
F*EX – Frams' Fast File EXchange - Tomte
http://fex.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/
======
emptybits
Classic and relevant quote from 1985-ish: "Never underestimate the bandwidth
of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Today, the equivalent may be an autopilot Tesla Model X full of microSD cards.
Terabyte-per-second calculations left as an exercise to the reader.

~~~
mhh__
Assuming the internal storage volume of the Tesla (which I assume is actually
the boots/trunks of the car) is 88.1 cubic feet
[[https://www.tesla.com/support/model-x-
specifications](https://www.tesla.com/support/model-x-specifications)] or
_2.49 m^3_.

A microSD card is _165 mm^3 = 1.65e-7 m^3_.

Dividing one by the other: 15090909 microSD cards could be put in the car
[This is simultaneously probably unrealistically high due to the assumed ideal
packing and also low due to the large amount of space left in the car].

256GB is the largest microSD card I can actually buy: This is gives us 3.8
exabytes of data hurtling down the highway.

How to efficiently load/unload this data is beyond me. (Short of magic
wireless microSD).

V unira'g purpxrq nal bs guvf, V'z n ovg qehax.

~~~
jl6
A similar calc with LTO-8 tapes comes out at 126PB per Model X. Not as dense,
but the advantage is that tape robots and tape libraries go a little way
towards automating the load/unload.

------
cmurf
Less than 1GB, encrypted, 24 hour expiration or one time use URL then it
denies the URL exists or existed, and deletes the file.
[https://send.firefox.com/](https://send.firefox.com/)

~~~
nneonneo
Shameless plug: I wrote a CLI interface for it:
[https://github.com/nneonneo/ffsend](https://github.com/nneonneo/ffsend)

------
peterbmarks
magic-wormhole is a pretty neat solution and lets you transfer where both ends
are behind NAT. [https://github.com/warner/magic-
wormhole](https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole)

------
bo1024
Interesting. My questions (1) what is the timestamp of this page (created or
last modified)? (2) Could you use a torrent client to solve this problem?

~~~
derefr
1\. From [http://fex.belwue.de/fex.html](http://fex.belwue.de/fex.html), it
looks like the software can't be any older than 2006. Looking at the source,
it uses things like rel="prefetch". The style is just an explicit aesthetic,
then, like that of Craigslist.

2\. Some of it could, yeah. Torrents make it easy to share files _directly_
from your computer to a peer's. FEX solves a slightly different problem,
though—the asynchronous "put the file somewhere, then let the peer get it
while your computer is offline" use-case. It's somewhat cumbersome to use
torrents for this (though possible: you and the server join the swarm, the
server leeches from you, you leave the swarm, the peer joins the swarm, they
leech from the server.) But, if you do use torrents that way, you won't [by
default] get the "auto-deletion of the server's copy" property that FEX has.

(You could probably match 99% of FEX's functionality with a torrent client
running on a server + a daemon running alongside it that can control the
torrent client through RPC; but I don't know of any attempt to build such a
thing.)

------
CyberShadow
A more modern approach is to stream the file from the sender's web browser
directly to the recipient's web browser, using WebRTC and related web APIs.

An example implementation, on top of WebTorrent:
[https://instant.io/](https://instant.io/)

------
mehrdadn
Does it encrypt? Is there any privacy? They complain about the lack of privacy
for other services so I assume they're doing better somehow?

~~~
blfr
You run it on your own server so it offers as much privacy as you can provide.

------
blfr
Can you put it behind nginx or does it only work as a stand alone service?

EDIT: probably, [https://fex.rus.uni-
stuttgart.de/usecases/reverseproxy.html](https://fex.rus.uni-
stuttgart.de/usecases/reverseproxy.html)

------
microcolonel
A time before Syncthing, dark indeed.

------
himom
Not going to reliably without a resumable upload/download manager with
fallback to traditional means. Murphy’s Law insists a transfer will get to
99.753% of a 3.5 PiB data set and time-out.

AWS Snowmobile/Edge, Snowball and Import/Export; SneakerNet™ and PostalNet™
for other needs.

~~~
iforgotpassword
"Main features of F*EX

...

RESEND and REGET for resuming after link failures at last sent byte"

