Syncthing for reliable Dropbox replacment

I’m planning to replace my Dropbox with Syncthing. I have a couple computer that are online all the time and I would like any change I make on a laptop to be automatically pushed to my computers running syncthing. I think this is a pretty standard use case.

I have been testing this setup in parallel with Dropbox and I have noticed that in some locations (e.g. wifi at University) syncthing can’t connect but Dropbox work flawlessly. From what I can tell Dropbox runs on ports 80 and 443 which are standard for HTTP(S) so this may play a role. In the places where SSHing isn’t blocked I can create a SSH tunnel to one of the “always on” nodes and it works but it seems like a workaround that I need to enable manually. I’m really looking for solution that is worry free once it’s setup

What is something I can do to make syncthing work as reliably as dropbox in random locations?

Maybe you are interested in the upcoming relay support in version 0.12: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/commit/c87faace6b1181982afdd5a75d2a1f751b62b08b

Relay would only help, if the relay servers run on port 80 or 443 (in this case).

If you don’t have a “real” web server running on one of your always-on-nodes, you could change the port to 80 or 443 on that note and set up the manual port forwarding accordingly.

True. One could also consider an ssh tunnel on port 443 with ssh multiplexing: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Secure_Shell#Multiplexing