Tahoe-LAFS Documentation Release 1.x The Tahoe-LAFS Developers Mar 03, 2021 Contents 1 Welcome to Tahoe-LAFS! 3 1.1 What is Tahoe-LAFS?..........................................3 1.2 What is “provider-independent security”?................................3 1.3 Access Control..............................................4 1.4 Get Started................................................4 1.5 License..................................................5 2 Installing Tahoe-LAFS 7 2.1 First: In Case Of Trouble.........................................7 2.2 Pre-Packaged Versions..........................................7 2.3 Preliminaries...............................................7 2.4 Install the Latest Tahoe-LAFS Release.................................9 2.5 Running the tahoe executable..................................... 10 2.6 Running the Self-Tests.......................................... 10 2.7 Common Problems............................................ 11 2.8 Using Tahoe-LAFS............................................ 11 3 How To Run Tahoe-LAFS 13 3.1 Introduction............................................... 13 3.2 Do Stuff With It............................................. 15 3.3 Socialize................................................. 16 3.4 Complain................................................. 16 4 Magic Wormhole Invites 17 4.1 Magic Wormhole............................................. 17 4.2 Invites and Joins............................................. 17 4.3 Tahoe-LAFS Secret Exchange...................................... 18 5 Configuring a Tahoe-LAFS node 19 5.1 Node Types................................................ 20 5.2 Overall Node Configuration....................................... 20 5.3 Connection Management......................................... 24 5.4 Client Configuration........................................... 27 5.5 Frontend Configuration......................................... 28 5.6 Storage Server Configuration...................................... 29 5.7 Running A Helper............................................ 30 5.8 Running An Introducer.......................................... 30 i 5.9 Other Files in BASEDIR......................................... 30 5.10 Additional Introducer Definitions.................................... 32 5.11 Static Server Definitions......................................... 32 5.12 Other files................................................ 34 5.13 Example................................................. 34 5.14 Old Configuration Files......................................... 35 6 Tahoe-LAFS Architecture 37 6.1 Overview................................................. 37 6.2 The Key-Value Store........................................... 38 6.3 File Encoding............................................... 38 6.4 Capabilities................................................ 39 6.5 Server Selection............................................. 39 6.6 Swarming Download, Trickling Upload................................. 41 6.7 The File Store Layer........................................... 41 6.8 Leases, Refreshing, Garbage Collection................................. 41 6.9 File Repairer............................................... 42 6.10 Security.................................................. 43 6.11 Reliability................................................ 43 7 The Tahoe-LAFS CLI commands 45 7.1 Overview................................................. 45 7.2 CLI Command Overview........................................ 45 7.3 Node Management............................................ 46 7.4 File Store Manipulation......................................... 47 7.5 Storage Grid Maintenance........................................ 53 7.6 Debugging................................................ 54 8 The Tahoe REST-ful Web API 55 8.1 Enabling the web-API port........................................ 56 8.2 Basic Concepts: GET, PUT, DELETE, POST.............................. 56 8.3 URLs................................................... 57 8.4 Slow Operations, Progress, and Cancelling............................... 59 8.5 Programmatic Operations........................................ 60 8.6 Browser Operations: Human-oriented interfaces............................ 69 8.7 Other Useful Pages............................................ 81 8.8 Static Files in /public_html........................................ 84 8.9 Safety and Security Issues – Names vs. URIs.............................. 84 8.10 Concurrency Issues............................................ 85 8.11 Access Blacklist............................................. 85 8.12 URLs and HTTP and UTF-8....................................... 86 9 Tahoe-LAFS SFTP and FTP Frontends 89 9.1 SFTP/FTP Background......................................... 89 9.2 Tahoe-LAFS Support........................................... 90 9.3 Creating an Account File......................................... 90 9.4 Running An Account Server (accounts.url)............................... 90 9.5 Configuring SFTP Access........................................ 91 9.6 Configuring FTP Access......................................... 92 9.7 Dependencies............................................... 92 9.8 Immutable and Mutable Files...................................... 92 9.9 Known Issues............................................... 93 10 Tahoe-LAFS Magic Folder Frontend 95 10.1 Introduction............................................... 95 ii 10.2 Configuration............................................... 95 10.3 Known Issues and Limitations With Magic-Folder........................... 96 11 Download status 99 11.1 Introduction............................................... 99 11.2 What’s involved in a download?..................................... 99 11.3 Data on the download-status page.................................... 100 12 Known Issues 103 12.1 Known Issues in Tahoe-LAFS v1.10.3, released 30-Mar-2016..................... 103 12.2 Known Issues in Tahoe-LAFS v1.9.0, released 31-Oct-2011...................... 107 12.3 Known Issues in Tahoe-LAFS v1.8.2, released 30-Jan-2011...................... 107 13 How To Configure A Server 109 13.1 Manual Configuration.......................................... 109 13.2 Automatic Configuration......................................... 110 13.3 Deployment Scenarios.......................................... 110 14 The Tahoe Upload Helper 113 14.1 Overview................................................. 113 14.2 Setting Up A Helper........................................... 114 14.3 Using a Helper.............................................. 114 14.4 Other Helper Modes........................................... 115 15 The Convergence Secret 117 15.1 What Is It?................................................ 117 15.2 What If I Change My Convergence Secret?............................... 118 15.3 How To Use It.............................................. 118 16 Garbage Collection in Tahoe 119 16.1 Overview................................................. 119 16.2 Client-side Renewal........................................... 120 16.3 Server Side Expiration.......................................... 120 16.4 Expiration Progress........................................... 122 16.5 Future Directions............................................. 122 17 Statement on Backdoors 125 18 Donations 127 18.1 Governance................................................ 127 18.2 Transparent Accounting......................................... 127 18.3 Expenditure Addresses.......................................... 128 18.4 Historical Donation Addresses...................................... 128 18.5 Validation................................................. 128 19 Storage Server Donations 129 19.1 Sending Donations............................................ 129 19.2 Receiving Donations........................................... 130 19.3 Further Reading............................................. 130 20 Expenses paid by donated BTC 131 20.1 Budget Items............................................... 131 21 Things To Be Careful About As We Venture Boldly Forth 135 21.1 Timing Attacks.............................................. 135 iii 22 Avoiding Write Collisions in Tahoe 137 23 Magic Folder Set-up Howto 139 23.1 This document.............................................. 139 23.2 Setting up a local test grid........................................ 139 23.3 Setting up Magic Folder......................................... 141 23.4 Testing.................................................. 141 23.5 Configuration............................................... 142 24 The Tahoe BackupDB 143 24.1 Overview................................................. 143 24.2 Schema.................................................. 144 24.3 Upload Operation............................................ 144 24.4 Directory Operations........................................... 145 25 Using Tahoe-LAFS with an anonymizing network: Tor, I2P 147 25.1 Overview................................................. 147 25.2 Use cases................................................. 147 25.3 Software Dependencies......................................... 148 25.4 Connection configuration........................................ 149 25.5 Anonymity configuration......................................... 149 25.6 Performance and security issues..................................... 151 26 Node Keys in Tahoe-LAFS 155 26.1 Why Announcements Are Signed...................................