File sharing with GNU Guix (was: Re: Package requests: fortune, gifsicle, inxi, uncrustify, unrar, vsftp, xss-lock)

[Chris Marusich]

Pierre Neidhardt <address@hidden> writes:

> Clément Lassieur <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Pierre Neidhardt <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> vsftp:      Very Secure FTP daemon
>>> Upstream URL:       https://security.appspot.com/vsftpd.html
>>> (It seems that there is not a single FTP server on Guix.  Strange... Can 
>>> anyone
>>> recommend anything better than vsftp for file sharing?  Not necessarily
>>> FTP.)
>>
>> There is SFTP, which is secure, and supported by GuixSD.  It's not FTP,
>> and it runs over SSH.
>
> My use-case is the following: share files with random people with
> zero-configuration on their end.  Because FTP is supported by most web
> browsers it is one of the most available options I think.
>
> Any other suggestion?  There is Samba, but I'm not sure I'd like to dive
> into that...

Some people have already mentioned simple HTTP servers, which are an
easy ad-hoc option.  Other potentially interesting ways of sharing
files that seem to be available in Guix today include:

* scp
* rsync
* syncthing
* onionshare
* linuxdcpp
* nfs (see: nfs-utils)
* cifs (see: cifs-utils and samba)
* gnunet

I found some of these via:

  guix package --search='file.*shar|shar.*file' | recsel -p 
name,synopsis,description | less

All methods of sharing, even FTP, require some amount of configuration
on the client end, but obviously the question of what tools require
effectively "zero configuration" on the client end depends on the
situation.  If you've both got accounts on all the servers in question,
then scp is dead simple.

It would certainly be nice if somebody packaged an FTP server.  Until
then, I usually just use scp.  If you want to go super low tech, you can
even email large files by compressing them and splitting them with split
and cat (from coreutils).  I've done this in the past to get around
email size limitations; it's fun but a little tedious, and it depends on
the recipient knowing how to cat the parts back together.

-- 
Chris

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