start in a predetermined WLAN

Hi I’ve got a degoogled Samsung S10e running Lineageos 19.1. I Successfully installed syncthing and managed to run and sync with a Synology NAS. I am on syncing in WLAN only. However, I tried to enable that it will run only in predetermined WLAN (thus at my private WLAN at home). I cannot activate this option. If I try to do so, Syncthing always displays the message to connect with a WLAN to add it to the list. However, I am connected to my WLAN. Is this a bug or a known problem or perhaps it is the user (I) who is not able to push the right buttons? Best, maguggi

Likely you need to enable location for it to work. It’s definitely a bug in that the popup should either detect if it’s wifi or location before giving a specific message, or say that “connect to wifi and/or enable location”. Plus maybe worth rechecking that enabling location is still necessary to get the wifi ssid, but likely it is still.

The app also needs to be allowed to use location all the time, not only while “in use” (which equals being in foreground). I’m not sure how this is solved in the current LineageOS, but in the Samsung’s stock ROM, the pop-up only seems to allow the latter, and you need to go into the OS app permission settings manually in order to allow the former.

That’s checked by the app though, and you’ll get prompted to enable it if it’s not there - that’s why I assumed that permission has to be in place already. Anyway, also worth a check. And yes, that’s not lineage or samsung specific: Since 11 (I think) you need to first enable location access while in use in the popup, then open app settings (syncthing-android gives you a link) to select that it can also access location in the background.

Thanks for your fast replies!

It is definitely necessary to activate location (i.e. to enable GPS). This finally resolved the main problem. The WLAN surfaced and I could choose. However, as soon as I turn off GPS (what I normally do) the message pops up: syncthing is deactivated, the SSID of the current WLAN is not on the whitelist. I always have the location deactivated unless I need it e.g. for navigation purposes. Is there a workaround?

@tomasz86 10.34: The location services were originally set to “while in use”, but I changed to “always”. However, the WLAN will show up even if set to “while in use”.

No there’s not. Android considers wifi ssids location information, thus syncthing can’t get it to compare to the allowlist when it’s disabled (didn’t check, from in this case only medium reliable memory).

Not if you leave the app running only in background for a longer period of time. It will fail to recognize the WiFi connection if it cannot access the location “always”.

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