A while ago I asked for help; @tomasz86 was good enough to try to help; somehow I failed to see that reply and the topic was closed due to inactivity. So I take the liberty of resuming the discussion here (and I have made a note to check the forum for replies).
tomasz86 asked me to check that the environmental variable STNOUPGRADE is unset. It is unset. Indeed not even ProcessExplorer shows it as set - though (oddly?), ProcessExplorer does seem to show two instances of syncthing.exe, every time I run Syncthing. I run Syncthing via a batch file that Windows Task Scheduler runs on boot. That batch file does this: Start "Syncthing" /B "C:\Portable_apps\syncthing\syncthing.exe" "-no-browser" "-no-console".
I find that running C:\Portable_apps\syncthing\syncthing.exe -upgrade manually produces the following, even when I disable my firewall.
INFO: Couldn't fetch release information: Get "https://upgrades.syncthing.net/meta.json": dial tcp 143.244.196.6:443: connectex: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
2023/09/13 10:45:33 WARNING: Upgrade: no version to select
Possibly this problem owes to server business - see here.
Thanks. I found that initially I could not open that URL. Then I disabled my firewall and then the page opened. I restarted Syncthing, with the firewall still disabled. Syncthing still showed that updates were disabled. Then I re-enabled the firewall. And then the URL continued to be openable.
Thanks. Sorry for the blemishes upon my immediately previous post: ‘business’ should have been ‘busyness’; and I should have added that Syncthing continues to say that automatic upgrades are ‘unavailable/disabled’.
I think it would help me to hear under just what conditions Syncthing gives that latter message.
You get that when it gets an error from the upgrade check, in this case (likely) caused by a problem reaching the upgrade server. You can get maximum info about what it sees like this:
> set STTRACE=upgrade
> C:\Portable_apps\syncthing\syncthing.exe -upgrade
I think it should be a bit more careful about going into unavailable/disabled since it disables a bunch of UI stuff, but that’s only tangentially related.
Thanks. Does the extra information go somewhere other than the terminal output? For, I see only this:
PS > set STTRACE=upgrade
PS > C:\Portable_apps\syncthing\syncthing.exe -upgrade
2023/09/13 13:23:10 INFO: Couldn't fetch release information: Get "https://upgrades.syncthing.net/meta.json": dial tcp 143.244.196.6:443: connectex: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
2023/09/13 13:23:10 WARNING: Upgrade: no version to select
PS > C:\Portable_apps\syncthing\syncthing.exe -upgrade
2023/09/13 13:24:37 INFO: Couldn't fetch release information: Get "https://upgrades.syncthing.net/meta.json": dial tcp 143.244.196.6:443: connectex: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
2023/09/13 13:24:37 WARNING: Upgrade: no version to select
Solved. The problem was a ‘split-tunnelling’ feature of my VPN - a feature that has never worked properly. Disabling that feature enabled auto-update. Thank you, calmh and bt90.