Re: [tlug] Tuesday at THS: "Sync and share your data with Syncthing"?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > Steve and I were at the Syncthing presentation last night at THS, so I
 > guess we're equipped to discuss it and maybe even demo it at TLUG
 > this

Unfortunately I won't be there; I'm presenting a paper at 2pm in
Shionan, Kanagawa.

 > weekend if anybody's interested. It sounds pretty good to me, though
 > there are some issues.

I agree with all of that.  It turns out that it's probably not
appropriate for the use case I had in mind (staff member drops files
into a directory, grants view and read permissions to appropriate
committee members), but it looks like an excellent solution for a
multihomed individual (ie, wants local access of files on multiple
devices).

 > Right. So the biggest caveat I had with Syncthing relates to this: it
 > runs in a loose mesh with trust transitive between all nodes and no
 > at-rest encryption, so once one node is compromised the whole system
 > is compromised. (Unlike with Dropbox or similar, it looks like you
 > can't easily and centrally turn off sync for malicious actor because
 > there is no central configuration.)
 > 
 > That means that you've got a fair amount of exposure should someone
 > get access to one of your cloud servers.

This sorta sounds like a job for Kerberos, but that's a pretty
centralized system.

 > > I want to download the updates only on one device, propagate to the
 > > others and keep one copy on a server. The only workable way is to
 > > duplicate the respective device directory to the server (say 3GB), for
 > > each device (=12GB).

@Kalin: have you considered CodaFS?  It's a caching file system, so
you only need to have the files you actually use on the device(s).
http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_(file_system)

Steve