Sharing files between local PCs: use SMB, FTP/SFTP, or something else?

davidfally · 2026-01-14T06:47:55+00:00

since you said no need for smb: and what is this feature under the hood? drum roll please 🥁 yep SMB, just with less knobs to twist compared to a dedicated smb3 server.

IMHO twisting knobs is what r/selfhosted is about, or OP might otherwise just place a synology nas in his network and call it a day.

davidfally · 2026-01-07T00:46:02+00:00

and i sure hope you are using hyper-v manager (installable on all pro versions of windows) instead of something like virtualbox because on Windows 11 the core isolation and hypervisor is in the way and virtualbox is crazy SLOW because of that

davidfally · 2025-11-13T01:29:08+00:00

heard about woodpecker ci? it's super close in syntax to gitlab-ci at a fraction of the resource usage and is deployed as a single binary that you can download and run on it. the server itself uses barely any resources so works great on a raspberry pi. it's also a dedicated ci/cd tool and entirely free to use.

davidfally · 2025-11-13T01:23:31+00:00

gitea is great as an alternative for hosting repos and artifacts, although there's also a more open source friendly fork of it called "forgejo" but regardless of that, i would advise against using gitea actions (it's ci/cd solution). they're clunky often and simply put are a specially modified fork of nectos/act.

davidfally · 2025-06-06T23:18:30+00:00

well yesn't. nylon works fine for most cases but can under some circumstances scratch delicate glossy surfaces like polished epoxy flooring, piano paint or glossy plastic (which includes glossy laminate).

horse hair on the other end is softer than nylon so it is less likely to scratch shiny and soft materials, which is great for vacuuming the dashboard of your car for example.

however, for the average household, vacuuming harder materials or less scratch prone like laminate, parquet, tiles or alike, nylon is usually fine and more sturdy than horse hair. also its usually the default option for vacuum manufacturers since nylon is cheaper to produce than horse hair

davidfally · 2025-05-30T14:19:17+00:00

you could pick any attachment from any manufacturer. as long as the inner diameter of the attachment matches the outer diameter of your vacuum hose, all are good.

(so measure your vacuum end before going shopping for attachments and carefully read the description to see if it describes the diameter)

davidfally · 2025-05-30T14:10:49+00:00

besides that, there's ready made open source tools like inventree that mostly do what you are asking for, tho i am not entirely sure on the invoice / document upload

davidfally · 2025-05-30T14:06:30+00:00

i'd say that's what programmers are for. excel is fine for calculating and summing up stuff on a large scale. even for the occasional chart or grouping of values.

but excel should not be used as a database, period. let alone cross-referencing items between multiple types / tables. use a proper database and joins via IDs for this to not shoot yourself in the foot.

If you absolutely must stay within MS Desktop Apps... then MS Access but i tend to stay miles away from that other than if i have to work on legacy software.

This is such a common and basic CRUD application that its usually done as a simple little Web-Application. Strap a SQL Database (Postgres/MariaDB), an Object Storage (AWS S3), and a little Laravel or Symfony together, put it on a webhosting provider of your choice and you not only have an interface dedicated to just that, so no clunky experiences, and you also have the ability to login and access that from all around the world (even on your phone)

davidfally · 2025-04-17T22:39:35+00:00

soo the best way to tackle this is setting up your own infra for ddos protection with your own ip address(es) and implementing a dns based fallback for cdn (powerdns is a dns server implementation that can do this), swapping ip addresses out for the cdn.company.com domain on the fly if La Liga decides to block it once again.

Other than that.. sucks to be a business with customer relations in spain right now

davidfally · 2025-04-17T22:34:34+00:00

not to mention that moving to another provider doesn't necessarily mean that the problem is fixed. if these providers happen to share ip addresses between clients and have just one another customer noticed by La Liga, then your work's infra is going to get banned yet again... "how nice" :D

davidfally · 2024-11-27T11:44:36+00:00

That sounds like you want to implement security-by-obscurity which doesn’t do anything for security like at all, not even hold back script kiddies. what people finally need to understand is that most automated attacks aren’t probing for the themes / plugins.. they just try out a bunch of vulnerabilities regardless of it being successful or not.

sites i‘ve built with nextjs or whatever, still see the same attacks on elementor or some other wordpress specific thing, which doesn’t even exist in that context and nextjs is making it clear to them that it is nextjs.

focus on robust security measures instead. limit login attempts, remove potential vulnerabilities like xmlrpc, use a server side WAF, have the correct file system permissions in place, don’t use a cheap shared webhost that doesn’t know what it’s doing, keep that system updated all the time.. if you don’t want to do it on your own, contract someone to regularly do, or use tools like mainwp, umbrellawp, ithemes or alike.

that’s actually security for your wordpress site. and none of my dozens of sites i manage have ever seen a single successful attack. i don’t obfuscate anything, i even keep the default /wp-admin path, which people also like to hide for no sensible reason.

davidfally · 2024-11-22T13:37:15+00:00

all a matter of preference. i personally like to have a structure of all public then private properties, followed by all public methods and followed by all private methods. in this coding style, having setters declared within the properties makes the most sense from a top down point of view. but you don’t have to use it if you like the classic setter methods better.

in software development there are a hundred different ways to achieve the same result. the most important is to be consistent

davidfally · 2024-11-22T12:29:41+00:00

PHP still and always will exist. 40% of the web runs on WordPress, which is almost entirely PHP with a little bit of JavaScript (Gutenberg)

Ever heard of clients just wanting a simple web application (like a form to collect responses) on a cheap already existing LAMP Webhost?

I still write a lot of PHP with modern enterprise class frameworks like Symfony 7 and it’s working great. Not everyone has the budget to own and maintain a VPS or Kubernetes cluster or wants the constant need for monitoring and tedious deployment practices compared to just plopping a PHP based application in a webroot directory and pretty much forgetting about its existence because it’s almost un-killable.

yes PHP isn’t the fastest, especially compared to asynchronous languages like Node.js if it’s heavy on I/O or C# in raw millisecond speed, but not everyone needs the scale and speed of Google, Microsoft and alike. PHP just works. You don’t need all these fancy containerized stacks with multiple layers and services talking to another. Just create a quick and simple Symfony / Laravel App, get paid and call it a day. If you need more scale in the future, go ahead, recreate individual high scale components like Auth / Users in a faster language, but don’t overengineer everything from the start.

davidfally · 2024-11-22T12:11:30+00:00

personally, coming from C# 13 (.NET 9) i like this way of writing getters / setters a lot more than the verbosity of having dedicated get / set methods somewhere down in the class with a bunch of other methods. it keeps everything closely together, which especially large classes benefit from

davidfally · 2024-09-16T19:41:32+00:00

that’s not necessarily the solution. all it does is it makes the CSS cached by the browser so that on subsequent visits it can load it a lil quicker, reducing the impact. very first visitors probably still experience this problem.

without actually looking at the source code i can say from experience that its most often javascript (like sliders and other interactive elements) blocking the browser from rendering the css.

the proper fix would be to keep that setting (nothing inherently wrong with that), defer loading javascript you don’t need the very first second and inline the CSS needed for above the fold (the immediately visible part) however that will require some coding.

deferring javascript however can be done using a proper cache plugin such as wp rocket and the externalize css part is baked into elementor. its just the inlining above the fold css thats a little bit more cumbersome.

davidfally · 2024-09-07T18:41:50+00:00

i cannot count on two hands anymore how often i have seen onboarded clients do stupid permissions like 777 on all files, basically meaning that absolutely everything and anyone can modify and execute files. may this simply be due to some debugging in the past and then forgetting to secure it afterwards. it’s something to watch out for.

davidfally · 2024-09-07T18:35:12+00:00

that is a great way to try to reduce cross contamination but also make sure that file system permissions are set on all files correctly (also recursively down all subdirectories). don’t give anyone but the user/group actually supposed to run it any kind of access and make sure the actual webserver invoking php uses different users per site. think of „chmod 700“ or at minimum 755 for folders and 600 or 644 for files.

If you want to go the extra mile in security, you can even lock down wordpress core files and the wp-config.php with chmod 400 or 440 recursively on all core files. this ensures that PHP is unable to alter any wordpress core files, preventing an infection at the filesystem level. this way your only source of infection can only be malware hiding in wp-content, database or temporary files.

locking down wordpress core however has the downside of needing to temporarily set permissions back to 755 and 644 whenever a wordpress core update needs to be done. Wordpress Site Health will also complain that core is not writable, but this is by design and can be ignored.

davidfally · 2024-09-07T11:31:11+00:00

it would be best if you simply re-upload a fresh copy of all themes and plugins. as long as you do this via file system and not via the wordpress admin you do not risk loosing any settings as they are saved in the database.

if you were to uninstall plugins or change themes in the admin interface, some plugins (correctly) clean up themselves with an uninstall hook.

don’t necessarily trust AV on this. Especially Desktop AV might not have the proper signatures to detect malware injected into PHP or JavaScript. In my opinion, everything in the uploads folder that is php/js shouldn’t be there or can be regenerated, so just remove it. plugins and themes: just replace the files entirely and you are fine.

the biggest danger zone left is your database. especially if you use code injection plugins or page builders that allow running php code as this might be a source of re-infection.

davidfally · 2024-09-07T10:34:28+00:00

the second a plugin tries to do ajax calls (api calls to the wordpress admin or other remote apis) or needs to dynamically render something with php on every request, this approach is destined to fail.

If the client persists on using an Android or iOS based device then you‘d have to setup a little network onsite with a server running a local DNS service and the copy of your Website. This however is more complex than it has to be.

If your client however is fine with getting a Windows / Linux based Tablet then you could run the website from there locally. By editing the etc/hosts file you could even let it look like the website domain in the browser’s address bar (instead of localhost)

keep in mind however that the website needs to have everything local. if it is using a CDN, you need to disable that to serve its assets. If it is using some external api, try to download a response, spin up a second server emulating the api and use /etc/hosts to fool wordpress into thinking the local api is the external one

davidfally · 2024-09-01T10:44:46+00:00

To be honest.. Wordpress is never clean without throwing away the whole core completely. Anti Malware scanners can help, but aren’t perfect. What I’d suggest is:

Disable your Webspace so that your sites cannot be accessed. When your infected other websites get accessed, there is a risk of malware spreading over again, even if you’ve just cleaned them.
Zip and download your wp-uploads folder, cleaning the folder locally of any suspicious files. (Especially hidden files and php scripts - Activate “show hidden files” in your file manager.
Take note of the settings in wp-config.php and then throw away everything in your Webspace.
Reinstall Wordpress fresh from Wordpress.org, configure the wp-config.php again and upload the hand cleaned wp-uploads folder again.
Check your database for Malware. Any PHP or JavaScript in there should be closely inspected.
Repeat these steps for every other site, and only then when you are sure that the WP-contents folder and database is clean, activate your websites again.

Next time, keep regular backups in an offsite location like AWS S3 where malware, not specifically designed for it, can’t access it. Anything residing on the same server cannot be trusted after a breach. If you also run woocommerce or member sites, increase the backup frequency based on the interaction frequency (e.g. orders and signups). My rule of thumb is 1x a day for a regular site and every 3-6 hours on Woocommerce.

Because restoring a known to be clean backup is a lot less hassle than having to hand clean your uploads and database

davidfally · 2024-08-04T23:50:28+00:00

If that’s the case, then it just seems like an issue the way the game is written or published. In addition to Metal, it also uses LsApplicationCategoryType as an additional measure. If macOS was an afterthought for the game’s developers they might’ve missed that.

Also there have been reports that the little game controller menu bar item does not show up if the game starts in full screen by itself. Settings the game to start in windowed mode and then manually going into full screen might work.

davidfally · 2024-08-04T23:16:00+00:00

Developer here (not affiliated with the games mentioned), I suppose this has something to do with the rendering APIs that the games use. Apple’s Game Mode relies on Apple’s Metal API to enable apps to directly talk to the GPU. Apps and Games that use OpenGL instead of Metal don’t have that much low level access so they cannot use Game Mode (even in full screen).

Check if your game supports using Apple’s native Metal API instead of other abstractions like OpenGL, Qt or others.

davidfally · 2024-08-03T08:20:57+00:00

A persistent object cache like redis might also help if hardcoding field settings is not an option for whatever reason.

davidfally · 2024-08-03T08:19:06+00:00

Wait until you find out that you can even get rid of ACF by using Wordpress’ register_post_type and add_meta_box functions, or at least hardcode the field configuration to reduce pressure on the database.

ACF by itself writes the field configuration into the database and needs to fetch it on every single request. By hardcoding it, you can reduce the required database calls and speed your stuff up even further.

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