawn Willden, has been added to
docs/proposed/lossmodel.lyx .
CLI changes
'''''''''''
- "tahoe check" and "tahoe deep-check" now accept an "--add-lease"
argument, to update a lease on all shares. This is the "mark" side
of garbage collection.
- In many cases, CLI error messages have been improved: the ugly
HTMLized traceback has been replaced by a normal python traceback.
- "tahoe deep-check" and "tahoe manifest" now have better error
reporting. "tahoe cp" is now non-verbose by default.
- "tahoe backup" now accepts several "--exclude" arguments, to ignore
certain files (like editor temporary files and version-control
metadata) during backup.
- On windows, the CLI now accepts local paths like "c:\dir\file.txt",
which previously was interpreted as a Tahoe path using a "c:" alias.
- The "tahoe restart" command now uses "--force" by default (meaning
it will start a node even if it didn't look like there was one
already running).
- The "tahoe debug consolidate" command was added. This takes a series
of independent timestamped snapshot directories (such as those
created by the allmydata.com windows backup program, or a series of
"tahoe cp -r" commands) and creates new snapshots that used shared
read-only directories whenever possible (like the output of "tahoe
backup"). In the most common case (when the snapshots are fairly
similar), the result will use significantly fewer directories than
the original, allowing "deep-check" and similar tools to run much
faster. In some cases, the speedup can be an order of magnitude or
more. This tool is still somewhat experimental, and only needs to
be run on large backups produced by something other than "tahoe
backup", so it was placed under the "debug" category.
- "tahoe cp -r --caps-only tahoe:dir localdir" is a diagnostic tool
which, instead of copying the full contents of files into the local
directory, merely copies their filecaps. This can be used to verify
the results of a "consolidation" operation.
other fixes
'''''''''''
- The codebase no longer rauses RuntimeError as a kind of
assert(). Specific exception classes were created for each previous
instance of RuntimeError.
-Many unit tests were changed to use a non-network test harness,
speeding them up considerably.
- Deep-traversal operations (manifest and deep-check) now walk
individual directories in alphabetical order. Occasional turn breaks
are inserted to prevent a stack overflow when traversing directories
with hundreds of entries.
- The experimental SFTP server had its path-handling logic changed
slightly, to accomodate more SFTP clients, although there are still
issues (`#645`_).
.. _#442: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/442
.. _#645: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/645
.. _garbage-collection.rst: docs/garbage-collection.rst
Release 1.3.0 (2009-02-13)
--------------------------
Checker/Verifier/Repairer
'''''''''''''''''''''''''
- The primary focus of this release has been writing a checker /
verifier / repairer for files and directories. "Checking" is the
act of asking storage servers whether they have a share for the
given file or directory: if there are not enough shares available,
the file or directory will be unrecoverable. "Verifying" is the act
of downloading and cryptographically asserting that the server's
share is undamaged: it requires more work (bandwidth and CPU) than
checking, but can catch problems that simple checking
cannot. "Repair" is the act of replacing missing or damaged shares
with new ones.
- This release includes a full checker, a partial verifier, and a
partial repairer. The repairer is able to handle missing shares: new
shares are generated and uploaded to make up for the missing
ones. This is currently the best application of the repairer: to
replace shares that were lost because of server departure or
permanent drive failure.
- The repairer in this release is somewhat able to handle corrupted
shares. The limitations are:
- Immutable verifier is incomplete: not all shares are used, and not
all fields of those shares are verified. Therefore the immutable
verifier has only a moderate chance of detecting corrupted shares.
- The mutable verifier is mostly complete: all shares are examined,
and most fields of the shares are validated.
- The storage server protocol offers no way for the repairer to
replace or delete immutable shares. If corruption is detected, the
repairer will upload replacement shares to other servers, but the
corrupted shares will be left in place.
- read-only directories and read-only mutable files must be repaired
by someone who holds the write-cap: the read-cap is
insufficient. Moreover, the deep-check-and-repair operation will
halt with an error if it attempts to repair one of these read-only
objects.
- Some forms of corruption can cause both download and repair
operations to fail. A future release will fix this, since download
should be tolerant of any corruption as long as there are at least
'k' valid shares, and repair should be able to fix any file that is
downloadable.
- If the downloader, verifier, or repairer detects share corruption,
the servers which provided the bad shares will be notified (via a
file placed in the BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories directory)
so their operators can manually delete the corrupted shares and
investigate the problem. In addition, the "incident gatherer"
mechanism will automatically report share corruption to an incident
gatherer service, if one is configured. Note that corrupted shares
indicate hardware failures, serious software bugs, or malice on the
part of the storage server operator, so a corrupted share should be
considered highly unusual.
- By periodically checking/repairing all files and directories,
objects in the Tahoe filesystem remain resistant to recoverability
failures due to missing and/or broken servers.
- This release includes a wapi mechanism to initiate checks on
individual files and directories (with or without verification, and
with or without automatic repair). A related mechanism is used to
initiate a "deep-check" on a directory: recursively traversing the
directory and its children, checking (and/or verifying/repairing)
everything underneath. Both mechanisms can be run with an
"output=JSON" argument, to obtain machine-readable check/repair
status results. These results include a copy of the filesystem
statistics from the "deep-stats" operation (including total number
of files, size histogram, etc). If repair is possible, a "Repair"
button will appear on the results page.
- The client web interface now features some extra buttons to initiate
check and deep-check operations. When these operations finish, they
display a results page that summarizes any problems that were
encountered. All long-running deep-traversal operations, including
deep-check, use a start-and-poll mechanism, to avoid depending upon
a single long-lived HTTP connection. `webapi.rst`_ has
details.
Efficient Backup
''''''''''''''''
- The "tahoe backup" command is new in this release, which creates
efficient versioned backups of a local directory. Given a local
pathname and a target Tahoe directory, this will create a read-only
snapshot of the local directory in $target/Archives/$timestamp. It
will also create $target/Latest, which is a reference to the latest
such snapshot. Each time you run "tahoe backup" with the same source
and target, a new $timestamp snapshot will be added. These snapshots
will share directories that have not changed since the last backup,
to speed up the process and minimize storage requirements. In
addition, a small database is used to keep track of which local
files have been uploaded already, to avoid uploading them a second
time. This drastically reduces the work needed to do a "null backup"
(when nothing has changed locally), making "tahoe backup' suitable
to run from a daily cronjob.
Note that the "tahoe backup" CLI command must be used in conjunction
with a 1.3.0-or-newer Tahoe client node; there was a bug in the
1.2.0 webapi implementation that would prevent the last step (create
$target/Latest) from working.
Large Files
'''''''''''
- The 12GiB (approximate) immutable-file-size limitation is
lifted. This release knows how to handle so-called "v2 immutable
shares", which permit immutable files of up to about 18 EiB (about
3*10^14). These v2 shares are created if the file to be uploaded is
too large to fit into v1 shares. v1 shares are created if the file
is small enough to fit into them, so that files created with
tahoe-1.3.0 can still be read by earlier versions if they are not
too large. Note that storage servers also had to be changed to
support larger files, and this release is the first release in which
they are able to do that. Clients will detect which servers are
capable of supporting large files on upload and will not attempt to
upload shares of a large file to a server which doesn't support it.
FTP/SFTP Server
'''''''''''''''
- Tahoe now includes experimental FTP and SFTP servers. When
configured with a suitable method to translate username+password
into a root directory cap, it provides simple access to the virtual
filesystem. Remember that FTP is completely unencrypted: passwords,
filenames, and file contents are all sent over the wire in
cleartext, so FTP should only be used on a local (127.0.0.1)
connection. This feature is still in development: there are no unit
tests yet, and behavior with respect to Unicode filenames is
uncertain. Please see `FTP-and-SFTP.rst`_ for
configuration details. (`#512`_, `#531`_)
CLI Changes
'''''''''''
- This release adds the 'tahoe create-alias' command, which is a
combination of 'tahoe mkdir' and 'tahoe add-alias'. This also allows
you to start using a new tahoe directory without exposing its URI in
the argv list, which is publicly visible (through the process table)
on most unix systems. Thanks to Kevin Reid for bringing this issue
to our attention.
- The single-argument form of "tahoe put" was changed to create an
unlinked file. I.e. "tahoe put bar.txt" will take the contents of a
local "bar.txt" file, upload them to the grid, and print the
resulting read-cap; the file will not be attached to any
directories. This seemed a bit more useful than the previous
behavior (copy stdin, upload to the grid, attach the resulting file
into your default tahoe: alias in a child named 'bar.txt').
- "tahoe put" was also fixed to handle mutable files correctly: "tahoe
put bar.txt URI:SSK:..." will read the contents of the local bar.txt
and use them to replace the contents of the given mutable file.
- The "tahoe webopen" command was modified to accept aliases. This
means "tahoe webopen tahoe:" will cause your web browser to open to
a "wui" page that gives access to the directory associated with the
default "tahoe:" alias. It should also accept leading slashes, like
"tahoe webopen tahoe:/stuff".
- Many esoteric debugging commands were moved down into a "debug"
subcommand:
- tahoe debug dump-cap
- tahoe debug dump-share
- tahoe debug find-shares
- tahoe debug catalog-shares
- tahoe debug corrupt-share
The last command ("tahoe debug corrupt-share") flips a random bit
of the given local sharefile. This is used to test the file
verifying/repairing code, and obviously should not be used on user
data.
The cli might not correctly handle arguments which contain non-ascii
characters in Tahoe v1.3 (although depending on your platform it
might, especially if your platform can be configured to pass such
characters on the command-line in utf-8 encoding). See
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/565 for details.
Web changes
'''''''''''
- The "default webapi port", used when creating a new client node (and
in the getting-started documentation), was changed from 8123 to
3456, to reduce confusion when Tahoe accessed through a Firefox
browser on which the "Torbutton" extension has been installed. Port
8123 is occasionally used as a Tor control port, so Torbutton adds
8123 to Firefox's list of "banned ports" to avoid CSRF attacks
against Tor. Once 8123 is banned, it is difficult to diagnose why
you can no longer reach a Tahoe node, so the Tahoe default was
changed. Note that 3456 is reserved by IANA for the "vat" protocol,
but there are argueably more Torbutton+Tahoe users than vat users
these days. Note that this will only affect newly-created client
nodes. Pre-existing client nodes, created by earlier versions of
tahoe, may still be listening on 8123.
- All deep-traversal operations (start-manifest, start-deep-size,
start-deep-stats, start-deep-check) now use a start-and-poll
approach, instead of using a single (fragile) long-running
synchronous HTTP connection. All these "start-" operations use POST
instead of GET. The old "GET manifest", "GET deep-size", and "POST
deep-check" operations have been removed.
- The new "POST start-manifest" operation, when it finally completes,
results in a table of (path,cap), instead of the list of verifycaps
produced by the old "GET manifest". The table is available in
several formats: use output=html, output=text, or output=json to
choose one. The JSON output also includes stats, and a list of
verifycaps and storage-index strings. The "return_to=" and
"when_done=" arguments have been removed from the t=check and
deep-check operations.
- The top-level status page (/status) now has a machine-readable form,
via "/status/?t=json". This includes information about the
currently-active uploads and downloads, which may be useful for
frontends that wish to display progress information. There is no
easy way to correlate the activities displayed here with recent wapi
requests, however.
- Any files in BASEDIR/public_html/ (configurable) will be served in
response to requests in the /static/ portion of the URL space. This
will simplify the deployment of javascript-based frontends that can
still access wapi calls by conforming to the (regrettable)
"same-origin policy".
- The welcome page now has a "Report Incident" button, which is tied
into the "Incident Gatherer" machinery. If the node is attached to
an incident gatherer (via log_gatherer.furl), then pushing this
button will cause an Incident to be signalled: this means recent log
events are aggregated and sent in a bundle to the gatherer. The user
can push this button after something strange takes place (and they
can provide a short message to go along with it), and the relevant
data will be delivered to a centralized incident-gatherer for later
processing by operations staff.
- The "HEAD" method should now work correctly, in addition to the
usual "GET", "PUT", and "POST" methods. "HEAD" is supposed to return
exactly the same headers as "GET" would, but without any of the
actual response body data. For mutable files, this now does a brief
mapupdate (to figure out the size of the file that would be
returned), without actually retrieving the file's contents.
- The "GET" operation on files can now support the HTTP "Range:"
header, allowing requests for partial content. This allows certain
media players to correctly stream audio and movies out of a Tahoe
grid. The current implementation uses a disk-based cache in
BASEDIR/private/cache/download , which holds the plaintext of the
files being downloaded. Future implementations might not use this
cache. GET for immutable files now returns an ETag header.
- Each file and directory now has a "Show More Info" web page, which
contains much of the information that was crammed into the directory
page before. This includes readonly URIs, storage index strings,
object type, buttons to control checking/verifying/repairing, and
deep-check/deep-stats buttons (for directories). For mutable files,
the "replace contents" upload form has been moved here too. As a
result, the directory page is now much simpler and cleaner, and
several potentially-misleading links (like t=uri) are now gone.
- Slashes are discouraged in Tahoe file/directory names, since they
cause problems when accessing the filesystem through the
wapi. However, there are a couple of accidental ways to generate
such names. This release tries to make it easier to correct such
mistakes by escaping slashes in several places, allowing slashes in
the t=info and t=delete commands, and in the source (but not the
target) of a t=rename command.
Packaging
'''''''''
- Tahoe's dependencies have been extended to require the
"[secure_connections]" feature from Foolscap, which will cause
pyOpenSSL to be required and/or installed. If OpenSSL and its
development headers are already installed on your system, this can
occur automatically. Tahoe now uses pollreactor (instead of the
default selectreactor) to work around a bug between pyOpenSSL and
the most recent release of Twisted (8.1.0). This bug only affects
unit tests (hang during shutdown), and should not impact regular
use.
- The Tahoe source code tarballs now come in two different forms:
regular and "sumo". The regular tarball contains just Tahoe, nothing
else. When building from the regular tarball, the build process will
download any unmet dependencies from the internet (starting with the
index at PyPI) so it can build and install them. The "sumo" tarball
contains copies of all the libraries that Tahoe requires (foolscap,
twisted, zfec, etc), so using the "sumo" tarball should not require
any internet access during the build process. This can be useful if
you want to build Tahoe while on an airplane, a desert island, or
other bandwidth-limited environments.
- Similarly, tahoe-lafs.org now hosts a "tahoe-deps" tarball which
contains the latest versions of all these dependencies. This
tarball, located at
https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-deps.tar.gz, can be
unpacked in the tahoe source tree (or in its parent directory), and
the build process should satisfy its downloading needs from it
instead of reaching out to PyPI. This can be useful if you want to
build Tahoe from a darcs checkout while on that airplane or desert
island.
- Because of the previous two changes ("sumo" tarballs and the
"tahoe-deps" bundle), most of the files have been removed from
misc/dependencies/ . This brings the regular Tahoe tarball down to
2MB (compressed), and the darcs checkout (without history) to about
7.6MB. A full darcs checkout will still be fairly large (because of
the historical patches which included the dependent libraries), but
a 'lazy' one should now be small.
- The default "make" target is now an alias for "setup.py build",
which itself is an alias for "setup.py develop --prefix support",
with some extra work before and after (see setup.cfg). Most of the
complicated platform-dependent code in the Makefile was rewritten in
Python and moved into setup.py, simplifying things considerably.
- Likewise, the "make test" target now delegates most of its work to
"setup.py test", which takes care of getting PYTHONPATH configured
to access the tahoe code (and dependencies) that gets put in
support/lib/ by the build_tahoe step. This should allow unit tests
to be run even when trial (which is part of Twisted) wasn't already
installed (in this case, trial gets installed to support/bin because
Twisted is a dependency of Tahoe).
- Tahoe is now compatible with the recently-released Python 2.6 ,
although it is recommended to use Tahoe on Python 2.5, on which it
has received more thorough testing and deployment.
- Tahoe is now compatible with simplejson-2.0.x . The previous release
assumed that simplejson.loads always returned unicode strings, which
is no longer the case in 2.0.x .
Grid Management Tools
'''''''''''''''''''''
- Several tools have been added or updated in the misc/ directory,
mostly munin plugins that can be used to monitor a storage grid.
- The misc/spacetime/ directory contains a "disk watcher" daemon
(startable with 'tahoe start'), which can be configured with a set
of HTTP URLs (pointing at the wapi '/statistics' page of a bunch of
storage servers), and will periodically fetch
disk-used/disk-available information from all the servers. It keeps
this information in an Axiom database (a sqlite-based library
available from divmod.org). The daemon computes time-averaged rates
of disk usage, as well as a prediction of how much time is left
before the grid is completely full.
- The misc/munin/ directory contains a new set of munin plugins
(tahoe_diskleft, tahoe_diskusage, tahoe_doomsday) which talk to the
disk-watcher and provide graphs of its calculations.
- To support the disk-watcher, the Tahoe statistics component
(visible through the wapi at the /statistics/ URL) now includes
disk-used and disk-available information. Both are derived through
an equivalent of the unix 'df' command (i.e. they ask the kernel
for the number of free blocks on the partition that encloses the
BASEDIR/storage directory). In the future, the disk-available
number will be further influenced by the local storage policy: if
that policy says that the server should refuse new shares when less
than 5GB is left on the partition, then "disk-available" will
report zero even though the kernel sees 5GB remaining.
- The 'tahoe_overhead' munin plugin interacts with an
allmydata.com-specific server which reports the total of the
'deep-size' reports for all active user accounts, compares this
with the disk-watcher data, to report on overhead percentages. This
provides information on how much space could be recovered once
Tahoe implements some form of garbage collection.
Configuration Changes: single INI-format tahoe.cfg file
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
- The Tahoe node is now configured with a single INI-format file,
named "tahoe.cfg", in the node's base directory. Most of the
previous multiple-separate-files are still read for backwards
compatibility (the embedded SSH debug server and the
advertised_ip_addresses files are the exceptions), but new
directives will only be added to tahoe.cfg . The "tahoe
create-client" command will create a tahoe.cfg for you, with sample
values commented out. (ticket `#518`_)
- tahoe.cfg now has controls for the foolscap "keepalive" and
"disconnect" timeouts (`#521`_).
- tahoe.cfg now has controls for the encoding parameters:
"shares.needed" and "shares.total" in the "[client]" section. The
default parameters are still 3-of-10.
- The inefficient storage 'sizelimit' control (which established an
upper bound on the amount of space that a storage server is allowed
to consume) has been replaced by a lightweight 'reserved_space'
control (which establishes a lower bound on the amount of remaining
space). The storage server will reject all writes that would cause
the remaining disk space (as measured by a '/bin/df' equivalent) to
drop below this value. The "[storage]reserved_space=" tahoe.cfg
parameter controls this setting. (note that this only affects
immutable shares: it is an outstanding bug that reserved_space does
not prevent the allocation of new mutable shares, nor does it
prevent the growth of existing mutable shares).
Other Changes
'''''''''''''
- Clients now declare which versions of the protocols they
support. This is part of a new backwards-compatibility system:
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Versioning .
- The version strings for human inspection (as displayed on the
Welcome web page, and included in logs) now includes a platform
identifer (frequently including a linux distribution name, processor
architecture, etc).
- Several bugs have been fixed, including one that would cause an
exception (in the logs) if a wapi download operation was cancelled
(by closing the TCP connection, or pushing the "stop" button in a
web browser).
- Tahoe now uses Foolscap "Incidents", writing an "incident report"
file to logs/incidents/ each time something weird occurs. These
reports are available to an "incident gatherer" through the flogtool
command. For more details, please see the Foolscap logging
documentation. An incident-classifying plugin function is provided
in misc/incident-gatherer/classify_tahoe.py .
- If clients detect corruption in shares, they now automatically
report it to the server holding that share, if it is new enough to
accept the report. These reports are written to files in
BASEDIR/storage/corruption-advisories .
- The 'nickname' setting is now defined to be a UTF-8 -encoded string,
allowing non-ascii nicknames.
- The 'tahoe start' command will now accept a --syslog argument and
pass it through to twistd, making it easier to launch non-Tahoe
nodes (like the cpu-watcher) and have them log to syslogd instead of
a local file. This is useful when running a Tahoe node out of a USB
flash drive.
- The Mac GUI in src/allmydata/gui/ has been improved.
.. _#512: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/512
.. _#518: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/518
.. _#521: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/521
.. _#531: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/531
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 wapi 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 `debian.rst`_ 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 wapi
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.
.. _#463: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/463
.. _#491: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/491
.. _debian.rst: docs/debian.rst
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 `CLI.rst`_ for complete details.
wapi: 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 wapi 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 wapi 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 wapi node, into a separate
process. RSA keys can take several seconds to create, and so a wapi
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.
.. _#221: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/221
.. _#374: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/374
.. _#391: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/391
.. _#439: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/439
.. _CLI.rst: docs/CLI.rst
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