1.9 Released

With all the spooky things which came out during Halloween, we also saw the release of 1.9.0. 1.9.0 offers a new mutable-file format, MDMF (more efficient for large files), a file-blacklisting feature, and a new "drop-upload" feature. A big thanks goes to Brian Warner , release manager, and the rest of development team for such a fantastic release.

New Server

In the dark of many a night, the Tahoe-LAFS ninjas migrated tahoe-lafs.org to a brand new server. You should noticed improved speed and responsiveness from our new server. I would thank the ninjas, but I can't seem to find them. Sneaky ninjas :)

Tahoe-LAFS Summit

Tahoe-LAFS held its second Tahoe-LAFS Summit from November 7 through 11. The Summit was a huge success. Below is some of the agenda items covered during the Summit:

• Review: Tahoe-LAFS v1.9 release, LAE product launch
• Brian explained how his #466 signed-introducer code works, committed to a public-key signature scheme
• decided upon a safe "web control panel" scheme
• explained how Brian's #666 Accounting code works
• discussed how accounting, #467 static-server-selection, and Invitations should interact, so Brian knows what to build going forward
• discussed Performance Improvements, HTTP-only Storage Protocols, New Encoding Formats (Rainhill!)
• Thursday items: explained LAE's s3-backend branch, designed race-free Accounting leasedb-crawler
• Friday items: explained Rainhill

We have a report of the activities for each day:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4

Lastly, we would like to thank Mozilla for their wonderful hospitality and those folks who made the video streams possible. As someone who couldn't make it, I really appreciate the latter.

Visualizer

Brian Warner landed a new verison of the immutable-file download visualizer, replacing the early version in 1.9.0 with one that zooms and pans faster. The visualizer is useful for studying the progress and significant events in an immutable-file download. This can aid you and developers determine any possible issues with a download.

Buildslaves Need Update

With the migration to the new server, buildslave operators need to update their buildslaves to point to the new server.

FreedomBox Posting

Zooko posted a fantastic description of Tahoe-LAFS to the FreedomBox discuss list. He covered ways in which Tahoe-LAFS resembles a filesystem, arbitrarily nestable directories and files and a built in SFTP server. However, its performance characteristics fail to match the expectations of user-space programs that access their storage through the POSIX filesystem API. I believe the following sums it up best,

"All the people who actually Tahoe-LAFS end up using it less like it is a "filesystem" like ext4 and more like it is an "application" for backing up, sharing, or hosting files." [1]