Facility to automatically renew leases of root caps

[kpreid]

There should be a facility to automatically renew the leases of (and repair) every cap in your tahoe aliases, better than this:

for item in `tahoe list-aliases | cut -f 1 -d :`; do echo ---$item---; tahoe deep-check --repair --add-lease $item:; done

In particular, there should be a command-line command to do it, suitable for executing from cron, *and* there should be an option to have your tahoe client node persistent process do it on a schedule, for whichever people find convenient.

Having easy auto-renew seems to me to be important; many people won't find it simple to set it up on their own, and they may forget and "..hey, where's my files?"

[warner]

How many aliases do you have? What about creating a master directory that contains all of them, and then doing deep-check on an alias that points to that?

(*something* has to be the starting point.. I generally only have one alias per grid)

I agree that the node should have a built-in renewal mechanism. I've wondered how to configure/manage it: it should be possible to check on the status/progress of the renewal process through the webapi, including finding out which files had problems or needed repair, but these status pages should not be reachable without knowing the secret alias values.

Maybe a tahoe.cfg section that lists aliases which should be auto-checked, and then any WUI directory page which matches one of the alias values should include a link that says "a deep-repair process is working on this directory and its children, click here for progress". And/or a page which lists all the deep-repair processes currently running, with alias names (but not dircaps) and general information about their progress (but no access to pages with filecaps or dircaps), and instructions to type "tahoe webopen ALIASNAME:" for more details.

[kpreid]

• A directory (currently) can only contain items from the same grid. If I have items on multiple grids, I still need multiple aliases.
• If I use a single root directory, I have an especially large authority of a sort which is more likely to get accidentally leaked than a tahoe aliases file.

I like your WUI ideas. In fact, I suggest that the WUI should (optionally, in case of publicly-accessible WUI) indicate when a directory being viewed is an alias, independent of renewal configuration. (Thus a pet-name system...)

[davidsarah]

Kyle Marley says:

I'd like to have better lease control. For example, I'd like to have my Latest backup live "forever" but to assign garbage collection dates to the earlier backups. This would allow me to keep, say, weekly backups for the past month, and quarterly backups for the rest of the year. I would expect to do my own scripting to make this happen. I realize I could mostly get this with careful use of tahoe rm, but then my files are inaccessible immediately, whereas I'd rather the older backups be allowed to stick around until a garbage collection is run. "You may delete these files at your convenience, but please keep them until you need the space."

[davidsarah]

Kyle Markley, sorry. The tahoe-dev post is ​here.