Yulqen

Running Syncthing on OpenBSD

I am trying OpenBSD again.

I momentarily went back to NixOS and then thought better of it. It’s great, it’s clever, it’s a tinkerer’s nightmare.

So, on the old Thinkpad X201 upon which I throw operating systems to play around, I have installed OpenBSD again.

The installation didn’t go particularly well this time and I had a few problems with doas. Anyway.

And then it came to installing and setting up syncthing which I rely upon to keep all my machines in the same state. As is often the case, I didn’t read the docs properly. I initially set it up to run as an rc script. However, by default this will run it under the _syncthing user, with the root directory as /var/syncthing and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how I must have got round the ensuing permissions issues on my other machines. I didn’t bother (or didn’t think) to check how I started syncthing on those machines - I just assumed I used systemd and started the process at system level. Not so. (I used .xinit and friends…)

So then I followed the advice in the docs and started the process as my user. What’s great is that the docs advise starting the process inside a tmux session:

tmux new-session -d -s syncthing '/usr/local/bin/syncthing'

I use tmux all the time but I don’t do anything other than create sessions and windows to split up various projects and workflows, so I’m happy to see this use case - it makes perfect sense. Also, to start at boot using cron, with @reboot tmux new-session -d -s syncthing '/usr/local/bin/syncthing' is awesome, and I never have to think about it again.