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Comment by colinsane | Hacker News Reader

funny thing: i recently happened into the solution to that age-old question of "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room". i now run an anonymous FTP server on my laptop, open to the LAN. prior to this Dropbox _was_ one of the solutions, but recently i've used that FTP server for the job several times with both Linux and Windows users.

yet, you jest.

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Sometimes I’ll just throw up

    python -m http.server

In a directory as a lazy way to transfer a file (especially to my phone).

It is not encrypted, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if it was also vulnerable in some ways, but it sure is easy (and it is only for lan, and pretty brief).

Exactly what I do as well

If you're fortunate enough to have Ruby installed, you can save three full keystrokes:

  ruby -run -e httpd

The keywords you want for that file transfer are "Magic Wormhole".

Yes, it works on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Magic Wormhole is great, but sometimes unbearably slow for bulk transfers. (I imagine the public relay server used for the common NAT-to-NAT case is sometimes overloaded.)

His comment was: "how do i transfer some file(s) between two computers in the same room".

All the problems with NAT traversal should be avoided in that case.

Fair, but my comment is for other readers, too.

(Also, being in the same room doesn't always mean direct connection is allowed. I've seen wifi networks that forbid it.)

Samba also works just fine for that job.

Did you try syncthing?

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