Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News, issue number 18, November 29, 2011

Welcome to the Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News (TWN). Tahoe-LAFS is a secure, distributed storage system. View TWN on the web or subscribe to TWN. If you would like to view the "new and improved" TWN, complete with pictures; please take a look.

Announcements and News

Newest Contributor

Marcus Wanner Marcus Warner is the newest contributor to Tahoe-LAFS. He is contributing the move button to the web interface. You will see the move button next to the rename button in the directory view of the web interface. Marcus' contribution needs review at ticket number 1579. Marcus runs a node for the Virginia Tech Linux and Unix Users Group (VTLUUG) VTLUUG Tahoe-LAFS grid. Welcome to the team, Marcus.

1.8.3 Being Backported

Ubuntu Ubuntu has a ticket to backport 1.8.3 for Lucid, Maverick and Natty. The backport will make available to users of Lucid, Maverick and Natty, within the library of Ubuntu-provided packages, the features that were added between their current version and 1.8.3.

From the tahoe-dev Mailing List

Tahoe-LAFS Inspired Students' Thesis

Three students from Norwegian University of Science and Technology thanked Tahoe-LAFS in their thesis.

"We would like to thank all contributors of code and documentation to the open source software Tahoe-LAFS, which has given us great inspiration and building blocks for our thesis.” [1]

It appears the students implemented a subset of Tahoe-LAFS, including mutable directories and separate read- and write- caps in Java and tested it on Android. They implement the server side portion in Python.

LAE Sponsors pycryptopp Hacking

Taking advantage of Least Authority Enterprises (LAE) Least Authority Enterprises allowing employees to work on open source projects on Fridays, Zooko zooko announced a pycryptopp hackaday on Nov. 25. Below is a list of items on the hackaday todo list:

  1. Review and merge Brian's patch to add Ed25519 signatures: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/75
  2. Review and merge Yu Xue's patches to add:
    1. XSalsa20: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/40
    2. Python HMAC: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/41
    3. Python HKDF: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/42
    4. combined AES⊕XSalsa20: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/46, https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/47
    5. Comb4P: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/50
    6. curve25519: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/71
  3. See if Billy Earney or someone else will volunteer to port pycryptopp to "both Python 2 and Python 3 compatibility": https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/35
  4. Look at the buildbot issues, solicit new volunteers to run buildslaves on more platforms: https://tahoe-lafs.org/buildbot-pycryptopp/
  5. Look into alleged miscompilation by Microsoft compiler, try to devise defensive strategy, push someone else (the Crypto++ project) to devise defensive strategy, or just close this ticket as "wontfix": https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/65
  6. Fix a few small bugs, e.g.: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/70
  7. See if we can replace Twisted conch's use of pycrypto with pycryptopp: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4633

Open Source Project of the Week

The Open Source Project of the Week is backshift. backshift is a backup tool with "convergent variable-length block deduplication", as well as compression and incremental updates. The tool written in Python and uses a GPLv3 license. Zooko posted to the backshift group list with the suggestion of combination of the frontend behavior of backshift with the backend storage of Tahoe-LAFS.

Patch Needing Review of the Week

There are four (4) tickets still needing review for 1.10:


The Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News is published once a week by The Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation, President and Treasurer: Peter Secor peter . Scribes: Patrick "marlowe" McDonald marlowe , Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn , Editor: Zooko. View TWN on the web or subscribe to TWN . Send your news stories to marlowe@antagonism.org — submission deadline: Friday night.