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Syncthing

Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, whether it is shared with some third party, and how it's transmitted over the internet.

Installation⚑

Debian or Ubuntu⚑

# Add the release PGP keys:
curl -s https://syncthing.net/release-key.txt | sudo apt-key add -

# Add the "stable" channel to your APT sources:
echo "deb https://apt.syncthing.net/ syncthing stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/syncthing.list

# Update and install syncthing:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install syncthing

Docker⚑

Use Linuxserver Docker

Configuration⚑

If you're only going to use syncthing in an internal network, or you're going to fix the IPs of the devices you can disable the Global Discovery and Relaying connections so that you don't leak the existence of your services to the syncthing servers.

Troubleshooting⚑

Change the path of a folder⚑

  • Shutdown Syncthing
  • Edit the config file (~/.config/syncthing/config.xml)
  • Search and replace the path
  • Start again syncthing

Syncthing over Tor⚑

There are many posts on this topic (1, 2) but I wasn't able to connect two clients through Tor. Here are the steps I took in case anyone is interested. If you make it work, please contact me.

Suggest to use a relay, go to relays.syncthing.net to see the public ones. You need to add the required servers to the Sync Protocol Listen Address field, under Actions and Settings. The syntax is:

relay://<host name|IP>[:port]/?id=<relay device ID>

The only way I've found to get the relay device ID is setting a fake one, and getting the correct one from the logs of syncthing. It will say that the fingerprint ( what you put ) doesn't match ( actual fingerprint ).

Steps⚑

  • Configure the client:

    export all_proxy=socks5://127.0.0.1:9058
export ALL_PROXY_NO_FALLBACK=1
syncthing --home /tmp/syncthing_1

  • Allow the connection to the local server:

    sudo iptables -I OUTPUT -o lo -p tcp --dport 8384 -j ACCEPT

  • If you're using Tails and Tor Browser, you'll need to set the about:config setting network.proxy.allow_hijacking_localhost to false. Otherwise you won't be able to access the user interface.

Issues⚑