No local discovery over VPN

Hello everyone. I tried searching the forums for my issue but couldn’t come across anything specific.

When I’m home, discovery is quick and direct over my local LAN. No issues.

When traveling, with no VPN, a relay is used and things work fine.

When traveling, I sometimes connect to my home VPN (OpenVPN on NAS), and my laptop joins the home LAN. I can access/ssh to other devices on my home network. I would expect Syncthing to switch to using the VPN connection instead of continuing to use the relay, but I’ve not noticed this happening.

Is there some setting to change to make this happen?

Local discovery only works within a single “LAN” (broadcast domain, for the technically inclined). It’s very likely your VPN is not the same LAN as your home computers. You can configure a range of addresses to attempt for a given device though, if your home devices have static-ish IPs, for example tcp://192.168.1.42:22000, dynamic to try first the mentioned IP then dynamic discovery if that doesn’t connect.

Thanks for the info. I thought that my VPN was properly setup because when my laptop connects to my home VPN, after about 20-30 seconds, other auto-discovered services appear. For example, my wife’s laptop, and the NAS itself suddenly show up as other computers in Finder windows. Because of this, I assumed my broadcast domain was properly configured.

Sure, could be, and I’m wrong. The other things might also use something like DNS-SD (“Bonjour”) and the NAS/VPNthing may proxy it… Hard to know for sure. Do you get an IP number in the same range on your VPN connection as you have on your devices at home (like 192.168.1.x on both sides)?

Ah, no, I do not. My home network is 10.10.10.0/24 and when I connect to VPN, my IP comes from 192.168.10.0/24. Hrm. More curious now how all those other things discover with different networks. The VPN is a TUN/point-to-point. Maybe I’ll need to switch to a different topology so that my laptop gets an IP in the same range as home network. Thanks!

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