On occasion I find myself needing to send a file at least a few gigabytes in size to a friend across our slow ISPs but haven’t found a satisfying solution. I usually end up creating a private torrent with the announce address of my own IP. Even though it’s slow - it basically never reaches my max upload speed for some reason, it is at least resilient if there are ever any network glitches.
Does anyone else face this same challenge?
EDIT: Thank you for the awesome suggestions! I have some homework to do on these
Syncthing
You can use syncthing to transfer files across the internet? How? I thought it was only for local networks
By default out of the box it will transfer over the internet if it needs to.
It just works, there’s no “how”. Take one of the devices outside, connect to the internet, done.
Er, wait, are you using Syncthing for its intended purpose of syncing files across devices on your local network? And then exposing that infrastructure to the internet? Or are you isolating Syncthing instances?
The user can choose. Please note you first much accept another client by its fingerprint.
It’s very much a WAN solution too. I use it to push my files to a Pi Zero W that’s 200 miles from my house. I use it as an off site store of my files. The Pi is connected as an untrusted device in Syncthing so that all files sit encrypted at rest.
You’re probably thinking of PairDrop (which also allows extranet).
Syncthing is not limited to local network. It’s hole punching is one of the major features
The fact that Syncthing seems to solve CGNAT on its own has me wondering why there are not more solutions for the server/home side.
Why does Wireguard or any other VPN not work like Tailscale or Zerotier?
Why don’t torrent clients can’t work with IPv6 to seed more?
Why doesn’t Plex adopt a similar mechanic like Syncthing to expose the media over the Internet instead of being a prisoner of CGNAT?
I know I am just throwing different options with my personal frustrations lol, but I hope you get what I am trying to mean, Plex, torrent and home VPN users shouldn’t become masters at networking, especially when the documentation for the tools IS NOT ENOUGH.
Why does Wireguard or any other VPN not work like Tailscale or Zerotier?
tailscale and zerotier are wireguard, but with a public server that helps with NAT. Syncthing uses a public server for that too.
wireguard was specifically made to be as simple and minimalistic as possible.
Why don’t torrent clients can’t work with IPv6 to seed more?
is there such a problem? honest question. But I think that might be a different issue
Why doesn’t Plex adopt a similar mechanic like Syncthing to expose the media over the Internet instead of being a prisoner of CGNAT?
maybe they just don’t see working on it profitable enough
tailscale and zerotier are wireguard, but with a public server that helps with NAT. Syncthing uses a public server for that too.
wireguard was specifically made to be as simple and minimalistic as possible.
Zerotier wasn’t always Tailscale was it?
is there such a problem? honest question. But I think that might be a different issue
You need to be connectable to download from all the peers, likewise non connectable users can’t download from you, and how do you become connectable? By opening your ports, something that might seem archaic from somebody who has totally embraced IPv6.
maybe they just don’t see working on it profitable enough
Yeah maybe.
Just to clarify, I have several workarounds for the 3 issues that have involved spending more money or not to get rid of CGNAT.
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For the 1st one… Well I already mentioned it, I am a ZT and Tailscale user, I did try Wireguard from a VPS once though, but I didn’t like that I was entirely dependant of my upload speed, maybe I had my Iptables wrongly configured but I usually got faster speeds just using ZT or Tailscale (I didn’t need to relay in the US VPS server).
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For Torrenting… I actually haven’t found a solution to use IPv6… I did use a container client to use my VPS at that time though, it being Digital Ocean and thus getting a DMCA letter for downloading TWD me being a LATAM user was… A kinda funny experience, with that said I stopped that project immediately, it was fun to give back to the community with my 24/7 NAS always seeding though.
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For the last point… Well, I do use ZT and Tailscale to access the server myself, but when I want to expose it, I usually do it with a reverse proxy pointing out to my IPv6 address, and more recently using a Tailscale funnel, I haven’t tried it thoroughly, but at least it seems to connect without using Plex’s relays.
As you can see, one needs to be well prepared with workarounds to deal with CGNAT.
Zerotier wasn’t always Tailscale was it?
it is not tailscale. but also it seems I was wrong and its not wireguard either
You need to be connectable to download from all the peers, likewise non connectable users can’t download from you, and how do you become connectable? By opening your ports, something that might seem archaic from somebody who has totally embraced IPv6.
I know what opening ports is, I only have v4. But I thought you have difficulties with bittorrent over v6. or is it that you still need to open ports for v6, in the firewall or something?
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> is there such a problem? honest question. But I think that might be a different issue
Yes, that is a problem. We’re still in a world where you need to manually enable port forwarding in order to get better seeding for bittorrent clients, and if you have CGNAT you’re SOL (short of using a VPN or something to bounce through an external host).
It’s likely because torrent software is older (& in crappier languages), and came about before CGNAT was a thing.
Yep, I’ve got a buddy in another country that I needed to share a group of files with, it was several gigs and we were both editing things.
We setup a syncthing connection and once we were synced it just worked. I also use it on my LAN to sync personal files, but to share with him we both just set up a folder and I just shared that one folder with him while the rest of my shares stayed private on the LAN.
Syncthing is amazing.
Syncthing has public releays enabling it to work (dunno if one or none need to be public) without both parties being exposed.
I mean… exposed to each other, sure, but they’re all exposed to Syncthing and the public relays.
Syncthing is designed to be used over the internet, it’s why it supports NAT hole punching, relay servers, and discovery servers.
Syncthing is not just for LAN use. Even their homepage mentions transmitting data over the internet
I’ve been using it to sync devices over the internet for years. It’s also how people use it to sync from say their desktop to their phones, remote server, etc.
If you watch your network firewall Syncthing does reach out to servers on the internet to help it find other devices so e.g. if you enter the other device’s ID (example ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG) it can reach out over the internet to find that specific ID to pair with. I think Syncthing uses a sort of DHT resolver to find other devices, I know on my firewall I had to whitelist Syncthing’s servers to make it work.
I was going to try to link you some references but their forums seem to have connection issues at the moment, you may want to search around later if you’re interested how Syncthing works over the internet.
Me and my friend used netcat to transfer 30 GB of files put into a zip. Very fun, would not recommend
Wormhole.app, can’t recall if they have a limit atm
I use wormhole, but when I’ve wanted to use that website for receiving, I can never tell how to do it.
Can you actually use that site to receive files?
Whoever uploaded them has to send you a link to them. It does have a limit of 10gb, but its pretty reliable I’m my experience.
Ahh, I see. I’ve got a wormhole app on my phone which I was trying to use to send from. I guess it just can’t work with that website. Thanks
So just like when you send a file you fwd a link, someone tfering files to you must provide the link. They expire in a maximum of 24 hours though so do be aware of that.
Not sure if this works for you but I didnt see it mentioned. I use plex for my media server, so I would just put whatever it is on there and then someone else can log in remotely and download it through the app on their mobile, and I think also via the website too.
I know this works if the person is downloading from android but haven’t tested otherwise.
That should work for media files at least, but I believe they’ll also need Plex pass to be able to download anything.
Should be able to do that with Jellyfin, no Plex/Plex Pass needed (if you really want to use media software for this).
That said I suspect your current method with creating a torrent to share is much more resilient when dealing with choppy internet connections. With Jellyfin/Plex it’s more of a direct download situation, not sure if either can resume broken downloads.
wormholeis good; also its CLI.Wormhole or croc
Friends I know IRL: Thumbdrives.
Friends I only know via the Internet: Torrents or IRC filesharing.
Though knowing that a homing pigeon with a thumb drive is actually faster than the fastest Internet network on the planet, maybe I should simply invest in a coop and some pigeons. 🤔
Though knowing that a homing pigeon with a thumb drive is actually faster than the fastest Internet network on the planet
Depends on how big the flash drive is, I suppose. Need to send a 1GB file? Just make a torrent. Need to send 40TB? Yeah, that hard drive is getting driven across town.
Perhaps two pigeons could carry the hard drive on a string. I’ve heard tell of swallows that have done this with coconuts.
Exactly what kind of pigeons are we talking about here? Or would you recommend switching to an avian variant of the migratory type?
I’d recommend either an african or european swallow.
Create share links allowing anyone with the link (+ optional password) to browse and download individual files, or whole folder contents.
If someone needs to send me a file, I can create a user for them in a few seconds; so they can upload to that as well.
I used vaultwarden just the other day for this purpose. I mean, I use vaultwarden daily as a password manager, but it also has secure file transfer.
Nextcloud is great for this
You could try wormhole. It makes a direct connection.
Or croc which is very similar. I think it also allows to resume file transfers.
I’d go for syncthing over nextcloud for your specific usecase. Nextcloud isn’t good for unreliable connections and they’re sticking with the annoying decision of not supporting server to server synchronization.
I use an ancient HTTP File Server program called HFS from Rejetto. Very light weight. Supports making user accounts and whatnot if you want.
I usually just turn it on for a transfer and don’t leave it up these days, but still comes in handy on occasion.
HFSv2 (the windows exe) has publically known unfixed vulnerabilities! Please upgrade to HFSv3 (nodejs, crossplatform). I’m also maintaining a list of other alternatives; https://github.com/9001/copyparty/blob/hovudstraum/docs/versus.md
I’ve used:
But for slower connections bittorrent is the best option by far because it doesn’t care about interruptions, and verifies the data as it goes. Just gotta make sure you’re port forwarding the client.
