Drop Area file sharing

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At drop.hackersanddesigners.nl we setup a folder where to upload and share files.

Anyone can download a file by visiting the url above, but to upload and delete something, you need to have some permissions given. We are using simple ssh login access, to manage this. This means you need to have your computer public ssh-key added to the h&d server, in order to upload and delete files at drop.hackersanddesigners.nl.

Setup

For macOS / GNU-Linux

1. open your terminal
2. type cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and press enter; if things worked, the terminal printed your public key (a long string of letters and numbers)
3. depending on the result above:
   1. if the terminal printed a long string of letters and numbers, then type pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and press enter, to copy your public key in your system clipboard
   2. if the terminal said there’s no file with that name, then you need to make a new ssh key:
      • type this ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 in terminal and press enter
      • accept default location when asked from the terminal
      • lastly, type a passphrase when prompted: tip, choose a sentence and note it down somewhere safe (or keep it in your head forever)
      • after this, go back to point 3.1
4. send it to André via PM or email

For Windows

For Windows system, you can either use the terminal program PuTTY by following this guide, or if you happen to have installed Windows Subsystem for Linux (link), then you can use the same steps for GNU-Linux outlined above.

Notes

It might be that sending your existing ssh-pubkey does not work when added to the h&d server. For example you receive a Permission denied (publickey). Noob speculation: it might be that your key is too old, or there’s something wrong with the system configuration. Try to make a new key by typing ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 in the terminal, and set as location the default one. This should overwrite the existing key. If it does not work, another way would be to manually delete your old keys. Reach out to André in that case.

Testing

To make sure your key is valid, just try to ssh login to the server using the terminal by typing:

ssh drop@hackersanddesigners.nl

The terminal will ask you if you trust the server, say yes, and you should be in. If you get a pubkey access denied type of error, then please reach out to André.

Usage

To use the drop space, you can either use the terminal or a Graphical App like RsyncOSX; in both cases we are using rsync, a file synchronization program (which means an app you can use to copy some files between two folders, either within your computer or between two computers). You can use also scp, or technically any program that can connect to a server through ssh and public key verification. This means that some FTP-like program might be used as well.

Upload files

A basic command example would be

rsync -azP <path/to/file> drop@hackersanddesigners.nl:dump/.

• <path/to/file> needs to be replace with an actual path to a file in your computer, for example ~/Downloads/THE-PROBLEM-OF-SCALE-IN-ANARCHISM-AND-THE-CASE-FOR-CYBERNETIC-COMMUNISM.pdf
• -azP is a series of flags, in terminal programs slang a series of options, that you set to the program command; in this case
  • a stands for add,
  • z stands for compressed (as in compress the file(s) you want to upload before uploading them),
  • and P stands for progresss, like display a progress bar while executing this operation

Delete files

… <need testing before blindly copy-pasting some internet answer>