The sys admin's daily grind – Pulse

Here and There

Article from Issue 173/2015
Author(s):

Equal treatment, as sys admin Charly so boldly proposes, should be the norm. What he really wants is a free tool to sync user data across multiple computers.

In the past, I have covered various approaches to keeping files synchronized across two or more computers. BitTorrent Sync [1] does a great job here, but it's not open source. Pulse [2] is a GPLv3 tool knocking on the door of all data duplicators. It is a Syncthing [3] fork and very popular despite its beta status.

The Pulse software is available on Linux and on OpenBSD, NetBSD, OS X, Windows, and Android. The Linux clients include versions for ARMv5, v6, and v7, which means that Pulse also runs on the Raspberry Pi and its close relatives. Communication between the computers is secured by TLS encryption with Perfect Forward Secrecy [4].

When first launched, Pulse generates keys and certificates, creates the ~/sync directory, and launches a web server on port 8080, which then handles the remaining configuration steps. The web interface looks pretty neat and well designed, which you wouldn't necessarily expect of a beta version (see Figure 1).

[...]

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