netgiv

netgiv

What is this?

netgiv is a single binary client and server to facilitate sending files across your local network quickly and easily.

It uses a familiar unix pipeline paradigm, so files can be moved between machines as part of a pipeline, obviating the need for dealing with temporary files.

netgiv automatically detects "copy" (stdin is a pipe) or "paste" (stdout is a pipe) modes, allowing intuitive use like:

hostA$ pg_dumpall | netgiv

hostB$ netgiv | psql restoredb

Note that since netgiv uses a persistent server, there is no need to setup both ends of the pipeline in advance (compared to netcat or similar tools).

All data is encrypted in flight (though not in the temporary files on the server) Access to the server is granted by an authentication token (preshared key) of your choice.

Install

Binary release

Grab the appropriate version from https://github.com/tardisx/netgiv/releases, unzip and place the binary somewhere on your $PATH.

Copy and paste for the trusting & lazy:

curl -L https://github.com/tardisx/netgiv/releases/download/v0.0.3/netgiv-linux-v0.0.3.zip | funzip > netgiv && chmod a+x netgiv

Compiling from source

go install github.com/tardisx/netgiv@latest

netgiv should end up on your go binary path.

Compiling from source

Clone this repository, run go build.

Configuration

Configuration of netgiv is via a YAML configuration file in $HOME/.netgiv/config.yaml.

Run netgiv --help-config to see a sample config file.

The server requires the 'authtoken' and 'port' configuration keys to be set.

The client requires the 'authtoken', 'port' and 'address' configuration keys to be set.

• authtoken - this is any arbitrary string, you should choose something not easy to guess
• port - this is the TCP port the server will listen on (and that the client will connect to)
• address - the IP address or hostname of the netgiv server

Running

To run a server, just run:

netgiv --server

netgiv will run in the foreground and log accesses to it.

On any client, run:

$ echo "Hello" | netgiv

To check for success, try:

$ netgiv | cat

You should see "hello" echoed on your terminal.

To check the list of files on the server:

$ netgiv -l
1: UTF-8 text (6 B)
2: application/x-mach-binary (6.5 MB)
3: video/quicktime (14 MB)
4: image/png (1.5 MB)

Note that netgiv tries to identify each file based on file magic heuristics.

If you would like to fetch (paste) a particular file:

netgiv -p 3 > file.mov

Where '3' comes from the information provided in the -l output.

Note that providing no -p option is the same as -p X where X is the highest numbered upload (most recent).

Notes on output

Since netgiv is designed to be used in a pipeline, it does not provide any output on successful execution (apart from your actual data on stdout of course!)

If you'd like to see debugging information, use the --debug flag.

Note that netgiv will send error logs to stderr in cases of problems.

Alternative ways of providing the authtoken

It's possible that you do not trust the hosts you are running the netgiv client on, or otherwise not want to store your authtoken in a file on there. If that is the case there are a couple of alternate options:

ENV var

The environment variable NETGIV_AUTHTOKEN can be used to provide the authtoken. A common way to leverage this is to send it when you ssh to a remote host via the SendEnv option (see your ssh_config man page).

Interactive

If the authtoken has not been set by any of the above methods, it will be prompted for interactively (it will not be echoed to the screen). Note that this only applies to the client - the server must have a config file with an authtoken specified.

Other notes

Temporary file storage

The netgiv server will store files in your normal system temporary dir. They will be deleted when the server shuts down (SIGTERM). These files are not encrypted.

Window support

Windows support is marginal, at best, mostly because of the lack of POSIX style pipes. Bug reports and suggestions for workarounds are welcome.

Acknowledgements

• thanks to tengig for the name