Sweet :) I wasn't doing it over lan though, totally different subnets here. It's easy to quickly open the port I want to use for netcat on a remote machine and copy files quickly that way.

If you're interested in completely saturating all your resources for the maximum possible transfer speed, check out Tsunami: http://tsunami-udp.sourceforge.net/ -- It's a UDP protocol designed for raw throughput. Also no security or checking, but it does support throttling which is nice. I've tested and it actually does exceed netcat's rate by a few percent, but it's a little less reliable (client and server have to agree on a lot of things). Pretty cool to experiment with though :)

As an alternative to all of the above, consider UDPCast. It's point is that it can multicast; but it is also great for point-to-point copies. I adds its own reliability layer, so don't be scared of UDP in the name. It can rate limit, if you want. I've used it to great effect to shuffle a lot of GB to a bunch of servers at the time.

Way down at a low level, the network hardware/firmware knows how to send data 1:N. Using that is a single easy command away, but hardly anyone knows it.

http://kylecordes.com/2008/multicast-your-db-backups-with-ud...