SSH browser with rsync transfer engine | Hacker News Reader

SSH browser with rsync transfer engine

bonhardcomputing.com

47 pointsbonhardcomp16 comments

Looks interesting!

I had a pain point a few days ago when I had to delete a few thousand files from my VPS over SFTP (it took forever.) This project looks like it could help out a lot in that regard because it uses rsync, which should be much faster than FTP's method of deleting the files one by one.

if you had sftp access ... shouldn't you have had ssh access?

> The remote machine must have a running SSH service and carry its own copy of rsync

Really the machine should just have to be running SSH. The UI could then take care of spooling up an instance of rsync on the target machine under the hood as soon as it connects.

I think it means rsync must be installed. It probably starts rsync as you say.

feelix is probably thinking of transferring an rsync binary first, when it is not available on the remote end.

How would you easily figure out which version to install? Having a requirement of rsync already installed on the box sounds reasonable, compared to having x86, x64, arm32, arm64, and the rest binaries in the client download...

And that's not counting different OS's, different dependencies such as libc. In my opinion those things would be far out of scope for this project.

I agree that it is beyond the scope of this project but a statically linked (with musl libc) rsync would be possible.

Like these guys: http://sta.li/

Nice. Am gonna be doing this.

How does this compare to SSHFS? https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs

one uses sftp the other uses rsync for file transfer. Rsync is known for transfering multiple files way faster than sftp. Also one transfers the other syncs but I guess one can figure that out by the names.

As far as speed goes: Transfers: ~1000s times faster (thanks to Rsync as fimdomeio says); Browsing: ~10x (thanks Paramiko); Deletion: ~100x (SSH/rsync beats SFTP recursion). Although one day I am going to write a FUSE/driver that implements all this and avails it for SSHFS, because it's hard to beat that Finder integration...

How is it going to get "~1000s times faster" ust by using rsync? Rsync'll still be using the ssh channel to connect

Unless by "~1000s times faster" it means "skip all the files it doesn't need to transfer" ... which is not transferring faster - it's transferring less

This looks like a brilliant tool! It's always annoyed me how slow copying stuff over the network using a GUI is -- especially folders with many files.

For example copying a 300MB folder from one Mac to another over Wifi took 10 minutes (using the Finder). Then I tried using rsync from the command line, and it took just 15 seconds.

I don't often use rsync, so I always have to look up the required flags every time I use it. A friendly GUI is greatly appreciated!

Is there something similar to this for ubuntu ?

FWIW this is written in PyQt so it'll easily port over to Ubuntu and Windows, will post again here when done.

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