Friendly LAN-File Sharing. Does it Exist?

A few months back, I migrated my sister’s PC from Arch linux to Kubuntu. We were both a little fed up of the constant need for staying on bleeding edge, for fear of being left behind with the distribution. I was so impressed with Kubuntu I installed it on my machine too. I’m hoping that since I am now on a more “user friendly by default” distro, that I’ll be able to iron out a few things with my home network.

The idea of zeroconf is great. Personally, I hate doing network based configurations over the command line, I find them very awkward. Similarly, I don’t like having potentially non-permanent configurations hardwired into the system, and especially not ones which are automatically loaded.

I’m looking for a zeroconf compatible file sharing system (be it SSHFS, NFS or whatever) which can be loaded by a click of a button. I don’t want to have to specify mount points or anything else on the client machine, although I’d be willing to do a bit of setup on the file server if its a one time thing.

Any help out there?

11 Comments

  1. dystopianray
    Posted April 10, 2007 at 5:00 pm | Permalink

    Try kpf, it is zeroconf enabled and lets you easily share files over http.

  2. Posted April 10, 2007 at 5:13 pm | Permalink

    Given enough votes, you will have it available on KDE by the end of June.

    http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#Ad-hoc_collaborative_content_.26_file_sharing_applet

    Already have all the parts lined up – the uPnP library, example file server (woof), the DnD and object management code. All I (and a mentor) need is a green light to spend a month on this…

    It seems your problems are really hurting the whole OS community. I counted 3-4 file-sharing projects in this SoC.

  3. Posted April 10, 2007 at 5:18 pm | Permalink

    I tried kpf, except that it doesn’t let the user upload content, and it’s impossible to download directories, making it very tedious to grab lots of files…

  4. tm
    Posted April 10, 2007 at 6:38 pm | Permalink

    The fish:// kioslave has always worked great for me. Only requires a SSH daemon to be running on the target machine, and you get full access to the file system.

  5. Posted April 10, 2007 at 7:02 pm | Permalink

    I wrote such tool: http://netek.berlios.de/

    But unfortunately I didn’t have the time to implement Zeroconf… however FTP with unicode is stable in released version and http/webdav is already mostly implemented in svn, so if you or someone else has some spare time to hack on zeroconf… ;)

  6. Diederik
    Posted April 10, 2007 at 7:15 pm | Permalink

    What about Samba? In Windows it’s easy to navigate to the shared files at a different computer. KDE has smb4k and konqueror’s remote:// for this.

  7. Posted April 10, 2007 at 7:28 pm | Permalink

    fish:// will not let you to play video from the remote server. Copying large files are also troublesome. I use sshfs on edgy.
    anil

  8. ReTyPe
    Posted April 10, 2007 at 7:58 pm | Permalink

    sftp:// secureftp works if you have a decent recent ssh server

  9. Flávio
    Posted April 10, 2007 at 8:08 pm | Permalink

    U can try gShare(http://yimports.com/~cpinto/projects/gnome/gshare/).

  10. Jakub
    Posted April 10, 2007 at 9:22 pm | Permalink

    I use proftpd to share files avahi to announce it. Mandriva 2007 even sets up avahi automatically when you install proftpd.

  11. Assassin
    Posted April 10, 2007 at 11:02 pm | Permalink

    Chungles is a zeroconf local file sharing program. It really works great and is easy to setup.

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