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?

This entry was posted in tech. Bookmark the permalink.

11 Responses to Friendly LAN-File Sharing. Does it Exist?

  1. dystopianray says:

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

  2. Daniel says:

    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. Seb says:

    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 says:

    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. egonk says:

    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 says:

    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. Anil says:

    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 says:

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

  9. Flávio says:

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

  10. Jakub says:

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

  11. Assassin says:

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