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Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

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Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#53

Post by password4321 »

lotharrr wrote: post #38
netsec_burn wrote: post #10

I've used wormhole once to move a 70 GB file. Couldn't possibly do that before. And yes, I know I used the bandwidth of the relay server, I donated to Debian immediately afterwards (they run the relay for the version in the apt package).

(magic-wormhole author here) Thanks for making a donation! I run the relay server, but the Debian maintainer agreed to bake an alternate hostname into the packaged versions (a CNAME for the same address that the upstream git code uses), so we could change it easily if the cost ever got to be a burden. It hasn't been a problem so far, it moves 10-15 TB per month, but shares a bandwidth pool with other servers I'm rent…

> move to a slower-but-flat-rate provider

As I'm sure you're aware: https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ "up to 100Mbps" for $4/month

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#55

Post by layer8 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #21
dgrove wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

scp has the assumption that you have a login on the computers you're trying to share data from. wormhole allows for sharing with others without providing login access to the computer

Right. Also you may have to reconfigure some firewalls to use scp. Typically, a firewall allows outbound connections without needing an explicit entry for the protocol, and in the case of magic wormhole, both sides are an outbound connection. So it passes right through. If you've got security-minded folk managing that sort of thing for you, it's possible that magic wormhole will upset them for this reason. More for p…

Both problems can be worked around by having a third, general-purpose host where both source/destination hosts can scp to/from. Not quite as straightforward because you have to copy twice and do it from both sides, but has the benefit of not having to install bespoke software.

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#56

Post by Klonoar »

DavideNL wrote: post #49

Just noticed by coincidence there's also: "Rust implementation of Magic Wormhole, with new features and enhancements" : https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole.rs

This lacks a few of the features of the other implementations (e.g, sending a zip and having it unpack correctly).

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#57

Post by hinkley »

alanbernstein wrote: post #11

I realize this is a dumb question, but what's a good way to do this between an iPhone and a MacBook? Airdrop is disabled (by policy), iCloud storage is full (because I'm lazy), and I use syncthing on every other device, but I haven't found a client I can use on my work iPhone.

I tend to message myself a lot of things. Usually links not files, but it works and it doesn’t take me out of the headspace I’m occupying. Either Apple messages or slack.

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#58

Post by lotharrr »

ddtaylor wrote: post #27

I find `syncthing` pretty useful for this kind of stuff. It's been around a long time and has a lot of different options for configuration and clients for every platform you could imagine, both UI based and command line. On every *nix platform I would just install the `syncthing` package and use it quite easily. I've experimented with some wormhole stuff before and looked at this package some, but there would be a lo…

Yeah, syncthing is awesome for repeated interaction.. once you've configured the two sides to know about each other, it's really flexible for doing an initial transfer, pushing just the new changes, pushing to multiple destinations, etc.

magic-wormhole doesn't need the initial configuration, but only lets you transfer one file (or one directory). So it's better for ad-hoc transfers, or for safely establishing the configuration data you need for a more long-term tool. The analogy might be that magic-wormhole is to synthing as scp is to rsync.

The snap/flatpak thing is weird, and I share your discomfort with uncertain provenance of software delivered that way.

I wrote the original version in Python, and took advantage of a number of useful dependencies (Twisted, to begin with), but a consequence is that installing it requires a dozen other packages, plus everything that Python itself wants. I've watched multiple people express dismay when they do a `brew install magic-wormhole` and the screen fills with dependencies being downloaded. If I knew Go, or if Rust had existed when I first wrote it, I might have managed to produce a single-file executable, which would be a lot better for deployment/distribution purposes, like wormhole-william provides today.

Re: Magic Wormhole: get things from one computer to another, safely

#59

Post by lysace »

password4321 wrote: post #53
lotharrr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(magic-wormhole author here) Thanks for making a donation! I run the relay server, but the Debian maintainer agreed to bake an alternate hostname into the packaged versions (a CNAME for the same address that the upstream git code uses), so we could change it easily if the cost ever got to be a burden. It hasn't been a problem so far, it moves 10-15 TB per month, but shares a bandwidth pool with other servers I'm rent…

> move to a slower-but-flat-rate provider As I'm sure you're aware: https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ "up to 100Mbps" for $4/month

32.4 TB for $4, or approximately 700 times cheaper than AWS. Neat.
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