I have just seen well produced tutorial video explaning how to install syncthing on FreeNAS 11.2 OS for a single-user with UID 983 and single-group with GID 983.
Consider that you have at the server multiple syncthing users who want to backup their data at the FreeNAS server. I have not found any instructions or tutorial how to setup the syncthing at the freenas for multiple users. As I see there is still only way that all users would synchronize the data at the FreeNAS server via the user 983. But it means that everyone sees everything. And noone want it…
I do not understand why it is problem to setup it at the FreeNAS server, while it can be solved at any other unix machine as different user-specific syncthing services: Syncthing as automatic user specific service
Each user has then his/her syncthing specific setup page under different port or IP address, I do not remember well now, but I believe it is the port.
Would you be available to try to help me to solve this problem? I do not believe I am the only one user who would love to have user specific syncthinng runs at his/her FreeNAS server.
Or just mention what is the crucial issue why it is impossible now…
The simplest way to do this would be If each user was running Sycnthing on their workstations then you would connect each workstation to a folder that you create per user on the instance of Syncthing running on FreeNAS and this would forgo the need for each user to be setup in FreeNAS.
Yes that make sense, there is no any way how to setup synthing at the users’ workstations. The issue is with the syncthing at the FreeNAS machine, there the synthing is running under UID 983 and GID 983 as default and noone is presenting how to change it and not broke the FreeNAS system.
Before, I was trying to setup it for multiple suers at FreeNAS 9.3 version and it was a disaster which ended with FreeNAS system reinstall everytime. After 3 years when I come back to FreeNAS, it appears nothing changed in the version 11.2.
Now I see the only way how to setup syncthing for multiple users at the FreeNAS server stays as follows:
Lets call the user 983 as “sync”, and its primary group 983 as “sync”.
Then we have user1 with primary group user1, and user2 with a primary group user2.
Lets have a dataset point at the FreeNAS server /mnt/pool/SyncthingData for storing of syncthing synchronized data.
The only one way how I can see it could work for multiple user is as follows:
Add the user sync into groups user1 and user2.
Execute syncthing under user “sync”.
Create folders /mnt/pool/SynthingData/user1 (user owner is sync, group owner is user1 group, both user and group can read and write) and /mnt/pool/SynthingData/user2 (user owner is sync, group owner is user2 group, both user and group can read and write).
User1 is sharing the data into subfolders in /mnt/pool/SynthingData/user1 where everything belongs to the sync user and user1 group. Similarly for the user2 in the user2 folder.
This is the only way how I can imagine now that one user “sync” is synchronizing data for two different users and different users are not able to see data of different user/s, if the settings at the user1 or user2 directories are set as: drwxrwx—
But there is still a security risk if someone will hack the user “sync” with the UID 983 than the “hacker” can see everything, similarly as if someone would hack the “root” user of the system. From this point of view it is not really true that the set password for the “sync” user is unimportant, as mentioned in the provided tutorial video.
Please any opinions? Do you agree this would work or would you suggest a different more optimal strategy?