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#1 Yesterday 21:05:48
[HowTo] Hassle-free LAN file transfer with a Windows machine
Okay, so here's the story. Recently I got myself an Ethernet adapter for my newer laptop that runs Devuan Excalibur, since it lacks the appropriate (essential!) port being the victim of certain ... sickly modern trends. Now, since I also have an older machine running Windows 7 and a spare Ethernet cable, I decided to try and connect the two for the purpose of fast and easy file transfers. Creating a connection was the easy part, but what about actual sharing?
From the get-go, I was looking for a straightforward way to transfer files, preferably not involving Samba shares or complex server-client setups with encryption, compression etc. I researched several solutions, some of them seemed more feasible than others. To my surprise, finding a program capable of doing simple LAN transfers between different systems was not an easy task. Some of them could not be used because they were no longer supported on Windows 7 side, some worked but only one way (Win7 > Linux) because they detected wrong IP address due to a bug and had no manual way of setting up things. Some even required Internet access because they used a relay that could not be disabled!
Oh well. With patience and some trial and error, I eventually found a program called LanXchange, which works beautifully. It's not the prettiest or most featureful thing in existence, but it does its job very well.
To use it, you need to install Java Runtime Environment (JRE). You can get it via default-jre package in Excalibur repos, or from Eclipse Adoptium using this guide. I just got the repo version, while on Win7 I'm using the latter.
Unpack and launch LanXchange on both machines. On Windows, lxc.exe complained that I do not have Java installed, but the .jar file worked - so if you get the same error, just try that. On Linux side, use the provided lxc script. You can also run the .jar directly like this:
$ java -jar lanxchange.jarbut I noticed that it sometimes causes issues with incoming transfers not appearing until you unshare your previous files. Not a big problem, but I still recommend using the script.
Next, if you use a firewall like gufw, you will need to allow the following incoming ports: 27716, 27717, 27719. Create two separate 'Simple' rules both for TCP and UDP. On Windows, you probably don't need to do anything other than click 'Allow access' once.
So that's it! Now it should work - nothing beats sending files via a nice fat cable just like in the old days. Enjoy the speed and simplicity (and less wear for your USB Flash devices). Thanks to this wonderful program, I was able to forgo Samba entirely. I did not look into other solutions such as NFS, SFTP or a Python server - they do seem interesting though, so might experiment with them later as well.
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