I discovered that some of my code was still living on my old laptop from high school. The laptop hadn’t been booted in about 4 years, so the clock battery had died, causing the filesystem checks to fail (this is Ubuntu 9.10, which cared about these things). I reset the clock manually, boot up the machine, and decide that to be on the safe (but marginally inefficient) side, I’ll copy my entire multi-GB home directory to my more beefy desktop and filter out what I don’t want there.

Sadly, this laptop came before 802.11n and is limited to 54 Mbps. I have an AirPort Express with only one local port, which is connected to my desktop, but I don’t want to disrupt the network setup. I realize I can chain the Ethernet from my old laptop (named metroid) to my new laptop (named roran), which has 802.11n to connect to my desktop (named nasuada).

ross@nasuada$ nc -l 8080 > mybackup.tar.bz2
ross@roran$ nc -l 8080 | nc nasuada.local 8080
ross@metroid$ tar -jcf - $HOME | nc roran.local 8080

I love Unix.