[plug] Fastest way to transfer files over Internet.

[James Devenish]

In message <1052526265.29102.13.camel at virgo>
on Sat, May 10, 2003 at 08:24:25AM +0800, Scott Middleton wrote:
> Whats the general consensus for Linux users on the fastest way to

Fast in what sense: Setup time? Connection initiation? Fewest keys to
press? Bulk transfer rate? Number of small files per unit time?

> transfer files from one computer to another over the Internet.

UDP.

> There must be some security but it's not really essential.

Huh? "Must be...but not...essential"! What security are you talking
about? Are you talking about authentication or encryption and
validation?

(I would say the easiest way would be to stick the file into a web- or
FTP-shared directory and then wget it on the other computer. No time
spent authenticating, no time spent encrypting, works across operating
systems, may include compression by default if your server and client
can handle it, etc. But presumably we can exclude such things in your
situation?)

> Preferably a 1 liner.

So you're talking about transferring just a single file per invocation?

If you have rcp (a long-standing UNIX rsh facility) set up with
address-based authorisation then you would have minimal authentication
time and no overhead of encryption. If you needed encryption you could
set up IPsec with a fast, loose cipher (obviously that only applies if
you are continually doing transfers between a particular set of
machines).

If you have SSH set up with public key authentication and no passphrase
on your private key, then yes scp would be very convenient. But of
course it's slow to get started. So it wouldn't fit the general
definition of "fastest" because it would be slow to do many. On that
note, transfers of large numbers of small files may be faster if you
archive the files on the sending machine and dearchive them on the
receiving machine at a later time. That way, the *Internet* part of the
transfer would be faster. If you have several files to copy, but not all
at exactly the same moment, you could open an SFTP connection and send
through files as and when you realise you need them transferred. That
way you only have to initiate the connection once.