Hello everyone,
I have an iMac and a Macbook Pro. I would like to sync for my each of my family members several folders so they have always the latest documents on either iMac or Macbook Pro.
I installed syncthing with one user but I haven’t been able to run syncthing for the other user.
I was reading the Forum, but the questions are from 2015/2016 regarding my problem.
Is there any setup that I can follow?
How to setup syncthing multiple times on Mac for each user? I believe that this actually is not possible, correct?
There are some notes on auto starting for a user on https://docs.syncthing.net/users/autostart.html#macos. I’m unsure exactly how Homebrew does it, but “our” manual method works fine when repeated for multiple users on the same machine, and I’d hope Homebrew’s variant does as well.
The thing you’ll run into is that you need separate listen ports for the GUI and sync port, for each user. Syncthing will allocate random ones on (first) startup if another Syncthing is already running.
I installed on two users the manuall way. I recognized that when both are logged in I ony can sync the first user. Since I tried to add the folder for the second user while the first one was connected it did not work out.
I logged off the first user and finally the NAS and Mac talked to each other. Currently I have a different GUI port. I haven’t done anything for the sync port. Hope this is automatically. Also the Mac has a different ID as I could see.
I will keep testing.
But I am right that when two users are logged in, only the first one will be able to sync?
I don’t know macos and/or its launchagens/launchctl mechanism. If it is meant to run processes while the user is logged in, it is totally imaginable that all processes are stopped/halted while you login to a separate account. Macos being unix I would expect it to be able to run multiple user sessions at the same time, but maybe it restricts that somehow.
You could just try and use homebrew or syncthing-macos, seems quite a bit more straight forward to me looking at the docs.
Most likely it’s a question of port 22000 being taken by one and not available for the other. Syncthing does autodetection of a free port, but only on first startup. If 22000 was available then, it will be used always.
(Macs can have multiple users logged in at the same time, and then their respective background processes and whatnot are indeed both running, like you’d expect on any unixish system.)