RASP’s A Sneakernet Proxy

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
—Andrew Tanenbaum

This program allows a computer with no or slow connectivity to download files through another machine with better connectivity. Transfer is done using a thumbdrive, floppy, or other medium. It is particularly intended for upgrading computers that are normally connected over dialup, when a faster connection is available, e.g. at work. It works well with apt.

Once rasp is compiled and installed somewhere, for example in /usr/local/bin/, run rasp using micro_inetd, in a directory on the portable drive:

micro_inetd 8080 /usr/local/bin/rasp

Then set the HTTP proxy of your client software to localhost, and the port given to micro_inetd, e.g. 8080. Attempt to download whatever you like; if you’re using apt,

export http_proxy='http://localhost:8080'
sudo apt-get upgrade

The proxy will generate a file called wget.txt, and return errors to the HTTP client.

Move the portable drive to the machine with connectivity, and download the files using wget:

sh wget.txt

Each download will generate a file with a meaningless name, which is a hash of the requested URI. Transfer the portable drive to the network-limited machine, run it using micro_inetd as before, and try again to download your files via the HTTP proxy. It should work.

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