The Discussion:
We started talking about various privacy issues including license plate readers. These are becoming more common as identified in deflock.me. We talked about various tactics, many of which were illegal. Perhaps the best thing is to avoid them.
Selling stuff on the internet came up next. While there is no “one size fits all” method, eBay is good for rare and more expensive items, and Nextdoor is better for privacy and avoiding shipping costs.
Pat asked for recommendations for small Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Several of us had good experiences using Buffalo and Netgear ReadyNAS units. Maybe we’ll hear more about this next time.
NordVPN had said they would discontinue its Meshnet service, and customer response was quite strong. In the wake, they have agreed to continue to support and have even made the service available at no cost to everyone.
The Presentation:
Carl then started a tour of filen’s website and a demo of the linux-cli.
It was very easy to create an account which allows up to 10 GB of free storage. If more is desired, they have very reasonable prices. After responding to the email confirmation, I was able to log in on their website and had full access to the account. It was quick and easy to upload or download a file using the web client, and I was quite impressed that has an option to provide versioning for files as they are updated.
Of course I immediately wanted to try out the filen-cli command. They provide a script to download the file into your home directory and update various startup files like .bashrc and .profile. I preferred to download the file from github and save it in /usr/local/bin.
Once installed, run the program and it will prompt you for your email and password. The option to save these is offered. From there use the “filen cp”, “filen rm” to add or remove files. This worked flawlessly with the current version.
However the “filen mount” command is what I really wanted. It was broken (and is soon to be fixed) in the 0.0.36 version. [Since then 0.0.39 has been released, which fixes the mount issue.] Once mounted the system appears as a fuse device, and linux commands like df and dust work as expected.
This is definitely something worth playing with! I may even set up a cronjob to mount the system and use rsync to copy important files. And best of all, the price is right!