giFT / News: Recent posts

OpenFT 0.2.1.6 has been released. This is another bugfix release; there are no new features.

From the ChangeLog:

* Fixed a bug where full parents could trigger an assertion failure.

* Index tokens database by array index instead of by pointer (should improve space efficiency, especially on 64-bit platforms).

* Clean up the database properly. Not only does this avoid leaving huge temporary files lying around, but potentially allows the db to be shutdown and restarted at will.... read more

There's a rather nasty bug in the TCP buffering code of giFT 0.11.8. Please don't use or package this version; use the newly-released 0.11.8.1 instead, which has the bug fixed.

The only other change from 0.11.8 is that greycat's build patch has been applied.

As usual, it's available at:
http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34618&package_id=26748

Yes, giFT 0.11.8 is here. Mostly just a few bugfixes here and there,
and ImageMagick has finally been replaced (did anyone actually compile
with ImageMagick?).

ChangeLog cut-and-paste:

libgift:

* The SI suffixes k, M and G multiply configuration values by 2^10, 2^20 and 2^30 respectively.

giftd:

* Shares are now keyed by pathname instead of by hash. (Hashes weren't guaranteed to exist, could collide for identical files, and no lookup function was provided in any case).... read more

This release is primarily a bugfix release that contains some rather critical bugfixes which affect Windows and 64-bit platforms.

Critical changes:

giftd 0.11.7:

* Filter LOCATE requests so that they are not delivered to protocol plugins which do not have a registered hash handler for the hash type being searched for.

* Preserve extension when renaming downloaded files because the file name is already used.... read more

gift-openft 0.2.1.4 has been released! Not much is new, mostly just bugfixes. Tom (HEx) has officially taken over the bulk of the maintainership duties of the project while jasta temporarily refocuses his efforts on other areas of the project (most notably the web site and gift 0.12.x). Expect much more active development and frequent releases in the near future. Thanks HEx!

And now for the changes...... read more

Quoting from the ChangeLog:

* Fixed a potentially fatal problem when parsing an HTTP request header which fails to provide a request method.

* Fixed a bug that could result in a remote crash when supplying a relative path in HTTP GET and HEAD request methods.

* Rewrote the ZLib decompression code to [hopefully] fix a bug which can potentially leave OpenFT in an infinite loop (very rare).

* Fixed a problem when requesting additional nodelists from actively connected peers which would produce an invalid request packet, and thus never receive nodes.... read more

Again, I'd like to apologize for the unacceptable delay on this release. We have been brewing over several changes that were originally planned for OpenFT 0.2.1.2 but were rolled back at the last minute due to the dubious nature of the changes. None-the-less, we have put together a solid release with many new features and bug fixes which we hope will improve the search node diversity issue on the network.... read more

First off, I'd like to apologize for the relative lack of release frequency we have demonstrated over the last few months. We have been hard at work on the next major release (giFT 0.12.x) and we have regrettably neglected several critical improvements in the older tree.

Most notably in this release, we have updated (and included in the distribution) the Windows build environment to once again make it possible to build and use giFT on a Windows machine. We still maintain that users should not seek direct support for this code unless otherwise offering their services to improve the [many] problems that still remain, but we feel that we at least owe these people a workable release.... read more

The long-awaited gish project (GIft SHell) has begun development in the main giFT repository. Gish is [will be] a powerful command-line giFT client heavily geared towards scriptability. A preliminary "usage" document may be found by simply checking out the "gish" CVS module and looking at docs/README.

Included with this project is a command-line tool originally written by weinholt and rewritten by myself (jasta) which allows users to input URIs from magnet, sig2dat, etc. This tool also serves as a simple example of how easily gish can be integrated into other scripts.... read more

ChangeLog is as follows:

Move libgiftproto version requirements up to 0.11.4 for the changes to the p->upload_auth system.

Improved default nodes file from 0.2.1.0.

Optimized ft_netorg_length to use a constant iteration of 31 (total distinct possibilities for the klass fields) instead of moving over every node that currently exists in the state set.

Added a feature to clamp the maximum number of OpenFT connections that will be allowed. By default, this feature is only active for search nodes and it is intended to keep them away from the default maximum fd limit of 1024 on most systems.... read more

As you all may have noticed, there was a serious flaw in OpenFT 0.2.0.0 which would cause periodic disconnects for user nodes. Under the surface (and more importantly), this problem forced users to constantly scour the network for additional nodes. This process is sometimes referred to as "desperation mode" and is usually only triggered when a node loses its connection to the Internet or it is experienced for a brief period after a parent node connection is severed. When a significant portion of the network is in this mode, a much larger-than-usual resource requirement will be laid onto search nodes (specifically bandwidth and total open file descriptors). The result is that most search nodes using the default fd limit for their platform (usually 1024) will reach the limit and begin to have problems managing their local database and eventually the connections to the network. What likely occurs is that the node will appear so unresponsive that all peers will drop the node and search for a new one.... read more

See the previous post (or the ChangeLog) for more details about the release. For those skimming over, this will be a non backwards compatible release and will appear a much smaller network than existed before. The compatibility was intentionally broken to try to avoid the OpenFT 0.1.0.x users who are effectively DDoS'ing the network due to a connection management bug. Sorry about the mess guys :)

New version of OpenFT has gone into CVS for testing (previously labelled OpenFT 0.1.0.6). This version breaks version compatibility for the purpose of casting off the old network, which was notably broken and implemented poor resource management on a large scale. The official release is expected in the next day or so. See the ChangeLog in CVS for details, or simply wait for the official release.

Due a gaping flaw in OpenFT pre 0.1.0.5 (and even partially existent in that new version), search node resources are being dominated by simple PUSH requests. Most search nodes will find themselves reaching the maximum fd limit, which is causing a lot of denial-of-service for our users. The next release is going to feature a significant improvement to the way PUSH requests are handled such that only one request is needed per source (instead of per source retry, as exists now). We may also explore the possibility of routing the packets through the search node virtual cluster to eliminate the need for new outgoing TCP connections.... read more

giFT is a project designed to completely abstract low-level filesharing protocol communication while allowing seamless support for multiple networks. Currently available plugins include: OpenFT, Gnutella, and FastTrack (third party). This release features only build environment improvements and new command line options to override the local, home, plugin, and data directories that giFT was configured to use. This feature is currently only being used by the poisoned developers to package a mostly self-contained giFT installation.

All I can say is "oops". The last couple of releases included an overlooked design flaw which would senselessly retry TCP connections to parent nodes which have the child sharing the file you are trying to download. Additionally, search nodes were poorly managing the subsequent PUSH requests and attempting outgoing connections when the protocol rules demand that the PUSH can only be sent to currently connected children.... read more

Looks like the folks at techtv's The Screen Savers have taken notice of the popular Mac OS X client, Poisoned, and have decided to make it their download of the day. They also gave a brief on-air review of Poisoned, even mentioning the giFT project as the technology under the hood, so-to-speak. I'd just like to say thanks to the Poisoned developers for producing such a high-quality interface and to techtv for the free publicity...keep it coming!

The CVS repository is being restructured to separate the Gnutella and OpenFT plugins from the daemon and library source code. This change will be over the next couple of days and will surely break previous builds as we will be asking the sourceforge.net staff to perform the moves to preserve revision history.

After approximately two years of internal development, giFT has finally been released to the public! This release features OpenFT and Gnutella plugins as part of the standard distribution distribution. Be sure to read the QUICKSTART file available in the tarball for information on how to begin using giFT. giFT is a project designed to completely abstract low-level filesharing protocol communication while allowing seamless support for multiple networks. Currently available plugins include: OpenFT, Gnutella, and FastTrack (third party).... read more

OpenFT 0.0.10 magically became 0.1.0-1 today preparing for the giFT 0.10.1 release. Lets hope all goes well.

In an effort to prepare for the upcoming giFT release, I have reopened the following public forums:

Open Discussion
Help

OpenFT 0.0.10 is out. See OpenFT/ChangeLog for changes.

Many people have come to various places (mailing list, bug tracker, irc) asking about the '*** GIFT-FATAL: couldn't load protocol in file /usr/local/lib/giFT/liblibOpenFT.so.la: file not found' error.

The cause of this error is that the format of gift.conf changed. Namely, for the 'plugins' entry, you'll now only have to give the name(s) of the protocol(s) you want to use.

So, to fix this, edit ~/.giFT/gift.conf, and change the line with 'plugins = libOpenFT.so' to 'plugins = OpenFT'. That's it!... read more

OpenFT 0.0.9-4 has been merged into the trunk. A number of new (wildly untested) features have made it into the network this time around. The most notable feature is the introduction of a new scalable "virtual" cluster organization, which has been tested on a smaller scale in a separate CVS branch from a couple of weeks now. It is still unclear how well this code will perform without all the optimizations discussed on the gift-openft ML, so this may be a pretty bumpy ride.... read more

I lied, it doesn't bring world peace, but it is merged into the main repository. Largest "visual" change is that the search nodes backend is completely redone, and features much better scalability but it needs to be stress tested a bit. There are new configuration options that allow search nodes to tweak the memory environment that the node will be resting in, greatly improving search efficiency when there's lots of RAM to go around :)... read more