It’s Sunday somewhere already so why wait?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
I’ll post my ongoing things later/tomorrow but I didn’t want to forget the post again.
Why is it so hard to send large files?
Obviously I can just dump it on my server and people can download it from a browser but how are they gonna send me anything? I’m not gonna put an upload on my site, that’s a security nightmare waiting to happen. HTTP uploads have always been wonky, for me, anyway.
Torrents are very finnicky with 2-peer swarms.
instant.io (torrents…) has never worked right.
I can’t ask everyone to install a dedicated piece of software just to very occasionally send me large files
Maybe something like Copyparty would be what you’re looking for?
Thanks for the mention :>
Yeah, copyparty was my attempt at solving this issue - a single python-file for receiving uploads of infinitely large files, usually much faster than other alternatives (ftp, sftp, nextcloud, etc.) especially when the physical distance to the uploader is large (hairy routing).
curious to hear your specific concerns on this; maybe it’s something that’s already handled?
I already saw copyparty but it appears to me to be a pretty large codebase for something so simple. I don’t want to have to keep up with that because there’s no way I’m reading and vetting all that code; it becomes a security problem.
It is still easier and infinitely more secure to grab a USB drive, a bicycle and just haul ass across town. Takes less time, too.
You could always toss it in a sandbox for some isolation :> but yeah I get you, all of the optional features does mean more code.
It’s a shame that browsers make stuff like chunked uploading so tricky, so even just the essentials would be a fair bit of logic – and you won’t get optimal upload speeds without sending chunks in parallel. And the corruption detection is also worth its weight in gold… Ah well, it is what it is hehe
I think that openssh or any ssh or ftp app should facilitate this.
Sending is someone else’s problem. They have all sorts of different understandings and tools and I can’t deal with them all. So the only alternative is to set them up with an account in (e.g.) Nexcloud or just accept whatever Google service they use to send you a large file.
Sending other people files is easy in Nextcloud, just create a shared link and unshare when done. Set a password on the file itself.
It becomes my problem when I’m the one who wants the files and no free service is going to accept an 80gb file.
It is exactly my point that I should not have to deal with third parties or something as massive and monolithic as Nextcloud just to do the internet equivalent of smoke signals. It is insane. It’s like someone tells you they don’t want to bike to the grocer 5 minutes away because it’s currently raining and you recommend them a monster truck.
OK 80 GB is for sure an edge case. Nextcloud won’t even work for that due to PHP memory limits, I think.
Interesting problem. FTP is an option, with careful instructions to an untutored user. Maybe rsync over a VPN connection if it is always the same sender.
Not even sure what else would reliably work, except Tannenbaum’s Adage.
On a related note, it would be nice if there was a shared storage option for self hosting. It wouldn’t be the same as self hosting, but more like distributed hosting where everyone pools storage they have available and we could have an encrypted sharing option.
You’re describing the world wide web, except giving others write access
I sometimes create them a Nextcloud account and send them the credentials
Could you set a ‘password’ on the uploads? So the server will only accept and start the upload if the password is present. The password is a passphrase to make it easy to type in.