Tahoe

Tahoe LAFS stands for Least Authority File System. It is a file system and data storage with very interesting features.

• secure
• decentralized
• fault-tolerant
• encrypted
• peer-to-peer

You can use it to host and serve files or for your backups.
More information is available at:

• Tahoe Documentation
• Tahoe FAQ

This page is meant to be a resource of Tahoe knowledge. In the hope of making it as easy as possibly for others to start using it.

A group of servers providing storage is called a storage grid. Files stored on a grid are split into parts. Each node gets only part of your file. Each part is encrypted as well. To later restore a file you only need a limited number of it's parts. For example you spread parts of your file onto 10 nodes but only three of them are needed to restore it.

There's all kinds of grids out there. Connecting to them is done through their so called introducer. This is necessary since not all nodes might be online all the time.

In the installation we configure Tahoe to use Tor. All nodes are hidden services.

  > sudo apt-get install tor torsocks tahoe-lafs

  > tahoe create-client

or define the introducer right away:

  > tahoe create-client --introducer=pb://ifwpslh5f4jx2s3tzkkj4cyymrcxcunz@bvkb2rnvjbep4sjz.onion:58086/introducer
  # XXX This command is dangerous because it creates a tahoe.cfg file that tries to "deanonymize" your IP address...
  # XXX You *MUST* set the node's "tub.location" parameter to prevent this deanonymization activity as documented here:
  # XXX https://github.com/david415/tahoe-lafs/blob/tor-i2p-documentation/docs/anonymity-configuration.rst#torsocks-the-old-way-of-configuring-tahoe-lafs-to-use-tor

In this step we set the introducer (unless you already did with the tahoe create-client command.
If you did configure the introducer you still have to set tub.location correctly.

Replace tahoe.cfg with everything in https://gist.github.com/david415/7eca8611853caec30467 before “# this section below only works with the “truckee” feature branch” (line 23)

  usewithtor tahoe start
  usewithtor tahoe stop

After starting it you open your browser and open 127.0.0.1:7657. This is very useful for diagnostics and some of the Tahoe functionality is available through it, too.

An alias is effectively the root directory of a partition. Before we can store anything a new alias has to be created.

  > tahoe create-alias <PICK_A_NAME>

The alias is always followed by a colon. Let assume we picked the alias myalias. Hence we address it as

  myalias:

File system are similar to their Linux/Unix counterparts. To get the help for a specific one please enter the following on the command line (e.g. for ls):

  > tahoe ls --help
  > tahoe help

  > tahoe ls <ALIAS>:
  > tahoe ls <ALIAS>:<FOLDER>

Be aware of the colon again!!!

Copy a file to alias.

  > tahoe cp <LOCAL_FILE_PATH> <ALIAS>:<DIRECTORY>

Copy a folder to alias.

  > tahoe cp --recursie <LOCAL_FOLDER> <ALIAS>:<DIRECTORY>

TODO