Release Version 2.0 beta 3

Release date: 10 February 2018.

Distribution

Source snapshots are attached to this announcement and the git tag filesender-2.0-beta3 contains the base that these snapshots were created from.

Installation

Documentation is available at http://docs.filesender.org/v2.0/install/

Upgrade Notes

Version 2.0 breaks compatibility with version 1.x. We recommend a fresh installation to version 2.x of FileSender.

Major changes since 2.0 beta 2

Zip64 support has been updated. In the previous beta, on the download page if you made a zip that was more than 4gb in size some tools did not want to open the resulting zip file. Zip files should now have no size limit and be more acceptable to more tools and are always zip64 format files regardless of size.

A major new change to help expose issues with upload stalling, change of network or intermittent network absence, laptop sleep and resume, is the display of per worker (Terasender) or single worker (non terasender xhr upload) of staleness information. This is a lead on from the above pull request with pull request 211 which adds the option upload_display_per_file_stats to display the number of seconds each worker has been active on it's current chunk next to the file that the chunk belongs to. While sites may not wish to display this information it is useful to obtain it in order to use it for working out if something has stalled.

FileSender can now use xhr progress messages to keep a much closer eye on uploads for Terasender and single thread file uploads. This allows a stall of a chunk to be known much sooner, for example, if absolutely no bytes are sent by a worker for 5 or 10 seconds then it is likely to be a good bet that something is wrong or stalled. At the moment no active action is taken but PR 221 is a great base for future work restarting stalled chunks.

The upload stall detection code was making assumptions about Workers which might not always be correct. In articular, comparing one worker to another has no guarantee that Worker threads undergo completely fair scheduling. This lead to pr 209.

Two race conditions in upload completion which related to
issue/189 have an update. The issue is that "Sometimes Transfer->makeAvailable() is
called before all Event#file_uploaded are called." A race in both the Terasender and single threaded xhr uploading code lead to pr 206 and 208 respectively.

Better support for Internet Explorer with an issue relating to localStorage being denied (pull 198).

Updates relating to filesystem_hashing have been made to resolve issues/176, 177, and 178.

A fix in pull/214 addresses a potential loop that was in class loading and seemed to only hit some configurations.

More configuration testing is added thanks to issue/197. Issues like 197 are useful because catching and halting on a bad or misleading configuration is likely a better route than undefined or unexpected behaviour through misconfiguration.

Translations updated:

• French

The following pull requests have been merged:

• 193 fixes undefined value in Exception::class
• 199 Fix spelling of 'additional'
• 37 Show more prominent login button on landing page
• 210 adds StorageFilesystemExternal to allow storage backed by scripts.
• 215 builds on 210 to share run() and update the stream library usage a little.
• 219 displays messages to this effect on attempted download and a banner on the download page to this effect only if crypto is not available and the transfer contains an encrypted file.
• 204 fixes issues/88 to allow certain cronjobs to run.
• 218 adds a new configuration option to address issue/80 which requests that crypto transfers do not offer
  a resume transfer option.
• 244 allows generated passwords to be made longer than the minimum password length
• 238 pauses an upload if the stop button is pressed
• 237 normalizes the font sizes on the download page
• 236 allows the minimal password length to be set
• 235 allows a maximum file size to be set for encrypted uploads
• 234 brings back the ability to force the AuP to be selected in order to use the system
• 37 Show more prominent login button on landing page

Configuration changes

Raw list of interesting config directives changed or added in this release

storage_type
max_transfer_file_size
max_transfer_encrypted_file_size
encryption_min_password_length
encryption_generated_password_length
upload_display_per_file_stats
upload_force_transfer_resume_forget_if_encrypted
upload_considered_too_slow_if_no_progress_for_seconds

There is a new storage_type to allow storage to be handled by scripts.
File sizes can now be limited through the two file size options.
encryption passwords can optionally have a minimal length and an optional larger one for generated passwords.
Encrypted file resume can be forced to be off.
Turning on upload_display_per_file_stats will allow more insight into the health of each chunk being uploaded.

As always, see the main documentation for full details at
http://docs.filesender.org/v2.0/admin/configuration/

Support and Feedback

See Support and Mailinglists and Feature requests.

A new label "release2.0beta3" has been created to specifically track issues relating to this release. Please attach that label when reporting issues that relate to this beta. Current known issues can be seen at https://github.com/filesender/filesender/labels/release2.0beta3