I did some digging through the forums for a while and I did not see any submissions which fit what I'm looking for. I currently use Tixati to send large files across my LAN and occasionally to friends over WAN using Torrents that I have created (without using trackers). It seems to work well enough, albeit a bit slow sometimes even over LAN. Whenever I want to send a file to another machine in my household or to a friend, I copy the magnet link from my generated torrent and send it on its way. I typically seed the private torrents off of a dedicated machine, a "server" of sorts.

I've been playing with fopnu and like the idea behind it, but I need some help wrapping my head around a couple of things and would like some expert advice. While I would use my "server" as the primary "seed" with fopnu, I currently have four machines that I regularly send files between using the Tixati/torrent method. How should I set the username and private key combination on these machines as I own and administer each one? Should I use the same username and copy the private key between each copy of fopnu (and what would happen if I did that, out of curiosity)? If so, how would I identify each machine? Or if I were to create a unique "username" for each machine, what's the best way of making the files available to the other machines on a whim, through the friends list or a group of some sort in a similar fashion to spooling up a torrent and sharing it with the other systems?

A good portion of these files are private, so I would assume I would set group permissions of different levels across files that I want only available to my machines, files I want shared with friends only, and then the least restrictive option for files that I would share with the community publicly. Any tips or advice on how to set this up "properly" given that I would want multiple machines/copies of fopnu to be able to browse each other's shares/files? Seems silly to have a unique user in my friend's list for each computer I set this up with.

I have a question about how fopnu does its file transfers as well. I've noticed it seems faster than Tixati for sending files across my LAN, which is what is spurring me to attempt to use fopnu in a similar manner. Tixati and torrent clients in general almost always send the file right the first time, and if a bad chunk (piece) comes across the network, it is discarded and redownloaded. This accurate transfer methodology is critical for what I need as some files I want to send privately between systems exceed 100GB in size, and if a single bit is out of place, the whole file is trash. I rely on Tixati/torrents because it does it right the first time, and the odd cases in where it doesn't, it is a matter of rechecking the file and fetching the handful of pieces that didn't make it through correctly, therefore repairing the broken file without having to re-transfer the whole damn thing. It's this reason that I stopped using SMB or external HDDs between computers to send big files because it rarely worked right and I got sick of wasting hours of time waiting for a transfer that could easily fail. I want to see if fopnu does something similar to ensure the file is sent correctly or can be easily remedied if not without having to start the transfer from scratch.

I suppose my final question would be, am I asking or expecting something out of the software that it wasn't designed to do? Ideally I would like to have tiered shares as mentioned before to make it easy to share sets of files with my buddies and with the community by letting them browse and fetch files on-demand (which seems to be what it's designed for), but also to potentially send big files across LAN or even WAN to my systems without fuss or worry that the files will get "damaged in shipping".

I'm not saying it will solve all your issues (or this will answer all the questions from your original post), but how about this?:

So you don't have to add each machine's user to every other machine's contact list, instead create a private chat room (a password protected one that doesn't advertise on the room list) and make each machine join that room.

Set up a "personal" group and build you library with the appropriate permissions for the public and personal groups.

Finally, assign the personal group to the private chat room. This way, only members of your private chat room can access files associated with the personal group.

A similar model could also be used with friend - new room, new group, specific permissions.

One thing missing from Fopnu currently that would make the search aspect work for you your case is if you could limit the Search to a particular room or rooms. Similar to how the Search functionality works in Tixati at the moment.

That way you wouldn't need to browse all the machines to find the right file(s), instead you could Search by room across all the machines.

I wasn't aware that group permissions could be assigned to chat rooms. That's a great idea, and I appreciate your input. I may end up continuing to use Tixati for the large files or directories that don't change very often, and use Fopnu exclusively for multimedia files and documents / directories that change frequently. After some thinking on my original plan, I could export torrent files for the large files or a document with a list of magnets for the private seeds and keep them in Fopnu to share them "on demand" with friends as this could work as a best of both worlds.