Syncthing for Enterprise Cloud Solution?

Here is a question:

Can i go ahead and use Syncthing in an enterprise setup? so far it seems to do what is says it does which is syncing folders between devices?

Albeit there is a few issues i have with slow speeds sometimes and fast speeds sometimes . In addition one needs to know the best device sync arrange to have a working cloud solution.

You could but it is not the intended purpose.

You will loose ownership information, ST is designed to be run as a single user and all files it creates will belong to that user.

The index of each of the connected devices is held in memory. This probably doesn’t scale to suit enterprise.

There is no centralised authentication, you would have to run introducers and add new clients appropriately. Once added they would have to be removed from each device if required. Again not scalable.

I am sure there are many other reasons it probably isn’t appropriate but these are the most obvious to me.

Hi Kluppy i was just wondering why you are the only one that responded.

If you say its not the intended purpose then my understanding is different. According to https://syncthing.net/ “Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it’s transmitted over the Internet.”

What is the intended purpose of Syncthing then? Well just to clear things up im ot talking about some “large enterprise coorporation” here. Im talking about a small office of about 6 people.

It is through running and testing and proving what the Syncthing can do that will make people know the advantages and disadvantages of Syncthing leading a better and more refined product. Or am i wrong here. Just using Syncthing for sharing data with “friends” wont work because it wont be practical sometimes. For example my friends will not know or even bother install syncthing they dont care about it.

But a real setting where cloud is needed other than personal use is of course a business environment and there it is easy to instal, test, support and give feedback on how it works.

Just my thinking Kluppy…

Your question was kind of vague and an “enterprise setup” is sort of unspecified. Certainly none of us are going to stop you using Syncthing for whatever purpose you like. :wink: Syncthing currently isn’t optimized for the enterprise, in the ways @kluppy highlighted.

For your purposes I suspect the real answer is try it out, and if it does what you need then all is good. If it doesn’t, file issues on what you find missing and we’ll see what we can do about it. Otherwise I’m still not really sure of what you’re asking…

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Thanks Jakob. You just answered me even though you still say you not really sure what i am asking…hehe.

My question was “Can one use Syncthing in a business setting?” for example an office like an Architect’s office where there 5 or 6 users, to sync data between devices.

I’m am in Namibia by the way. I will be happy to give feedback on how it is doing/performing/working and all things that i find out as a result of using Syncting.

I did extensive research on cloud software that does not include 3rd party servers and landed on Syncthing.

i hope my question is clear now.

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Hi @windhoeker

Where I come from anything less than 50 users is normally considered small to medium business and people start to refer to enterprise solutions around the 150+ user mark. I know this isn’t the definition of the word but it it “accepted” marketing practice.

For your use case I think ST could be a wonderful solution but as Jakob said you will have to try it out.

The devs are amazing and usually respond very quickly to questions and issues. They work hard to improve the system but what I was really trying to say is there are no specific plans to make ST scale to a 50+ user base per cluster. Note I am referring to users not devices. There are some very big clusters of devices reported to the stats server which I could not imagine trying to maintain if there was an enormous user base as well.

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I say; give it a go! Unless you need to keep ownership rights it may indeed deliver the folder syncronization you need. Some tinkering with the settings may be needed, and you may find it useful to have at least one device running 24/7.

Thanks @kluppy. All is clear now then. i will go ahead and implement this cloud solution for a few artchitects seeing their offices are 6 users mostly.

Hey @krmathis thanks for the response. Sorry for being a little bit “dump” what are these Ownership rights you refer to?

Yes. In one particular office there is 1 Windows PC Server running 24/7. So there is Syncthing running on this server. This acts as the central server computer that keeps all data.

Namibia is in Southern Africa for those who don’t have a clue what country this is.

Anyone correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it Syncthing will not transfer a specific file/folders ownership upon syncing, but assign it to the current logged in user.

Let’s say file A is owned by user 1 with read access for anyone. If user 2 sync this file it will appear on the other nodes as if the file is owned by user 2 and hence also write access. It may not be of importance, but please take note.

That is correct @krmathis.

ST creates all files as the user who runs the process creating the file.

To do otherwise it would have to be run as root/administrator. Even then there would be issues of the users not existing an all devices.

My android phone doesn’t have the same user accounts on it that my laptop, work machines and client machines I have set up.

Couldn’t an inotify process or similar deal with the permissions end of things?

Have Syncthing do the secure transport piece, and have inotify / scripts deal with the local perms etc?

The architects want their files, Syncthing is only getting it to their server / pcs, it’s the local admin that manipulates the data from there to their individual machines.

I reckon it’s not in Syncthing’s remit to deal with anything past transport (Android excepted).

For this specific use case I expect it’s fine - each user will want to own their copy of the files. This issue really only comes into play when someone tries syncing all of /home for a bunch of user with one Syncthing instance. Which isn’t the way to do it.

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