Using Syncthing servers and relay for a different purpose

Hi all,

For a personal project related to discovery/bootstrapping protocols, I am looking for the possibility to use Syncthing’s announcement servers as well as relay servers. Going through this infrastructure will allow me to test my implementations, but I want to know if it is legal to use these different servers for another purpose than Syncthing?

I didn’t find anything about it on the syncthing site, so I was wondering if community members could confirm or disprove this idea.

For all that we know people might already be doing it, and we just would not know.

It’s not like libraries for all of these are easily available, so expect to put in some work lobotomizing the existing code/rewritting protocols, etc.

I guess it’s unfair from our perspective to “approve” this, as people dedicate relays for the purpose of syncthing.

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Hi, there.

I’m Not A Lawyer and I definitively can’t speak for the whole ‘Syncthing community’, but only for myself.

I’ve setup a Syncthing relay server on one of my public servers and I have thoughts about setting up a second one soon. It’s a way to contribute back to the community, to participate and to be loyal with my fellow Syncthing users and administrators, since I sometimes use part of their bandwidth and cpu.

You ask if your idea would “be legal”. I guess that if you would like to use Syncthing services, as provided to the community, for anything else than what they’re intended for, then you would need to explicitly acquire formal approval by each of the server owners and their administrators.

Apart from the (il-)legal aspect of it, if it was me somehow realizing that someone was using my Syncthing relay service(s) for anything else than Syncthing traffic, directly or indirectly, without me having explicitly approved it, I might get upset and could potentially be seen doing anything possible (and some) to come after the responsible for the misuse.

Just my personal reaction. Others may see it differently.

Speaking personally I’d rather you didn’t, for the reasons mentioned. Running the central services also incurs a cost, a cost that we cover by donations to the Syncthing project.

You are of course totally welcome to run the same code on your own $5 VPS or whatever, and use the protocol as you see fit.

5 Likes

Feel free to use these:

Discovery: https://discosrv.tk:8443/?id=554GCWZ-7TSUAIF-UEZPIWY-6AVBFKD-D77HEDC-6MT2QMO-KC542YI-EKUX2AC

Relay: relay://discosrv.tk:22067/?id=554GCWZ-7TSUAIF-UEZPIWY-6AVBFKD-D77HEDC-6MT2QMO-KC542YI-EKUX2AC

2 Likes