Syncthing user rights

[m.holmes (mycroft holmes)]

Hi,

I recently had a problem with syncthing on a synology device. Basically, the issue was as follows: I tried to synchronize a folder full of music files with the “default” shared music folder on the NAS. However, to speed things up, I manually copied most of the files in place before starting the sync, and this basically stopped the device.

The cause of the problem turned out the fact that the manually-copied files were owned by me, while the syncthing created files are owned by some user sc-syncthing, the service tries to chown them, it fails (user and group sc-syncthing do have read/write permission in the music folder, but probably they can’t change file ownership) and so it stops permanently (i.e. synchronization never ends).

now, the reason I’m mentioning all this here is that a chown… was not even necessary: the file was readable/writable by everyone, even if the owner was someone else, so the error wasn’t indeed very serious. Additionally, all the files were already in sync, so just running chown manually with ssh, fixed the problem… until someone else drops a new file in the shared folder on the LAN.

Is there a “proper fix”? e.g. a set of user rights I should grant? (or a script for proper syncthing user creation/configuration)?

thanks in advance, MH

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

On Synology, you almost always want to check ignore permissions for the folder in Syncthing, so that Syncthing doesn’t even try to set permissions or react to changes in them. The files created by Syncthing will always be owned by the user running Syncthing. On Synology you should be fine by just granting that user read/write on the share.

[m.holmes (mycroft holmes)]

Thanks for the quick response! I’ll definitely try ignore permissions and I feel it’s the solution I was looking for.