ST is showing wrong ip address in New Device warning

Support
1

2015-11-26 22:20:11: Device XXXXX-5YFANF3-TMRKVH7-EI6L5WF-IPNBLWP-XXXXX-AWBV2IJ-XXXXX (195.93.242.160:22067) wants to connect. Add new device?

Now the above warning looks like it is a normal new device message via the introducer however the ip address that is in there for that device is totally wrong. I do not have an ip adress like that in fact the ip for that device is shared by many devices within the same lan.

I use a custom discovery server (self signed certs) which runs on a vps. The ip of the vps is not that either.

Please bear in mind that the ID of the device is right but the ip shown is there wrong. No device that I know of has that ip address either. In fact it looks like the ip is in somewhere in Germany which I have noi relationship.

What is even more crazy is that another remote st node`s web gui is showing (similar new device do you want to add message) the same device with another unrelated ip.

I also do not use a custom relay server.

I am using .12x

2

That IP is in the default relay pool. So your device is connecting through one of the default relays.

3

Interesting.

I do not want any kind of relay since I am running my own discovery server here. Although I am not sure about the relationship between a relay and a discovery server. I thought that running a custom discovery server means I need no relay. Do I also have to run a relay too?

Anyway the bottom line is that I do not want any kind of external relays/discovery servers etc. So how do i disable all these external dependencies for good?

thanks

4

You can disable relays in the advanced settings.

Then you will need to make sure, that the devices can connect to each other (firewall / port forward).

5

If you didn’t need a relay previously you don’t need one now. There is a relaysEnabled setting under the options section of the advanced settings menu in the GUI.

If you are interested in running your own relay server the documentation is here: http://docs.syncthing.net/users/relaying.html

Configuring relays is also mentioned in the docs: http://docs.syncthing.net/users/config.html

6

Hi

Thanks for the replies.

What is the difference between a relay and a discovery server then? I thought that the discovery server handles all that already. Maybe I am wrong on this?

7

I have been using my own discovery server with all prior versions to 0.12x. To be honest, I did not know that such things as relays existed. Is this something introduced with 0.12x or was also avail in previous versions?

8

Discovery is an adressbook so devices can find each other (ip, port) by only knowing the device id.

Relay server will relay the data connection, so devices which are both behind NAT can sync.

9

It is new in v0.12 and allows 2 nodes that cannot reach each other directly to connect through a relay. Usually to get around firewalls.

The Relay and Discovery Server can run on the same system because they are designed to use different ports. They do 2 different jobs.

10

Were there relay stuff prior to 0.12x? Is this a recent introduction?

11

It was added in 0.12

12

I do not know much about the technical side of ST. So I have couple questions.

  • Prior to 0.12 I was just running the discovery server and everything worked great. Now I am still running the new discovery server. Will I need relays? I like not to rely on anyone else except my own setup.

  • What is the point of having a relay and discovery servers separately? Would not be nice if discovery server also provides the relay stuff? It seems to be complicating the setups. Because I have many devices (Windows, Linux, Android etc) and I now have to edit all the configs manually to add manual relays if I were to run my own relay.

  • Is it hard to setup the relay server?

  • Any security issues that are attached to connecting to public relays? Does it collect data, mostly privacy concerns?

13

Read the docs.

14

No, you don’t need relay.

I can’t speak for developers, but as I understand it:

Discovery server is basically necessary for ST to work as intended. For example, I can set IP addresses in config files for all my pc’s and NAS, but I cant do it for my mobile phone and laptop, because it’s constantly changing wifi networks on which it is connected.

Relay on the other hand is useful only in some situations and ST (if firewalls and stuff are set correctly) can work without it.

It’s not hard to set up relay server, but if you don’t want to rely on anybody, you need set up relaypool server. (I haven’t tried that so I cant tell how hard it is but if you run your own disco server you probably are able to run relaypool also).

AFAIU relay server cannot see what data you transfer, it only knows IP, port and device ID. It also knows how much data you transfer over it of course.

But as Audrius said: READ THE DOCS. It’s there.

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15

The above is :+1:, except for just

as you can actually tell your clients to talk to just your relay server directly, and skip the public pool server completely. It’s not really well documented how to do that, but the technique is to replace the relay pool server entry in the config with relay://your-ip:port.

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