Rant: Why is there no way to test a direct connection

I’m trying to configure what must be the simplest possible setup. I have a single windows machine at home and a remote linux server. I’m trying to set up a one-way, direct connection between the two. On the server I see the home machine is “Unused” and on the home machine I see the server is “Not connected”. “Last Seen” both show “Never”.

I’ve tried everything I can think of to get this to work: creating matching folders on each end with the same ID, sharing it one way, both ways, configuring the address by hostname, by IP, with tcp:// tcp4:// tcp6://.

This leads me to one question: how come there is no feedback at all when trying to make this link. Not in the GUI not in the console. Nowhere. A simple “test connection” button would save countless hours of frustration.

Yep, there’s a ticket for it:

To answer your question, because none of us have felt like implementing it yet. Obviously.

Note that it does show discovered addresses nowadays, though.

Syncthing pretty much does that every minute (as in tries to connect), and if you are not connected after a minute you can safely assume the test failed.

As to why, it’s a different story, and there should be more exposure.

The easy fix is to output something to the log. It’d be nice to see something like:

attempting to connect to whatever using some method
connection to whatever failed due to some reason

Imagine how many log entries you’d have for 10 devices connecting every 60 seconds. Or 283 devices as https://data.syncthing.net/ says.

With 283 devices it’s about 4 lines per second, or a few hundred MB/year. You can contrast that with the 25TB that guy is apparently syncing. If you object to that, why not just log the errors? Just as easy and almost as useful.

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