FTP like solution - but only transfer during the night hours

October 18, 2015 1:30 PM

I'd like to take my older mac mini (10.7.5 is the max OS) and use it for some select file sharing with my family. Ideally, I'd like them to be able to see the file list from several hard drives, mark a file as something they'd like to transfer, and have it transfer only during the evening hours.

I'm looking for something with FTP like capability- transfer the files, see entire directories of information - but transfer only while both our families are asleep. I 'm looking for them to be able to browse and pick what they'd like.

I don't want to have to move files - that takes out things like bittorrent sync and dropbox.

They have a harder speed limit than I do - this way, they could indicate a bunch of photos and other media they want; and whatever was successful would show up the next day.

Has to be a mac based tool, just because that's the system that has the media attached. Would love any sort of advanced throttling/adjustments.

posted by filmgeek to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

MacOS X is really BSD Unix under the hood, so you have the option to use unix-land tools; that said, you could probably accomplish this by having them copy the files they want to a special folder ("Files for Aunt Agatha" or whatever), which then the contents of it would get transferred using rsync during a cron job that executes a script; your cron script would rsync the folder in question to their computer then delete the contents (since they were a copy created only for the purposes of doing the rsync). You can use the --bwlimit option of rsync to throttle the bandwidth if you want, but if the bottleneck is on their end it's probably unnecessary.

All this requires quite a bit of familiarity with unix-style tools, which might not be your wheelhouse, but maybe you know someone who could help you hack it together. Your requirement are quite peculiar in a way that makes me think a mac-based tool explicitly fulfilling them probably doesn't exist.
posted by axiom at 2:44 PM on October 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

So your idea is for your family to look over a few directories of files in the daytime, and they select the ones they want, and your computer then uploads it at night? What I don't get is how you want the upload to start. Would your family initiate it manually, or would they start a program of some kind and leave their computers running, waiting for your server to send the files over?

It sounds to me like you don't really have limited bandwidth, but your family does. Maybe you should just set up some kind of simple HTTP or FTP server, but also teach them how to copy the urls into a text file and have a download tool like WGET read that list at night?

Or I guess you could create a torrent file out of all the files in the volumes you want to share. In that case, teach your family how to select only the files they want from that torrent file, and make sure you create it with a small piece size (you wouldn't want them to download 400 kb photos in 4 mb blocks). On your side, set your torrent client to throttle its speed to 0 until night. Make sure you forward your ports properly. BitTorrent is overkill for this since you're the main uploader, but I can't really think of anything else I'm familiar with that has easy to use tools and upload scheduling, along with handling intermittent connections well.
posted by mccarty.tim at 2:52 PM on October 18, 2015

Scheduled bandwidth throttling might be a way to accomplish this: allow anyone to do anything they want anytime, but artificially limit transfer speeds depending on time of day? Here are a few deeply-Unixy answers from searching for “mac os x bandwidth throttling”: Throttle network bandwidth per application in Mac OS X and How can I limit bandwidth for a specific port/app in OS X 10.10 Yosemite?. You didn’t say whether you’re thinking of transfers in both directions, but OS X comes with the Apache web server which would support this directory viewing and downloading behavior.
posted by migurski at 4:19 PM on October 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I'm actually surprised a tool like this doesn't exist...

Yes, I've set up FTP servers before

> What I don't get is how you want the upload to start. Would your family initiate it manually, or would they start a program of some kind and leave their computers running, waiting for your server to send the files over?

Oh, it's 9pm? Transfer anything in the queue. It's 6am? Stop. Next day, resume where I left off.

BitTootrent is no good because the files list may grow.. (Also, I don't trust my ISP to see personal torrent files as 'safe')

The idea is freedom to view, downloads during allowed times.
posted by filmgeek at 6:57 PM on October 18, 2015

I could definitely envision something like this being done with a web interface front end (log in, view files, 'check off' the files that you'd like transferred overnight, the file listing would have some kind of icon or tag for 'already transferred, marked to be transferred, not transferred') and back end (job that runs at night, checks the status of 'to be transferred' files and attempts to transfer them in the hours allowed, updating the tag to 'already transferred' when done), but this would require a good bit of work! Sounds fun, though.
posted by destructive cactus at 11:50 AM on October 19, 2015