I do, password-protected of course. It is the only "native" way I found to get server files access to my iPhone without downloading a third party app (via Files).
I really hope you lock it down to something like Tailscale so that you have a private area network and your Samba share isn’t open to the entire world.
Samba is a complicated piece of software built around protocols from the 90s. It’s designed around the old idea of physical network security where it’s isolated on a LAN and has a long long history of serious critical security vulnerabilities (eg here’s an RCE from this month https://cybersecuritynews.com/critical-samba-rce-vulnerabili...).
It seems like every network filesystem is irredeemably terrible. SMB and NFS the stuff of security nightmares, chatty performance issues, and awkward user id mapping. WebDAV is a joke. SSHFS is slow. You can get really crazy with CephFS or GlusterFS, and for all that complexity, you don't get much farther way from SMB/NFS issues with those either.
Well one problem is that filesystem in general is a terrible abstraction both in terms of usability and in terms of not fitting well with how you design network applications.
I’d say Dropbox et all is closer to a good design but their backend is insanely crazy optimized to make it work and proprietary. There’s an added challenge that everything these days is behind a NAT so you usually end up needing to have a central rendezvous server where nodes can find each other.
Since you’re looking at rsync where you want something closer to Dropbox, I’d say look at syncthing. It’s designed in a way to make personal file sharing secure.
Out here in rural nowhere it doesn’t — it just gets the sheriff on the local news begging people to stop instead of solving the actual problem at hand by placing patrols on the routes.
Out here in rural nowhere it most certainly does. The school bus driver will record your number plate, and school buses have the equivalent of dashcams now.
Are you installing those tools regularly? I have a couple of invisible helper apps but Time Machine backups and Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant has made those apps transparent. They're always there.
But you know what, I think I know where you are mentally. I was there 2 years after I first bought a Mac. I wanted a clean Mac. Nothing untoward, nothing that wasn't Apple. I got rid of that feeling and learned to love the Mac as a platform, to love the Mac because of its vibrant third-party developers. That's why I use a Mac even though Apple is often a bad steward of this wonderful bicycle for the mind.
> mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it.
There's exactly two you need to get macOS eye-on-eye with Windows: Hyperswitch for an alt-tab that actually works and SizeUp to get a "window arrangement like Windows with Win+arrow keys".
Further migration pains can be eased with a Windows keyboard layout bringing special characters to where they belong in muscle memory (that however can and will bring pains with anything Adobe, their apps absolutely do not like non-Apple keyboard layouts and will refuse to load keyboard command presets) and Karabiner to map Ctrl+C/V to reduce hand strain.
I've just gotten the email and downgraded to the Essential plan for online Xbox gaming...which I'm not 100% sure I still need. Seems silly and short-sighted on Microsoft's part.
free users get the same value as paying customers...JetBrains can do as they please to get some value out of these users. Don't like it, pay up...I'm a long time JetBrains customer (since 2005). I've never asked my employer to pay for my licenses because their tools make me a better developer than any other options on the market.
Are you willing to pay for the true cost of maintaining these devices for ~50 years? The original price might have been 600 USD. I think the answer is regulation. Another idea: Sell the IP to a separate company who will support the legacy product for a fee. The original product will tell you how many years support is included (not lifetime). Later, there may be monthly charges. I doubt you will like that idea, but it is more honest. Germany has similar rules about car parts. Car manufs are required to make replacement parts available for X years after a car is manuf'd.
> Are you willing to pay for the true cost of maintaining these devices for ~50 years?
Sounds like Nest/Google didn’t think about that when they priced their products. That’s not the consumer’s fault. I’ve been de-Google-ing myself over the past couple of years and this is the final nail in the coffin. They could have given a partial refund, instead they insult customers with a “discount”.
How much do you think a server for config files costs? The true cost is very little here. You can make a server host a million thermostat connections for less than a thousand dollars per year. But let's 10x that to be safe, and have a sysadmin dedicate an overkill 1 day per week to keeping the servers happy. And we'll say the sysadmin makes well over median salary and costs $200k to employ.
For 2 million devices, that's $20k a year in server costs and $40k a year in sysadmin. For 50 years, that's 3 million dollars. So it would take a whole... dollar and a half per purchase to fund 50 years of servers.
Making this subscription-based would be fine, as long as I have my choice of providers. Because then I can run it myself on a raspberry pi or pay a big host a few dollars a year to handle my entire household of devices.
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