[plug] Fastest way to transfer files over Internet.

[William Kenworthy]

If you start now, you should have them zipped and mostly burnt to CD by
the time I arrive to pick them up ...

Seriously, as one of my lecturers said, its hard to beat a station wagon
loaded with CD's or backup tapes for bandwidth across town.  I think you
will have to be a bit more specific (how far, bandwidth (BB or modem),
protocol(s) available and so on.

BillK

On Sun, 2003-05-11 at 20:33, Scott Middleton wrote:
> What would you use?
> 1 to transfer 1x600MB file.
> 2 to transfer 600x1MB files.
> 3 to transfer 1200x512k files.
> 
> >From 1 Linux box to another.
> 
> On Sat, 2003-05-10 at 09:04, James Devenish wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
-- 
William Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au>