Filesystem Watcher Errors, windows client, network share path

Support
1

Hey folks, been using Syncthing now for a few months and it’s been great. Primarily have it running on 3 devices:

  • Windows 10 Desktop (connected to NAS over LAN)
  • Windows 11 laptop
  • Android phone

Currently, running Syncthing v1.23.4 on all 3 devices.

The laptop and the android phone are both syncing to local storage, no issue there. The Windows 10 desktop, however, has the files being sync’ed across a SMB fileshare on the NAS. This was the initial setup and it’s been working great for MONTHS. Now, out of nowhere, I seem to have a weird warning:

Filesystem Watcher Errors

For the following folders an error occurred while starting to watch for changes. It will be retried every minute, so the errors might go away soon. If they persist, try to fix the underlying issue and ask for help if you can’t. Support

Obsidian Vault notify: \\[IP OF NAS]\Public\Shared Documents\Obsidian path is unwatched

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When I pause this shared folder, and resume, the warning goes away for a bit, but then comes back. I can confirm that this path is accessible by syncthing, and it’s not having any permissions issues (like I’ve been seeing on previous posts).

Here's the snippet of my log file 
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:22:05 INFO: Paused folder "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID]) (sendreceive)
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:22:09 INFO: Ready to synchronize "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID]) (sendreceive)
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:22:09 INFO: Unpaused folder "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID]) (sendreceive)
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:22:13 INFO: Completed initial scan of sendreceive folder "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID])
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:22:44 INFO: Error while trying to start filesystem watcher for folder "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID]), trying again in 1m0s: notify: \\[IP OF NAS]\Public\Shared Documents\Obsidian path is unwatched
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:24:20 INFO: Error while trying to start filesystem watcher for folder "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID]), trying again in 2m0s: notify: \\[IP OF NAS]\Public\Shared Documents\Obsidian path is unwatched
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:26:55 INFO: Error while trying to start filesystem watcher for folder "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID]), trying again in 4m0s: notify: \\[IP OF NAS]\Public\Shared Documents\Obsidian path is unwatched
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:31:31 INFO: Error while trying to start filesystem watcher for folder "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID]), trying again in 8m0s: notify: \\[IP OF NAS]\Public\Shared Documents\Obsidian path is unwatched
[ICADX] 2023/05/11 13:40:06 INFO: Error while trying to start filesystem watcher for folder "Obsidian Vault" ([FOLDER ID]), trying again in 16m0s: notify: \\[IP OF NAS]\Public\Shared Documents\Obsidian path is unwatched

Any ideas? Sorry if this was covered elsewhere, but all my keyword searches were unfruitful…

2

The complaint is that it can’t get filesystem notifications on that folder. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to work or not with SMB and a NAS…

3

Then why’s it only complaining about it now? LOL Haven’t ever seen this warning before…

4

.

The Windows 10 desktop’s and/or the NAS’ configuration changed…

The SMB2 protocol has a file change notify request feature. An application such as Syncthing submits a filesystem event notification to the OS. In turn it’s up to the OS to request a file change notification from the SMB server, and then for the SMB server to actually honor that request (it’s not required to).

Only if the SMB server responds accordingly to the OS request can the OS then translate it into a suitable pseudo-filesystem event (SMB’s list of events only partially overlaps those for a local filesystem).

Syncthing doesn’t talk to the SMB server directly and it doesn’t even know that a target folder is a network share.

5

I can’t see that anything changed in the config on either the W10 desktop nor on the NAS.

6

What kind of NAS? (e.g., make, model, OS, etc.)

From Microsoft: How to detect, enable and disable SMBv1, SMBv2, and SMBv3 in Windows

Inspecting the network packets might also be worthwhile: https://wiki.wireshark.org/SMB2/Notify

At least SMBv2 needs to be enabled and supported on both the client and server ends for file change notify requests to work.

7

Self-hosted RHEL 9.2 with SMBv3 on a network share, and Windows 10 is using v3 as well. Weird, right?

Edit: I will say, I haven’t seen that warning since my original post either…

8

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