38 representatives of 27 organizations (including 16 NRENs) from 17 countries participated in the FileSender Online Infoshare on February 24, 2025. Complementing the annual meeting at GÉANT’s TNC25 conference, this online gathering gave FileSender community enthusiasts – users and developers – the opportunity not just to listen in and be kept abreast of new developments and future plans, but also to contribute: present their views, exchange experiences and share expectations.
FileSender aims to be a widely deployed service enabling anyone to easily and securely transfer files of any size from any person or machine to any other person or machine. FileSender explicitly targets mass usage and is built to service the 99% of users who would rather spend their time on other things than figuring out how to perform large file transfers.
Jan Meijer of Sikt, the Norwegian NREN, and Chair of the FileSender Board, made an introduction on some aspects of the FileSender collaborative effort, such as state of finances and contributor contracts, deployments in the NREN space, main challenges for the next 5 years (budget increase, secure code base, FileSender federation), state of development of version 3.0 and its current deployments.
We are grateful to AARNet (Australia), ACOnet (Austria), Arnes (Slovenia), Belnet (Belgium), CSC (Finland), DeiC (Denmark), GARR (Italy), HEAnet (Ireland), REANNZ (New Zealand), Switch (Switzerland) and to the German Cancer Research Center – 11 organisations in total – supporting FileSender financially with active contribution agreements. RNP (Brazil) provides substantial amounts of in-kind help with implementing the new user interface (UI). SURF (the Netherlands) assists FileSender considerably with both financial backing and in-kind resources.
Stefan Otto of Sikt presented information about the deployment of FileSender version 3.0 at the EOSC EU Node, branded as ‘Large File Transfer’, and as such is one of the 6 services made easily accessible to the European R&E community. He explained how the FileSender service inside the EOSC EU node is supported through a back-end IT infrastructure architecture (staging and testing). He further shared his experience on how the service is maintained and what change management procedures are in place; scalability requirements and how the Locust framework is used for load testing. EOSC EU Node users predominantly provided positive feedback about the new UI. The need to disable the ‘dark mode’ option at the moment and to improve end-user documentation in a few instances was also highlighted.
A significance of having FileSender present in the EOSC EU Node is that FileSender now has gained visibility at the European Commission and national ministry policy levels, as a useful tool for the R&E community. That it has been selected as part of the inaugural set of 6 essential research infrastructure services is an achievement that speaks for itself.
Rogier Spoor of SURF, the Dutch NREN, and member of the FileSender Board, spoke about the current work to finalize the UI redesign process (including admin portal and email templates) with the help of Marleen Velthuis, a UX expert involved with the project. These finishing touches for the UI are planned for release with FileSender version 3.1.
During the last FileSender meeting at the TNC24 conference, it was concluded that working towards a more secure FileSender codebase should be the priority for the roadmap, following the completion of the new UI. Rogier provided an overview of recent security audits and vulnerabilities found (and fixed!), emphasizing the need to maintain the highest security standards. SURF is currently contributing to investigating an approach to achieve this – a proof of concept (PoC) blank slate rewrite of core functionality. The FileSender Board will carefully consider the recommendations coming out of the PoC and weigh such an approach against alternative approaches to reach a more secure FileSender codebase, recognising a rewrite is a major undertaking.
Ben Martin, the Lead Developer for FileSender, described the issues and tasks to be tackled as we work towards the release of the new version 3.0.
At present, more than 2 sites have been operating their FileSender deployments of version 3.0 release candidates for more than half a year, and these were tested under significant load. This satisfies the requirement as stated in the FileSender project policy for elevating a release candidate version to a release.
The encouraging progress of FileSender, as an open source project, can only happen when individuals and organisations are willing to collaborate and to contribute their time and resources. Any FileSender user can join us and support the FileSender development effort – we would love to see your contribution and we really appreciate it! If you think the work on the FileSender development is valuable and you could contribute to any of the four areas of pertinent pressure right now, please let us know by sending an email directly to the FileSender Board.
