Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with filesharing

The Past Decade's Changes in the Music Industry

manos_frias — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:47:10 -0800

Do you think this is a good overview of the changes in the music business in the last 10 years (for someone like me, who could charitably be called a non-musician)? Do you recommend other sources?

How to get my large file from here to there?

vegetableagony — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:50:38 -0800

How to privately share a large set of files with a large club? Having trouble getting bittorrent to work. I have a 8gb collection of photos that I helped touch up and organize for a club I was in. Now I am across the country, but most of the other members are all on the same college network.

I tried creating a torrent with transmission using http://tracker.publicbt.com:80/announce as the tracker and gave the people the torrent directly. One person was able to download the whole thing, but now no one is able to find anyone seeding the file, even though I have transmission open, but it isn't finding any peers. I am using osx10.5 and connecting wirelessly my cable internet.

Any thoughts on what might be making the torrent not work or how to fix it?

Alternatively any suggestions on how to get the files out to the people who want them? I don't want to do anything that will have them open to any random person.

Making Money from P2P File sharing!

storybored — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:14:24 -0800

Do you know of any attempts to monetize peer-to-peer file sharing? That is to say if a user is sharing a file, she gets compensated for uploading bits of the file? I'm interested in knowing who's looking in to it and what kind of success they may have had.

I need to host lan torrents for a lanparty coming up.

Chamunks — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:41:32 -0800

I'm looking at an efficient way to distribute large files to multiple computers over my lan, I need to know how to do this and whats involved. I was thinking that since I have a dedicated server in my home that hosting the files via private lan'd bit torrent would be the weapon of choice as the file transfer speed increases exponentially. My server is running a version of ubuntu so whatever software I will need must run in ubuntu. The clients downloading the files will probably be running windows boxes so Utorrent can be used and would be preferred. Are there any specific things that I need to turn on in Utorrent to do this via lan or will it essentially be seamless as long as the tracker is my server? These file transfers need to go as quickly and as hassle free as physically possible. I need to be able to either access this tracker via http or ssh as it has no video card installed at this time. I can XDCMP into the box aswell as its on a lan its secure enough for what xdcmp is used for.

I have thought about running around with usb drives but I just installed gigabit lan cabling and hardware throughout my home so this would be MUCH faster if I could set this up once and essentially forget it. Also this dedicated server needs to host and track the torrent files.

Simple, but less ugly way to present items in an online folder?

huron — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:55:18 -0800

I'm sharing files by dropping them into a folder in my public_html folder. Is there an easy way to generate a tasteful, simple front-end that's more appealing than the standard web-browser's text list? For a while, I was putting together simple HTML pages, which is obviously not very efficient. (By the way, this is through web-hosting, not my own server.)

I'm imagining some kind of standalone database thing that I drop into the same folder as the files. Or maybe a "miniature" WordPress that's as simple as an FTP client, and presents a file hierarchy along the lines of the MobileMe iDisk.

I suppose I wouldn't rule out trying WordPress, if that's the best (or only) way to do it. Any suggestions for plugins and themes for this purpose?

Files/video (.mp4) are downloaded. It wouldn't hurt, but there's no need for streaming, or viewing within a browser window. I know this is sounding like an FTP thing, but I can't ask people to download and poke around with FTP clients.

There are lots of file-sharing sites out there, but I'd like this material to reside on my "site". However password-protected and secure file distribution services are, the data is confidential, health-related material, and any branding at all would cause people to wonder about security.

Linux Shares: SMB or NFS?

fatbird — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:29:22 -0800

Which is the better way to share Linux folders with Vista and OS X: SMB or NFS? I'm an IT consultant who works from home. I have a MacBook Pro, a Vista x64 desktop, and a Linux box on which I run VMWare. Since a lot of what I do is LAMP based websites, my typical way of working is to set up a CentOS 5.2 VMWare image with the LAMP stack for each customer's site, running on the Linux box. I work on my Vista desktop in Eclipse 3.4.

What's worked well so far is to create an SMB share for the web directory on the VMWare image, and locate the Eclipse project there. I get to work in Eclipse on a box with plenty of horsepower so it's fast, and I don't need to transfer files to the image to see changes. I've tried using the VMWare console, and doing remote X on my Vista box, and both are sluggish in comparison.

However, the nagging detail I want to address is that SMB seems like a really poor way to access the share. When I save files in Eclipse, there's a momentary pause, and often a hard drive noise, like I'm waking something up to access the share, even if I'm doing it every 30 seconds. I'm generally dissatisfied with SMB because I'd hoped to use the Linux box's copious hard drive space (2 TB) as networked backup for my laptop and desktop, but it seems unable to keep up, especially with large numbers of files.

So: Is NFS a better way to make shares available on Linux? I'm pretty sure that Vista has no problem accessing NFS shares with it's Unix services subsystem, and Leopard is unix based, so shouldn't have a problem either (I'd like to be able to do on my laptop what I do on my desktop). Is there something else I should be looking at?

My network is via an Airport Extreme N.

Bonus Question: I'm sharing a printer connected to my Vista box, and I've allowed guest access. Whenever my girlfriend tries to print from her MacBook, she gets a dialogue that asks whether she wants to connect as a guest or a named account; selecting guest works fine. Can we get rid of the dialogue and make it connect as a guest without asking?

Bonus Bonus question: Anyone using PHP have an IDE they're more satisfied with than Eclipse, that includes SVN integration?

Thanks in advance.

How safe is P2P?

The Ardship of Cambry — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:04:28 -0800

How worried should I be about the recent rash of stories in the mainstream media about P2P software being used to commit identity theft? For instance, this article about medical data being found on P2P clients like Gnutella. Or this one about a family's financial data making its way onto LimeWire.
I have no experience with these particular clients, but I have used Grokster and Morpheus back in the day. Is it really possible for someone else to download your files if you haven't taken a positive action to indicate that you want to make specific files available? Is this just a case of people who are even less l33t than yours truly not understanding how P2P software works and/or having lousy security on their computers? Or is this just another case of the MSM trying to mess with my head?

A question about corporate file sharing.

grumblebee — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:19:14 -0800

My friend runs a small company that is growing. They're starting to run into file-sharing problems (versioning, archiving, etc.). Laboring under the bizarre belief that I know something about this stuff, my friend has asked for my help. The company used to be two guys in Europe. Now it's about fifteen people in several countries (and continents), all collaborating. When it was just the two guys, it was easy for them to share files. Now it's getting complicated. They need a file and discover it's only on one guy's hard drive. and that guy is asleep (time-zone issues). Or there are several versions of a file floating around, and no one is sure which one is the most recent one.

I know about (and have used) svn and git, but I'm curious if there are any books or websites that go into details about this sort of collaboration and list good tools and techniques.

Note: this is a design shop, so many of the files are binary (Flash and PSD). This makes the svn thing a little tricky if there are conflicts. Or does it?

In any case, I'd like a resource or resources that gives suggestions for archiving (they have an svn, but it's getting huge), file sharing, naming conventions, etc.

They are mostly mac-based, but they have a few PCs on their network.

Sharing network drives through a firewall

SteveInMaine — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 08:12:12 -0800

How can I securely share files on a Windows server behind a firewall with remote users ? We have a Sonicwall firewall box with VPN, and while this works okay for remote desktop, it's really slow for file sharing. I'm currently looking into Hamachi or sftp and welcome opinions on these solutions, but am open to other ideas that are secure and relatively easy to set up and administer. Practically all of the remote users are on Windows XP machines, though there might be a stray Vista or Apple user that needs access.

Easiest way to set up a 'fake' torrent tracker?

JMB1138 — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:38:06 -0800

I need to create a website for a fake invite-only torrent community to feature in a short movie centering around said community. What's the easiest way to set up a customizable tracker? It's important to note that there will be no actual torrents shared, this is just for the purposes of the movie. I just need the colors and graphics to be customizable so it looks pretty on screen, and so I can 'update' it with fake accounts posting fake torrents as needed for the story. I already have a domain and a webhost with MySQL access. Do I need to go through all the trouble of setting up a real tracker script? Or you think I can just get away with a customizable BBS system?

Any thoughts appreciated!

Help my mac and pc files get along!

katyjack — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:04:53 -0800

mac files show up on pc but can't use - won't show up at all on mac. What to do? So, yesterday I gave a pc formatted thumb drive to a client and he copied a bunch of files from his mac for me to use. Got home - opened up my drive, saw them all, no problem. But then when I came time to use them - problem. The files have all kinds of names that look like they're some of index - not photoshop files like I should have.

Again, I think - np. I'll take my drive down to my neighbor's mac and open them up from there. Except I CAN'T SEE THE FILES AT ALL ON THE MAC!!!! All my pc files are all there - pretty as a picture - but the mac files are nowhere to be seen and I don't know how to view hidden files or anything like that on a mac.

So can anyone offer any advice? I have access to a mac and a pc, but they are not networked together.

Private file sharing over LAN

daksya — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 03:14:54 -0800

Computer 1 (XP SP2) and Computer 2 (XP) are connected to a router. I want to transfer and manipulate files from one on the other. I don't want to use File and Print Sharing. Any solutions? Ideally, I'd like to

queue files for download or upload,
be able to pause & resume,
password protect,
rename, move, delete files on the other (don't need remote desktop app, but if it does the trick, fine)
know if files are being transferred or manipulated on my current station

Now, I've tried a few private P2P apps, like Gigatribe and Remobo but they all seem to operate across the public Internet. I want this app installed just on these 2 computers.

Thanks.

How many hard drives does it take, before WinXP can see them?

jadepearl — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:42:29 -0800

External hard showing "weird". Better known as, sharing an external/portable hard drive between osx and winxp. I have tried out no less than 3 of these Lacie external hard drives.

They are formatted FAT32 and register perfect on my macs at home. However on 2 WinXP machines they register as a regular drive, are listed as "full" and nothing can be loaded or read from them. This all started because they initially could not be found on the winxp though device manager "saw" them just fine and disk managment found it "healthy". I got it enabled and allocated a drive. Now it does not show in disk management. This is what I have done so far:

1) Reformatted one on a mac for pc -- still not "mounted" though seen by device manager. Forced allocation using disk management. Unable to format on the PC to NTFS after it mounted. Unable to read or write because "full" or not recognized;

2) Plugged in a "virgin" FAT32 drive after forced allocation and it can be seen but now only registering as a drive with no further info and again, "full" cannot read nor write nor found by disk management;

3) MacDrive 7 unable to find or read the drives initially until I forced allocation and again, no read nor write nor formatting. App keeps asking where the mac drive is;

WinXP service pack 2 on my machine; hard drives connected via USB 2.0; Novell Zenworks and network drives are a part of my environment.

The drives are new and Lacie is generally a reputable firm. FAT32 should be able to be read by a WinXP machine. This is a consistent problem after trying 3 drives. Any advice would be nice.

How can I resume file sharing wirelessly between a Mac and a PC after the Mac has returned from sleep mode?

newfers — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:07:54 -0800

Can anyone help me figure out how to resume file sharing capabilities between my MacBook Pro and my Windows Vista PC after my 'Book has been in Sleep mode? I routinely copy media files from my Vista PC to my MacBook Pro over my wireless connection. The folders I've shared remain on my Mac desktop at all times, allowing me to open them, grab files, and copy them directly to my Mac.

However, if I close the lid on my 'Book and put it to sleep, I am unable to copy any files when I have resumed work on my 'Book. Basically, as I try to drag files to the desktop, I get the little "can't do that" symbol instead of the little green arrow.

If I do a complete reboot, everything works fine, but obviously that is not optimal. The funny thing to me is that the shared folders remain listed on my 'Book's desktop... if they disappeared, I could understand that the connection has been lost between both systems, but the only thing that changes is that I can see the files but am unable to copy them.

Help!!

BTW, I have Network Magic installed on both my Mac and my PC. I am not directly using it to transfer the files however, I am using the Mac Network application to keep the folders shared.

Thanks in advance from the wise computer people here at AskMefi!

David in Athens,Ohio

Sambafilter

ijoyner — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:16:17 -0800

Issue with Samba (on Ubuntu) file sharing and ownership of files. How do I set it so the ordinary user will not take ownership when saving over a file? (more details inside) Environment: about 20 windows client computers connecting to an Ubuntu Samba server. The Ubuntu box is mainly administered through Webmin and users are added with the “users and groups” module in webmin and when users are created in there, they are also created in the Samba users module.

Backups are made on one of the workstations with Acronis True Image Workstation to an external hard drive.

Problem: As users open files and save them, they take ownership of them, thus locking out other users from changing and saving the documents because they do not own them.

Where do I set security up to avoid this from happening? Is the file security stored on the individual files (thus having to run chmod or chown) or in Samba?
I guess I need to create groups and give the group ownership of the files so that everyone in the group (practically all clients) can access/change/delete files at will. There will also be 1 or 2 superusers running backups or doing administration activities. How do I give them access without allowing them to take ownership of the files and lock everyone else out?

File sharing really to blame for record industry decline?

nanojath — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:12:46 -0800

Looking for data on alternative causes for the mainstream music industry's declining fortunes. This post got me thinking about how music industry representatives pretty much take it as gospel that all their financial woes are caused by file sharing.

Over the past decade I've seen a lot of arguments made about other issues - fewer releases, greater competition for the entertainment dollar, arguments that the declines in sales are exaggerated, arguments that file sharing actually increases sales.

I'm looking for help putting together a comprehensive list of these arguments. Citations and especially any research with numbers (i.e. I vaguely remember an article where a study was done that argued increased record sales when file sharing was up but can't remember another thing about it) and advice on general places to look for more data and articles about this topic are appreciated.

How to give others access to a folder on my computer?

spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:47:52 -0800

What's the easiest way for me to host files for friends to download directly off my computer? I'm running Ubuntu 7.10. The goal: a friend can type in a URL (maybe I'll register with DynDNS since I'm using DSL, and my IP address changes periodically), see a list of folders/files, and download what they want.

Right now we're accomplishing this by me using Gmail to e-mail the file to them. What I'd rather do is have them be able to peruse the contents of a folder, as I'm constantly adding files to the folder(s). Rather than e-mail them all the time, they can log on, see what's there, and download it. They need to be able to do this through a browser, not an FTP client.

I'm not sure what I should even be looking for here. Searches like "file sharing" and "file hosting" aren't getting me anywhere, so I'm turning to the Green.

Remember, I'm running Ubuntu, so unfortunately something like HFS isn't going to work for me, but that looks like what I want to do.

A GUI with simple drag/drop would be perfect.

Ghost bit-torrent tracker

daksya — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 07:50:39 -0800

How do torrents work? I thought I knew. Something like this, basically:

Person A wants to share files. She creates a .torrent which contains
file-list +
pieces & their checksums +
tracker address +
maybe some other stuff

She uploads it to tracker, which loads the torrent, and if there's an associated directory, also gets it indexed.

Persons B, C, D come across the listing in the index and open the .torrent in their client. Client contacts tracker which, in short, returns list of seeds & peers. Client contacts seeds & peers and individually tries to hook up all connections it can. Enter DHT, which means, I think, is that you get peer lists from peers you already are in touch with.

***

Now it turns out that a pretty famous public tracker went down a couple of months ago, but with some lingering hope of its resurrection still present. I found a torrent on one of the *novas, with the only tracker listed being that of downed-site. On a whim, I open it in utorrent, and although tracker status is "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.", I get some seeds and the torrent is "working".

My question: where did it get the list of seeds from?

If it's from the downed-site, is the moral that it's "down" but not really?

Has anyone ever been sued for downloading music?

squarehead — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 07:57:31 -0800

Has anyone ever been sued for downloading music? It seems to me that I keep hearing about people being sued for illegally downloading music, but it seems like it always turns out that they are actually being sued for making music files available for others to download because they are sharing them on a P2P network. Is it just that people are either sloppy with language or don't understand the difference between downloading and sharing, or has someone actually been gone after for downloading?

Filesharing between two computers

bsexton — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:17:00 -0800

Syncing music between two computers help! Here's the setup... 1 work computer (laptop) running Win XP Home
1 home computer running XP Pro

I want to sync the two music libraries so both have the same files.

Ideally I would like some in between service where I can log into and upload the files. Something like the way mp3tunes.com works, but actually be able to download the file. As far as I have seen all you can do is stream the music.

It's not a huge library but it is around 15 gigs.

I have tried Xdrive but it seems to be unbelievably slow.

Thanks!

Windows network permission issues (access denied)

ijoyner — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 10:39:58 -0800

Serverfilter: My office is in the process of migrating to Windows Server 2003 for Fileserving. We constantly have issues with newly created files. Whenever they are placed on the server by a user, the immediately lose rights to do anything with the file. All other users attempting to access the files are also denied. This is just beyond frustrating. Any ideas what is happening and how to fix it? We already have the domain set up with all the users on it as well as the fileserver added to the domain. We added the domain users with share level and file level access. They are able to access files we placed on there that were restored from backup from the old server. When people create a file or save a file to the server, then close it and attempt to open it again, Windows doesn't know who the owner of the file is, and thus disables access for everyone. We have to go onto the local drive of the server just to get the permissions back to where it knows who the owner is.

We think it may have something to do with the inheritance of permissions across shares. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

DAM the torpedo.pdfs!

Salmonberry — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:28:20 -0800

Digital Asset Management. I'm looking for a web based solution that archives and stores files, but I don't need full on project management. I've looked around and it seems like most options go to project management. I'm not opposed to using one of those systems, just might be overkill. I like the way Basecamp looks, but I need a system with different levels of access. For example, if I put up a file for a printer, I don't want clients to go get it. I don't want my clients to be able to talk to my printers.

Basically this is for marketing, people in different physical office locations, no shared intranet as some are at different companies.

I'd like to be able to upload files and give my clients, creative teams and suppliers different access levels.

I'd like my clients to be able to access and download, via the web, completed artwork and look at archived artwork for up to roughly 6 months.

I'd like to be able to have the creative teams and printers, suppliers, etc, work with files via the web interface, rather than through a combination of ftp and email.

Needs to be mac and pc friendly. No software can be downloaded, as many clients have IT administrators that are naturally edgy about having to load software onto their networks. And cheap - think Basecamp pricing.

Thanks for any suggestions. If you're on Basecamp, would it be a solution? I like the interface and I think the clients would find it easy to work with.

Network reachable, but (Suddenly) file sharing stops working. Any thoughts?

TrueVox — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:16:26 -0800

My home network isn't cooperating. It worked fine for months, and then, unexpectedly (after a day of bad electricity (I hate my power company)), it isn't. See, if I couldn't connect to the internet (wired or wireless, no less!), I'd assume that my router was simply fried. But no, I can get to teh interwebs. Thankfully, even to the far reaches of Ask Mefi :). However, my file sharing (and printers too!) isn't functional. It's SMB file sharing (though I'm running a couple of Linux machines on the network too with SaMBa). I can ping the rest of the network, there's just something STUPID that I'm missing (I assume). Or can a power surge/failure fry JUST THAT PART of the router (I find that hard to believe, it's all just TCP or UDP, right?).

Anyway, thanks in advance!

Bahhhh! Short timeline & file sharing

snsranch — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 19:39:23 -0800

Can I transfer a quicktime vid from an iBook to my windoze machine using USB? (Her iBook is very old but does have connectivity to USB.) My wife just spent 3 hours editing a quicktime vid on her loaner iBook only to find out that it can't burn CDs. So...I would like to transfer the file to this WinXP machine so that I can burn multiple copies.

I'm asking before trying because I don't want to lose or eff up her work. I'm asking HERE because we have a serious dead line.

Thanks in advance. Also, we know very little about iBook, os x or Macs/Apple in general. She usually only uses it to record grades for school.

simple explanation of peer to peer filesharing

CrazyLemonade — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:01:26 -0800

Can you explain peer-to-peer filesharing to me in really simple terms? Particularly, I want to know about the similarities and differences between two programs. I have a basic understanding of how peer-to-peer filesharing works, but I'd like to be able to distinguish between what I use (Azureus) and what my boyfriend uses (eMule).

Please help me by explaining with not-so-technical terms. Pretend it's your grandma asking.