2011-09-09

How true

Every time you email a file to yourself so you can pull it up on your friend's laptop, Tim Berners-Lee sheds a single tear.

Sadly, the simplest way to get a file from my linux box to my wife's windows machine in the same house is still to email it to her. Yes, we can set up file shares and all sorts - that is all fine, but it is never as simple for her to use as a file arriving by email. She would have to find the icon for the file share, and then log in, and then file the file I am talking about, and... But on email it is there - the only attachment in the email that just arrived - simples. Thankfully we don't have limits on emailed file sizes, and the process does only send the file as far as Maidenhead over dedicated fibre links and not actually "out to the Internet" very far when I do that. I suppose I could run the mail server in the house maybe, well, hang on, yes, perhaps using a USB stick could work... Hmmm...

6 comments:

  1. I must admit Dropbox is almost as easy but I don't use that for confidential files cos I don't trust it.

    I had to do the emailing files to myself from newcolleague's machine cos she isn't set up on notwork shares yet and IT cite another 10 days before they'll do it. And they wonder why we have luddites using local copies and versionfail and and and...

    I regretted not copying stuff to usb stick this last weekend cos the wifi in the place we were in was PATHETIC and my winbox wouldn't even see the bloody wifi at all. Fortunately I had another 2 linux laptops which could see it. (I had 4 laptops in total)

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  2. Lol in the house either my server, or my computer, or yes perhaps even a USB stick are the best solutions. But what do I do when, like the other day, a friend wants to send a song to me that he made, that with it being a collection of songs, is larger that hotmail will allow him to send? I cannot believe there isn't a simpler file sending protocol of any sort out there. Email itself is actually a pretty good way of doing it with the exception of certain email providers that do have file size limits...

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  3. I just use scp to copy files to my server then off it on another machine. I guess that's not simple enough for general use though

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  4. I email things to my wife who's sat 2 feet away.. via google mail. So it's crossing the atlantic. Not my proudest boast..

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  5. as a Mac and linux user for my home network but with devices such as the o!play hd media player needing a smb share I set up my server with smb sharepoint AND a netatak (appleshare) sharepoint on exactly the same dir a sub dir of that is aliased to my webserver (same box) and thus all I have to do is send someone a url and they can spend all the time they like to dl the file at their leisure (often it's me wanting to a copy of a dot conf file or libs etc when I'm at a clients)

    I deliberately set a small max file size on my mail server ... I simply wont accept large attachments

    all else I carry on a small 32GB usb stick ;)

    revk how hard is it to send someone a url via email :P

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  6. Couple years ago I had to send a large file to my brothers computer. Easiest way for us at the time was MSN messenger as we didn't have any free flash drives or blank CD-Rs. When I clicked send it was almost instant, we only had 512k broadband at the time which if I recall was something like 56k uplink. Turns out for large files instead of MSNs servers handling the transferr it gets each of the sending/receiving clients to communicate directly, and as we were on the same LAN our router must have detected some kind of loop back connection and done it completely internally. No FTP, no windows shard folders. Pleasant surprise, no waiting around. Awesome sauce!

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