Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 192 posts

Re: Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

#101

Post by adrianN »

mschuster91 wrote: post #66
bhenc wrote: post #60

> Copying files with ssh/scp is fine, but requires previous arrangements and an account on the target machine, and how do you bootstrap the account?~ Assuming that you have openssh and rssh installed, you bootstrap like this: useradd -m -g users -s /usr/bin/rssh tmp passwd tmp edit /etc/rssh.conf and uncomment allowscp Share the password with the party you want to exchange data with. Make sure your ports are open. Se…

When both parties are in a corp network (eg across companies) you would need a server anyway. Many either offer a FTP server or have switched to Accellion (which is kinda cr.p, and full of security holes)... so this is a nice, fast and secure alternative.

When both parties are in a corporate network their IT policy would forbid using magic wormhole. They'd have to use the file-transfer program managed by their IT department.

Re: Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

#102

Post by bhenc »

bb88 wrote: post #74
bhenc wrote: post #60

> Copying files with ssh/scp is fine, but requires previous arrangements and an account on the target machine, and how do you bootstrap the account?~ Assuming that you have openssh and rssh installed, you bootstrap like this: useradd -m -g users -s /usr/bin/rssh tmp passwd tmp edit /etc/rssh.conf and uncomment allowscp Share the password with the party you want to exchange data with. Make sure your ports are open. Se…

Okay. Step 1. Open ports on your router. It's your job to figure out which ports those may be. Step 2. Redirect said ports to the box in question, hopefully you'll know the ip address that was assigned by your home router's DHCP Step 3. Make sure rssh is installed. Step 4. If rssh is not installed, please simply follow the simple instructions to get it installed for your system. Step 4a. If it's a mac, use brew. Type…

Okay.

The equivalents to steps 1-11 were done by the Wormhole authors when they created the rendezvous server. So yes, if you use Wormhole in SaaS mode, it's simpler, but you have to trust the rendezvous server.

Operating scp with a working ssh server is as simple as working with wormhole:

To push:

scp foobar.txt tmp@www.example.com: #equivalent to wormhole send

To pull:

scp tmp@www.example.com:foobar.txt . #equivalent to wormhole receive

To revoke access, you simply change the password, instead of deleting the user account. In fact, the steps you mention are what I already have by default on most of my machines, so there's 0% extra effort. I got rssh working in five minutes.

Steps 10/11 are my responsibility, and the only remaining step for the other developer is step 7.

Compare explaining the above two commands to explaining virtualenv and pip. On a busy public IRC channel, I'm not going to do that, I'll use scp, since it's also preinstalled on their system.

So yes, I do rejoice in the simplicity.

I commented for the benefit of those already running ssh, and who wondered how to create a similar setup to wormhole with what they have. rssh will work fine.

Re: Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

#106

Post by StavrosK »

vacri wrote: post #95
bb88 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the mac, you can: brew install magic-wormhole [1] And that covers 90% of the people that care. Granted I think you're right that software packaging and distribution is still generally broken in 2017, but that's a problem across the board. It's a problem with java, node.js, python, etc. [1] https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole

So... 'brew install rssh' is bad and kludgy, but 'brew install magic-wormhole' is easy and light? And hey, if you're not on a mac, you have to also install a bunch of other deps too. You probably shouldn't have tried to pad out your steps by taking a detour into package management.

Honestly, even if I have both rssh and magic-wormhole installed already, just creating a new user that can read (some of) the filesystem is already orders of magnitudes more hassle.

Re: Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

#107

Post by hiq »

lotharrr wrote: post #26
ohhhlol wrote: post #24

> The wormhole library requires a "Rendezvous Server": a simple WebSocket-based relay that delivers messages from one client to another. This allows the wormhole codes to omit IP addresses and port numbers. The URL of a public server is baked into the library for use as a default, and will be freely available until volume or abuse makes it infeasible to support. why not make use of https://docs.syncthing.net/users/st…

Interesting.. I'll take a look at it. My first thought is that magic-wormhole needs a canonical way to allocate "nameplates" (the numeric channel identifier at the start of the wormhole code), and that's tricky to do in a DHT (I'm assuming syncthing's relay server behaves like a DHT). We've got a ticket open ( https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole/issues/72 ) about distributing this rendezvous server.. I'll add a…

Why would I use magic worm-hole instead of Syncthing or Signal? They are both user-friendly and easy to install for the person I want to send the file to. The only shortcomings I can imagine:

_AFAIR Signal has a size limit on the file you can send

_you need a phone number and a smartphone to use Signal

_The Synching key you have to share is complicated, but sending it via email and making sure you add the hosts quickly on both sides would provide enough security guarantees for most people. If you have a secure messenger then you can simply share the key through this channel. And overall I find it easier to explain how to

1) install Signal

2) install Syncthing and share the keys

rather than install magic-wormhole and use some passphrase.

Re: Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

#109

Post by BrandiATMuhkuh »

ohhhlol wrote: post #24

> The wormhole library requires a "Rendezvous Server": a simple WebSocket-based relay that delivers messages from one client to another. This allows the wormhole codes to omit IP addresses and port numbers. The URL of a public server is baked into the library for use as a default, and will be freely available until volume or abuse makes it infeasible to support. why not make use of https://docs.syncthing.net/users/st…

You can also use https://ondevice.io for that. But in that case it let's you ssh into the remote device even if it changes location/ip-address. I use it for some IoT tinkering I do.

Re: Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

#110

Post by y4mi »

sw1sh wrote: post #105

More people should use Keybase, and this would be more easier within its filesystem https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs

Eh,I like the concept of kbfs and have it installed on my PC and phone, but it's not really a competitor to this. Keybase reminds me of a secure alternative to Dropbox or Google drive. You've got a quota that you can upload to their server (encrypted). While you can use it to move files between destinations, that isn't it's primary goal.

And it's not a lossless storage at that, as their filesystem doesn't support all metadata . I.e. it removes any timestamps from the files.

Post reply on HN