Management of remote devices

Feature
1

I have been running a small syncthing cluster for my family (10 devices inside a VPN with own discovery server, Windows, Mac and Linux clients) for a few months now. The devices are spread over multiple locations. My “users” generally don’t know anything about this “computer stuff”.

Keeping syncthing running in this scenario has been more effort than I had initially expected.

  • Adding a new device or folder requires me to drive around and click “yes” on all affected devices.
  • Upgrading to version 13 required me to drive around and click “upgrade” everywhere.
  • Some devices had a wrong discovery server URL after the v13 update (strangely one client set it back to “default” while one did not add “/v2/” in the URL - the other devices worked). Again this required me to drive around to the affected devices.
  • There was a 32-bit device which crashed because of the 13.8-bug. Again this required manual intervention.

I understand the “security over convenience” approach. But still I think that there should be some integrated way to centrally manage syncthing clients to make things less cumbersome.

2

Did you really drive around, or is that your way of saying “I had to open 10 Browser-Tabs, each with a different node’s WebUI”?

As Syncthing has a WebUI and you already are inside a VPN, there is no reason not to make the WeBUI accessible to you (of course with activated login).

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3

I think the only security related point is number one, which is neatly solved by promoting one of your devices to an introducer.

4

If you “own/manage” remote the syncthing instances you could “easily” write a management script which uses the REST-API (with hostname/ip and API-keys). I’m not 100% if everything can be controlled with the API.

5

Everything you can do with the GUI, you can do with the REST API, since the GUI uses the REST API.

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7

Things have changed a little since the OP: https://www.kastelo.net/arigi/

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