Sneakernet Puns

A bit of a weird question and I'm not sure if there's a better sub to ask this. I have incredibly slow internet in my area and there's not really anywhere to go locally for anything faster. Is there a way I could have someone to ship me USB sticks/hard drives containing Steam games? Not looking to pirate anything, just that it'd take far longer (months) to download a few games compared to shipping physical media lol

https://i.imgur.com/nSXMmJe.png

Apparently the SneakerNet is getting noticed and only the second drive has arrived so far so I thought I'd go with an update.

Firstly, I've formatted all the drives as ExFAT but with the OTG cable her tablet reports the drives need to be formatted This is confusing cause the 512GB MicroSD card inside is also ExFAT. Android supports ExFAT so WTF? I guess it's FAT32 from now on, since I shrink all the files they're under 4GB anyway.

Secondly, while I'm sure people would love to suggest smaller or cheaper media like MicroSD cards, this is supposed to be a plug and play solution. I'm going with Kingston SE9's because they are all metal, durable, and will fit into any USB slot without obstructing others. There are 'faster' and 'smarter options' but 'durable and causes as few problems as possible' is far more important here.

Thirdly, I'm adapting lanyard name tags to label the drives. I just remove the lanyard and attach it to the USb drive instead. The goal is to never have someone go 'WTF is even on this drive???'. You can look at a drive's tag and instantly know it's number, date and contents. Again, this is about being as user friendly and complication free as possible.

Fourthly, turns out the ship does have internet. Canadian frigates have long had satellite internet for military communications that would open up to the crew for personal use when docked for some time. In the last part of 2020 they started running it all the time. (It of course will not ALWAYS be on for security reasons, but usually) This does not negate the SneakerNet, suffice it to say a sat internet connection, in the middle of the ocean, with priority for military communications, shared between 260 people is not something you can watch YouTube on. However VOIP calling is mostly working. Another Canadian ship did a 'Lockdown Deployment' in the later half of 2020 and it got so bad that they had to deploy a social worker to the ship 3 months in and eventually bring it home early. I think enabling the internet full time is about trying to reduce the isolation as no one is allowed off the ship ever while this pandemic rages on.

Fifthly, this boat is FULL of Android boxes. Basically every TV in every mess and lounge has an Android box on it, so this is perfect for that. None of these have internet but they are normally plugged into external HDDs and playing something.

Sixthly, yeah, word is getting out that somebody's GF is mailing NHL

I have been considering a really dark network, one where data is passed as files via ad-hoc, intermittent and very high latency connectivity.

Data could be transmitted in a stream (like othernet), opportunistically synced (using syncthing), passed around via USB drive (sneakernet), synced between mesh nodes (avoiding the need for mesh IP), etc...

What I know so far... UUCP while really old and not well supported, can do email and Usenet, so you have a human networking component. WARC files can capture websites. Beyond that you can save downloaded files.

And is there a good presentation layer? Othernet is a good example of a user friendly presentation layer, UUCP not so much.

In Australia, and looking for a service that would pull data down from cloud hosted storage (AWS) onto a hard drive and post it to clients. And vice versa for loading. Data sizes are large but not large enough for Snowball, and the need is frequent. Internet speeds are frequently crap for clients outside of major cities...also crap inside of major cities.

Google offering me no help but I can't be the only one with this need. Any suggestions?

Thank you!

I know commercially available drones can't handle real long distance flight, but I'm sure the government could create a viable drone that could travel hundreds of miles. The drones could tap into the power infrastructure that already exists if we designed them properly. Clearly you couldn't do online gaming, but I think this could help protect us in this cyberwar. It would also be handy in terms of elections, and organized labor to have alternative means of communications. It could be something as simple as dropping off secured USB sticks, or as sophisticated as using data diamond drives to store data long term for archrival purposes. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-use-diamonds-store-data-180960932/

Could we establish our own private DroneNets?

We can all do lots of fast data things in the cloud but my piddly home network cannot download large files easily. I like cloud data but I also like some local data. Are there any services you guys use for handling mass data in the cloud and then getting the physical media shipped to you? I appreciate this means buying a drive and the obvious discussion around encryption/security but sneakernet services have been around a long time, I just can't find any!

Dramatis Personae:

WS-IT: Me, head of and only person in the IT department.

WS-PM: Project manager.

WS-CLIENT-PM: Project manager for our client.

WS-CLIENT-IT: Our client's sysadmin.

It was a Thursday and the project had ship by COB Friday, because of course it did. WS-PM paged me.

WS-PM: Hey, WS-IT, I'm having trouble sending emails to WS-CLIENT-PM. Can you take a look at it?

WS-IT: Are you getting bounced?

WS-PM: Yeah, want me to forward you the email?

WS-IT: Sure, send it over and we'll have a look.

WS-PM forwarded me the bounce notification. The client's email server rejected his message because he had attached a zip in excess of their limits. This used to happen all the time, and is the exact reason we have a Seafile server for sending clients download/upload links. I have done my best to ensure its usage, but abuse of email attachments is a hard addiction to break. I call him back.

WS-IT: Your email was rejected because you attached a large zip file. Send them a Seafile link; do you need any help?

WS-PM: Oh, yeah. No, I remember how. I'll send it out.

WS-IT: Thanks. Let me know if it gives you any trouble.

I don't hear anything else back for the rest of the day and move on. But then Friday comes. Friday morning WS-PM walks into my office.

WS-PM: WS-CLIENT-PM said he can't open up the Seafile link and we've got to get this out today.

WS-IT: Hold on, let me check...

I swig coffee as I log in to Seafile and find the link he created. It downloads fine. I remote into a test system in one of our branch offices and try it from there. Downloads fine. I even fire up a laptop on a cell modem with no VPN and try it there. No problem.

WS-IT: Do you have WS-CLIENT-PM's phone number?

WS-PM gives it to me. I call him. He can see the Seafile site just fine, but when he clicks on the download link it just spins until it times out. Odd.

WS-IT: Do y'all have any restrictions on y'all's end with downloads?

WS-CLIENT-PM: I don't know. I can transfer you to our IT?

WS-IT: Please do.

...

WS-CLIENT-IT: So yeah, we have http downloads blocked.

WS-IT: And no email attachments.

WS-CLIENT-IT: Yeah.

WS-IT: I've still got an old FTP server - would that work?

WS-CLIENT-IT: No, we've got that blocked at the firewall.

WS-IT: Do you have any services we could upload to?

WS-CLIENT-IT: Sorry, but we can't take the risk.

WS-IT: ...

WS-CLIENT-IT: ...

WS-IT: Mail you a flash drive?

WS-CLIENT-IT: Yeah, that would work. Send it to [Client's IT

I really have two questions here: the first is does anyone know a good SSH tutorial because I seem to be in over my head far too constantly and need to read more.

The more practical question is this:

I have Machine 1 and Machine 2 with users A and B respectively. Both have SSH set up for public key authentication only. I have physical access and root access to both machines. How do I start the initial safe key exchange over the network so I can use the ssh-copy-id to add permanent access?

Right now any attempt to ssh is (rightfully) dropped because neither machine has the other's public key saved. If I "know" that the other machine I'm connecting to is safe (since we're on the same network and can in theory check fingerprints against each other, I should be able to do *something*, I just don't know how.

We have a client we are wrapping up soon and we need to do a very large data handover for (5.5TB). This sounds like a job for sneakernet, but I'm a little fuzzy on the implementation details.

We need to encrypt the drive, anyone got ideas on what filesystem/encryption scheme to use? It would need to be writable by Linux and readable by Windows or possibly Mac.

What would be a good drive to purchase for this purpose? Do we need something better than an off-the-shelf consumer external drive?

If you can get 1 petabyte on a USB stick, that means-- if you limit every content provider on that USB stick to 1GB of space-- you can fit 1 million different content providers on that USB stick. That's like providing everyone on that USB stick with free limited hosting.

That's not an entire internet but it's a hellava lot of content to go through nevertheless. It's a mini Internet. You won't go through it all in a day.

And even if you can never deliver that mini Internet over wires, if you can provide a daily updated copy at the mailbox of users, you will have a slower but functioning, grass roots, citizen's brigade, corporate and advertiser free second Internet.

And you can add USB sticks as the network grows...so two USB sticks ='s two million unique users, three USB sticks ='s three million unique users, etc...

We just need that 1 petabyte USB stick.

How would we deliver this people's Internet free?

A citizen's army of couriers who would deliver the basic copy free five days a week but could also charge recipient's for customized content and/or even six to seven day delivery/pickup.

Can you have live gaming? No. Can you have real time video or audio or text chat? No.

But you'd have something more important:

A corporate and advertiser free form of digital communication, not subject to data collection by companies who want to form a personality profile on you so they can sell you shit and sell your surfing habits to other companies that want to sell you more shit.

This is well known but I think is worth sharing.

USK@MYLAnId-ZEyXhDGGbYOa1gOtkZZrFNTXjFl1dibLj9E,Xpu27DoAKKc8b0718E-ZteFrGqCYROe7XBBJI57pB4M,AQACAAE/Shoeshop/1/

This is a plugin somebody wrote 5 years ago that allows users to send files and sites over USB drives to other Freenet nodes. This would be for content that needs to be stored and retrieved later or for data that has to travel through hostile territory to other nodes(and thus the whole network) in a stealthier way.

For example clothing that can hide USB flash drives or sd cards?

I dont know why my buddy laughed, but arent there people making money off transporting sensitive data right now...not on the Johnny level but at least providing a service of transporting it safely and dealing with whatever happens... I was wondering if the niche is still available to offer such services or pointless.

newbie, read the wiki, any apologies in advance

Question: If I want to move gigabytes of data to / from a server to different systems in my home lab, all located in the same room, should I look at gigabit ethernet link aggregation or a "super sneakernet" approach that involves writing to SSDs? Server + 2 Desktops + Laptop, mix of FreeBSD, OSX, and Windows 7 (Gaming).

Background: I'm planning two upgrades to move me past the bronze age which will both improve the speed of disk access: RAID Z1 on my FreeBSD server and Pcie / M.2 SSDs on my clients, which are an OSX laptop, a OSX / Win7 workstation, a Win7 gaming system. But there's just a single gigabit ethernet port on the server and each client, which means that moving tens of gigabytes of data back and forth, which is something I do pretty often, will be slow.

Adding more ports and aggregating them seems like a cost effective solution, although it won't work for the laptop, and I'm concerned about interoperability with the OSX / Win7 / FreeBSD systems and the gigabyte ethernet switch. The second option is to use a spare 120 gb SSD to move data, using a common file system (exFat?) and interfaces like eSata, which should at least get me SATA 2 or 3 speeds, although again the laptop tops out at USB 3.0. OTOH I have to copy the data twice (server to SSD, SSD to client) so not sure there's a real benefit. AFAIK 10Gb ethernet isn't an option, as the prices are still high and I'd have to replace the switch and buy three NICs.

I need to sync a test database (mariadb) with recent updates to the production database (mysql). I originally used mysqldump on prod to create the tables and populate the data on test. Now I need to update test with changes since I created it from the dump. I cannot sync them over the net because they are not network accessible.

So how to get a dump from mysql of just certain tables and have mariadb only insert IF the entry doesn't already exist? It may be easier to drop all of the tables and get all fresh inserts, but thought there should be a way to just update.

Edit: Ended up performing two exports (using phpmyadmin) on prod and two imports on the test DB. First INSERT IGNORE dump, then an UPDATE dump. That seemed to do the trick. Thanks for all of the suggestions.