How do you like to transfer large files between friends across the internet?
from ReducedArc@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 17 Mar 17:21
https://lemmy.world/post/26975831
from ReducedArc@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 17 Mar 17:21
https://lemmy.world/post/26975831
On occasion I find myself needing to send a file at least a few gigabytes in size to a friend across our slow ISPs but haven’t found a satisfying solution. I usually end up creating a private torrent with the announce address of my own IP. Even though it’s slow - it basically never reaches my max upload speed for some reason, it is at least resilient if there are ever any network glitches.
Does anyone else face this same challenge?
EDIT: Thank you for the awesome suggestions! I have some homework to do on these
threaded - newest
Syncthing
You can use syncthing to transfer files across the internet? How? I thought it was only for local networks
By default out of the box it will transfer over the internet if it needs to.
It just works, there’s no “how”. Take one of the devices outside, connect to the internet, done.
Er, wait, are you using Syncthing for its intended purpose of syncing files across devices on your local network? And then exposing that infrastructure to the internet? Or are you isolating Syncthing instances?
Syncthing is not limited to local network. It’s hole punching is one of the major features
The fact that Syncthing seems to solve CGNAT on its own has me wondering why there are not more solutions for the server/home side.
Why does Wireguard or any other VPN not work like Tailscale or Zerotier?
Why don’t torrent clients can’t work with IPv6 to seed more?
Why doesn’t Plex adopt a similar mechanic like Syncthing to expose the media over the Internet instead of being a prisoner of CGNAT?
I know I am just throwing different options with my personal frustrations lol, but I hope you get what I am trying to mean, Plex, torrent and home VPN users shouldn’t become masters at networking, especially when the documentation for the tools IS NOT ENOUGH.
tailscale and zerotier are wireguard, but with a public server that helps with NAT. Syncthing uses a public server for that too.
wireguard was specifically made to be as simple and minimalistic as possible.
is there such a problem? honest question. But I think that might be a different issue
maybe they just don’t see working on it profitable enough
Zerotier wasn’t always Tailscale was it?
You need to be connectable to download from all the peers, likewise non connectable users can’t download from you, and how do you become connectable? By opening your ports, something that might seem archaic from somebody who has totally embraced IPv6.
Yeah maybe.
Just to clarify, I have several workarounds for the 3 issues that have involved spending more money or not to get rid of CGNAT.
For the 1st one… Well I already mentioned it, I am a ZT and Tailscale user, I did try Wireguard from a VPS once though, but I didn’t like that I was entirely dependant of my upload speed, maybe I had my Iptables wrongly configured but I usually got faster speeds just using ZT or Tailscale (I didn’t need to relay in the US VPS server).
For Torrenting… I actually haven’t found a solution to use IPv6… I did use a container client to use my VPS at that time though, it being Digital Ocean and thus getting a DMCA letter for downloading TWD me being a LATAM user was… A kinda funny experience, with that said I stopped that project immediately, it was fun to give back to the community with my 24/7 NAS always seeding though.
For the last point… Well, I do use ZT and Tailscale to access the server myself, but when I want to expose it, I usually do it with a reverse proxy pointing out to my IPv6 address, and more recently using a Tailscale funnel, I haven’t tried it thoroughly, but at least it seems to connect without using Plex’s relays.
As you can see, one needs to be well prepared with workarounds to deal with CGNAT.
it is not tailscale. but also it seems I was wrong and its not wireguard either
I know what opening ports is, I only have v4. But I thought you have difficulties with bittorrent over v6. or is it that you still need to open ports for v6, in the firewall or something?
Yeah, I totally meant Wireguard there, my bad.
I don’t have difficulties to download, I have difficulties to seed because I am CGNATED and it seems Qbittorrent or any Torrent client really can’t use IPv6 to be more connectable thus seed more.
I want to seed more without having to pay for it or do convoluted workarounds.
@WhyJiffie @kratoz29
> is there such a problem? honest question. But I think that might be a different issue
Yes, that is a problem. We're still in a world where you need to manually enable port forwarding in order to get better seeding for bittorrent clients, and if you have CGNAT you're SOL (short of using a VPN or something to bounce through an external host).
It's likely because torrent software is older (& in crappier languages), and came about before CGNAT was a thing.
I don’t understand, sorry. they were saying that something doesn’t work as expected IPv6. but CGNAT is not used for IPv6, is it? and you don’t really forward ports either, maybe you allow them through in the routercs firewall but notnsure because I don’t have v6
well, you don’t need to, often you can also enable the upnp function in the router so that any software can open all the ports it wants, which is a terrible idea security-wise
Yep, I’ve got a buddy in another country that I needed to share a group of files with, it was several gigs and we were both editing things.
We setup a syncthing connection and once we were synced it just worked. I also use it on my LAN to sync personal files, but to share with him we both just set up a folder and I just shared that one folder with him while the rest of my shares stayed private on the LAN.
Syncthing is amazing.
Syncthing is not just for LAN use. Even their homepage mentions transmitting data over the internet
syncthing.net
I’ve been using it to sync devices over the internet for years. It’s also how people use it to sync from say their desktop to their phones, remote server, etc.
If you watch your network firewall Syncthing does reach out to servers on the internet to help it find other devices so e.g. if you enter the other device’s ID (example ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG) it can reach out over the internet to find that specific ID to pair with. I think Syncthing uses a sort of DHT resolver to find other devices, I know on my firewall I had to whitelist Syncthing’s servers to make it work.
I was going to try to link you some references but their forums seem to have connection issues at the moment, you may want to search around later if you’re interested how Syncthing works over the internet.
Syncthing is designed to be used over the internet, it’s why it supports NAT hole punching, relay servers, and discovery servers.
It’s very much a WAN solution too. I use it to push my files to a Pi Zero W that’s 200 miles from my house. I use it as an off site store of my files. The Pi is connected as an untrusted device in Syncthing so that all files sit encrypted at rest.
Syncthing has public relays enabling it to work (dunno if one or none need to be public) without both parties being exposed.
I mean… exposed to each other, sure, but they’re all exposed to Syncthing and the public relays.
I meant exposed being publicly accessible by navigating to syncthing.example.org with being exposed thus not needing a relay.
You’re probably thinking of PairDrop (which also allows extranet).
The user can choose. Please note you first much accept another client by its fingerprint.
You could try wormhole. It makes a direct connection.
Or croc which is very similar. I think it also allows to resume file transfers.
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It’s generally not a good idra to give others access to your home network
i like zipline but i use it for smaller files where download resumability is not a key factor
I host pingvin for people to send stuff to me. To send, usually I’ll just move the file into a folder that exposed to Nginx with indexing and send that link. Otherwise I’ll also just use my pingvin instance.
I tell them to start their Nextcloud client. Or if they don’t have it, give them the share link.
I find Croc to be rather just good for this.
Swisstransfer
Internetxt
My use case is a bit different than yours but still worth mentioning, I think; I have Sharry running in Docker and it makes sharing and receiving files super easy. All downloads and uploads are resumable so they work well even in unstable networks.
If they are local, you can just put it on a thumb drive and physically transfer it.
Absolutely, that is definitely preferred when possible!
If they’re not local, you can put it on a pen drive and mail it to them.
I have a minio instance that I use to distribute files
Wormhole.app, can’t recall if they have a limit atm
I use wormhole, but when I’ve wanted to use that website for receiving, I can never tell how to do it.
Can you actually use that site to receive files?
Whoever uploaded them has to send you a link to them. It does have a limit of 10gb, but it’s pretty reliable in my experience.
Ahh, I see. I’ve got a wormhole app on my phone which I was trying to use to send from. I guess it just can’t work with that website. Thanks
So just like when you send a file you fwd a link, someone tfering files to you must provide the link. They expire in a maximum of 24 hours though so do be aware of that.
I was trying to send from a wormhole app, which I now see doesn’t work with the website.
Send
wormholeis good; also its CLI.wormhole.app
Wormhole or croc
Super easy. Spin up an OpenVPN server, forwarding the right ports to your server. Now spin up an Apache server with the folder your file’s in as server root. Send the client config for your VPN to your friend, along with the local address of your HTTP server. Now they can install the OpenVPN client on their PC and download the file from your HTTP server. Once you’re done, tear down all your servers, and don’t forget to unforward the ports. Couldn’t be easier.
/s
Okay can you explain why thats a sarcastic answer? Is one of those first three steps way harder than I think it is?
openvpn and apache can be very time consuming to set up if you do it for the first time
Cause that’s not simple or easy at all. It takes a fair bit of knowledge to set up all of these things.
I have non-ironically gotten responses like this
Just share the folder on soulseek. Probably not advisable for any sensitive information though xD
I’ve used:
send.tresorit.com
wormhole.app
pairdrop.net
But for slower connections bittorrent is the best option by far because it doesn’t care about interruptions, and verifies the data as it goes. Just gotta make sure you’re port forwarding the client.
Reminds me I had been needing to find something for this too. Looks like I had thought about using Croc.
Not sure if this works for you but I didnt see it mentioned. I use plex for my media server, so I would just put whatever it is on there and then someone else can log in remotely and download it through the app on their mobile, and I think also via the website too.
I know this works if the person is downloading from android but haven’t tested otherwise.
That should work for media files at least, but I believe they’ll also need Plex pass to be able to download anything.
Should be able to do that with Jellyfin, no Plex/Plex Pass needed (if you really want to use media software for this).
That said I suspect your current method with creating a torrent to share is much more resilient when dealing with choppy internet connections. With Jellyfin/Plex it’s more of a direct download situation, not sure if either can resume broken downloads.
I’d go for syncthing over nextcloud for your specific usecase. Nextcloud isn’t good for unreliable connections and they’re sticking with the annoying decision of not supporting server to server synchronization.
I literally just set up a container for Erugo for this exact thing. It worked perfectly and was super easy to do. It’s just a self-hosted version of wetransfer. Could be helpful…
If its a file from my seedbox: Direct share link (optional pw)
Local file: OneDrive
I used vaultwarden just the other day for this purpose. I mean, I use vaultwarden daily as a password manager, but it also has secure file transfer.
I’ve use Plik before with success.
github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?…
Friends I know IRL: Thumbdrives.
Friends I only know via the Internet: Torrents or IRC filesharing.
Though knowing that a homing pigeon with a thumb drive is actually faster than the fastest Internet network on the planet, maybe I should simply invest in a coop and some pigeons. 🤔
Depends on how big the flash drive is, I suppose. Need to send a 1GB file? Just make a torrent. Need to send 40TB? Yeah, that hard drive is getting driven across town.
Perhaps two pigeons could carry the hard drive on a string. I’ve heard tell of swallows that have done this with coconuts.
Exactly what kind of pigeons are we talking about here? Or would you recommend switching to an avian variant of the migratory type?
I’d recommend either an african or european swallow.
.
I’d have to have friends across the internet that wanted files first…
FileBrowser
Create share links allowing anyone with the link (+ optional password) to browse and download individual files, or whole folder contents.
If someone needs to send me a file, I can create a user for them in a few seconds; so they can upload to that as well.
Before I moved I used to use my web server.
My Domain . Com / files . Zip And I would set a password on the zip. After they download it, they tell me and I remove the file.
Same, always eorked great for me
Me and my friend used netcat to transfer 30 GB of files put into a zip. Very fun, would not recommend
RFC 2549: www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549
This problem was solved years ago: …ieee.org/pigeonbased-feathernet-still-wingsdown-…
Upload to Proton Drive > Create share link > Share link
file.pizza
You can OnionShare if you’re worried about privacy.
Nextcloud is great for this
I use www.sendbig.com I haven’t read their privacy policy, though.
I really like Wormhole for this exact purpose.
My largest file transfer I have done via USB disk. You simply don’t transfer multiple terabytes over the net.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a54bb080-9f8f-48af-bf9c-7f94750016e8.jpeg">
rsync
I use an ancient HTTP File Server program called HFS from Rejetto. Very light weight. Supports making user accounts and whatnot if you want.
I usually just turn it on for a transfer and don’t leave it up these days, but still comes in handy on occasion.
HFSv2 (the windows exe) has publically known unfixed vulnerabilities! Please upgrade to HFSv3 (nodejs, crossplatform). I’m also maintaining a list of other alternatives; github.com/9001/copyparty/blob/…/versus.md
Thanks!