After you run C:\Windows\system32\fsquirt.exe, what do you run on the other
devices to copy a set of files from them (or to them)?

On 1/14/2024 6:08 PM, Bill Powell wrote:
> After you run C:\Windows\system32\fsquirt.exe, what do you run on the other
> devices to copy a set of files from them (or to them)?

You could run fsquirt on one end, in receive mode.

You then run fsquirt on the other end, in transmit mode.

Notice that fsquirt appears to have no command line help.
It has a GUI with a receive-side button, as well
as a transmit-side button.

You need to set up a receiver first (or, you will be
prompted at runtime, when you start a transfer, to
authorize it on the receive side).

And it also needs device discovery and pairing, as part
of the recipe. Because, after all, the Bluetooth
devices can reach a number of "mates" in air space, and
the user needs a means to select them. Only I have
control of the pairing digits, I can see the "number"
one end puts up, and check the other end for the identical
number. I can't make fsquirt work with the computer of
the guy next door, because i can't see the digits on his
screen while pairing.

While you can enjoy sending files at 75KB/sec with little
effort, note that I discovered while testing, that finally,
piconet capability is there. And, you can set up *file sharing*
across Bluetooth. So not only have I used the point-to-point
fsquirt method, I also had general purpose networking set up
at 75KB/sec. Imagine doing Windows Update over that... :-)
This is similar in concept to ICS (Internet Connection Sharing).
And the activity is not without its little challenges, but
just having a working TCP/IP stack, is a major achievement.
The other issues it's got, pop up all the time in other
parts of networking, so the inconveniences are nothing new.
It's possible you will need to widen the netmask from the
normal /24 to /16, to make the BT piconet work with everything
else. That might be a command or two, per session (the changes
are not recorded between sessions).

A few years back, I tried to set up a piconet on Bluetooth,
and it managed to send two packets before dying. And repeated
efforts to repeat the feat, failed entirely. Color me shocked,
when finally it worked. I couldn't tell if they were really
working on it, or were planning such a thing or not.

And this really has nothing to do with Bluetooth 5 as an enabler.
As near as I can tell, Bluetooth 4 and Bluetooth 5 are more or
less functionally equivalent on Windows. The new capabilities
for BT5, are really for IoT, not for Windows. Windows tries
to run all the devices in the same "mode", so it is a
backwards compatibility play.

One other thing to note, while I was testing this and that,
I noticed that *no* bandwidth indicator was accurate :-)
Don't you love this stuff ? You really have to take the
number of bytes transferred, divide by the number of
seconds on your stopwatch, to figure out what speed
the transfer occurred at.

Summary: I'm hoping you find this discoverable, and no matter
what you do first, the interface will tell you what to do.
Sometimes, getting paired can be a chore.

NOTE: DO NOT share a Bluetooth nano plug with two computers.
When you retrofit a BT to a desktop computer, it stays paired
with the computer. So BT with MAC 123456 stays on this computer
and the other BT with 789123 stays on the other computer. In fact,
all my networking boxes are marked this way, with a Wifi labeled
Intel and a Wifi labeled AMD, so they stay on the correct side of
the room.

NOTE: A second warning. Do not send audio from a Windows computer
to a Linux computer and its speakers. This is a different config
than using BT speakers. What happens if you try that, is metadata
is stored in two places in Windows, and you can't make the machine
forget the details of the transaction. Bluetooth can get *confused*
which is why you have to use restraint when experimenting. Like, by
moving a BT, the computer will figure out something is wrong with
the computer name and the BT MAC address, and it will get some details
of association wrong. This will eventually drive you nuts, when you
can't reliably run fsquirt and friends. So some things you do to the
computer, have side effects, and deleting ENUM will never clean out
the mess.

A reliable way to sort a BT issue... is to reinstall Windows.

Paul

On Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:08:58 +0100, Bill Powell wrote:
>
> After you run C:\Windows\system32\fsquirt.exe, what do you run on the other
> devices to copy a set of files from them (or to them)?

Paul has given you a lot of good information. I'll just add this link
from Microsoft:

<https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
hardware/drivers/bluetooth/bluetooth-user-interface.

--
Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA https://BrownMath.com/
Shikata ga nai...