files

If you've ever had to transfer a file from one computer to another over the Internet, with minimal fuss, there are a few options. You could use scp or rsync if you have SSH access. You could use Firefox Send, or Dropbox, or iCloud Drive, or Google Drive, and upload from one computer, and download on the other.

But what if you just want to zap a file from point A to point B? Or what if—like me—you want to see how fast you can get an individual file from one place to another over the public Internet?

This is a simple guide, part of a series I'll call 'How-To Guide Without Ads'. In it, I'm going to document how I create an NFS share in Linux on a Raspberry Pi.

Install NFS

$ sudo apt-get install -y nfs-kernel-server

Create a shared directory

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/mydrive/shared
$ sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/mydrive/shared

I won't deal with permissions in this post; read this post for more suggestions.

Configure NFS to share that directory

Edit the NFS exports file with sudo nano /etc/exports, and add the following:

/mnt/mydrive/shared *(rw,all_squash,insecure,async,no_subtree_check,anonuid=1000,anongid=1000)

Update the NFS active exports

sudo exportfs -ra

Connect to the share

From another computer, access: nfs://[hostname-or-ip-of-pi]/mnt/mydrive/shared

tl;dr: If you want to skip the 'how-to' part and explanation, check out the pix_migrate example Drupal 8 migration module on GitHub.

For a couple years, I wanted to work on my first personal site migration into Drupal 8, for the last Drupal 6 site I had running on my servers. I've run a family photo/audio/video sharing website since 2009, and through the years it has accumulated hundreds of galleries, and over 20,000 media items.

The home page of the Drupal 8 photo sharing website.

I have over 100 git repositories on my Mac, and for almost every one, I sometimes browse the directory structure in the Finder. Once I do that, I inevitably end up with a few pesky .DS_Store files that want to be added to my repo:

.DS_Store files don't add anything of value to my code (they just tell Mac OS X about folder display and icons), so I always end up adding them to my own projects' .gitignore files. But when I'm working on other repositories (like Drupal, or a fork from GitHub) I don't want to add a .gitignore if none exists, or mess with the project's existing .gitignore. So what's a coder to do?

There are a couple good solutions:

I've often had trouble copying files with Mac OS X's Finder. From back in the Mac OS X Beta days (when it was based on NeXT's UI), hard drive to hard drive copies, network copies, and backups have often had strange quirks, and one of the strangest I've yet found happened yesterday when I tried copying a ~170GB Aperture library from one external USB drive to another.

I tried copying the library three times, and each time the copy would get to about 24GB, the hard drive (from which the library was being copied) would make a loud CLICK, and then it would unmount and remount, stopping the library file copy. This particular drive has never had troubles in the past, and the fact that it kept doing the CLICK-die thing at 24GB meant that there may have been a file problem or a Finder bug causing the problem.

I verified the drive using Disk Utility (could've gone deeper and used other utilities too), but only found one or two small errors (a file count one file off, or a few improper permissions). After repairing the disk, the drive still clicked off at 24GB.

When I was rebuilding www.jeffgeerling.com in Drupal, I decided to use the testing domain new.jeffgeerling.com. This presented me with a challenge, once I started working a bit more on the site, as I set up imagecache, the file system, the favicon, the logo, internal images in posts, images inserted into blocks, etc., into my /sites/new.jeffgeerling.com/files directory.

If I simply renamed the directory to 'jeffgeerling.com' and went live, I'd end up with tons of 404 errors. Currently, there's no easy way to switch the location of your files directory in Drupal. Lacking an easy method, it's time to get your hands dirty with a little SQL (I entered the following commands via phpMyAdmin, since my host doesn't yet allow SSH access):