A quick look at using Syncthing without discovery and TeX Live on Ubuntu 22.04

2024-10-27

As I mention on my "Now" page , I have recently moved to Stuttgart and started studying IT Automotive, which brought a few changes in my computing setup as well new requirements with it. On the one hand, I have to use the provided WiFi router in my new flat, which doesn't allow Syncthing's device discovery broadcasts on port 21027 for whatever reason - so that needed to be fixed. On the other, I'm already in the progress of writing my first small scientific essay, for which I'll use LaTeX of course - but the TeX Live Full installation seems to be broken on Ubuntu for quite some time now. Lucky, I have found solutions for both of these problems and want to share them without in this rather niche quick look...

As described on the firewall setup page of the Syncthing documentation, you need two ports to be open for it to fully work - 22000 for the actual sync protocol traffic over TCP or UDP and 21027 for TCP-based discovery broadcast over IPv4 and multicast over IPv6. In most home situations, both of these ports are open and functional, but some routers just like the trashy one I got with my flat seem to block the broad-/multicasts on 21027 for some mysterious reason. However, this isn't the end of the world, since Syncthing works fine, just fine without local discovery, if we manually tell it the addresses of all devices. To set this up, simply follow these steps:

Assign static IP addresses for all devices syncing over Syncthing either via the interface of your router or your device settings. Generally speaking, there should be an IP address section, where you can change the assigned address from an automatic one via DHCP to a manual one.
Make sure port 22000 works between all the devices by checking your firewall settings and pinging each other. If you can't get this to work, you can still edit the Sync Protocol Listen Addresses in the Connection settings of Syncthing to use another one instead.
Now for every device in the Syncthing network, add all other devices manually via Add Remote Device and change the Addresses field in the Advanced section from dynamic to tcp://[STATICIP]:22000, dynamic . If you needed to change the port, edit it here accordingly.
Once you linked all devices together, they should now be able to connect to each other just like normal and data syncing should start.

At the risk of exaggerating a bit, I believe that the word processing software you use is the biggest difference between a scientist or university student and an average employee. Sure, Word, LibreOffice Writer and maybe even Pages are great programs for everyday use and simple letters or documents. But once you start to add more advanced things like lots of math expressions, citations, references, drawings, charts et cetera you will have a terrible time with these solutions, since they get exponentially more complicated to use. LaTeX on the other hand, might be a bit more complicated to get started with, but once you have your base setup dialed in, adding advanced features like circuit drawings or 3D graphs isn't a big deal anymore. That's why it is so popular in the scientific community and why I want to get started with it right away (especially since I got an excellent template to work with from my employer). Unfortunately, the TeX Live Full installation is quite broken on Ubuntu right now ( sudo apt install texlive-full ) and will just stop at Pregenerating ConTeXt MarkIV format. This may take some time... without any progress in hours. Believe me or not, but according to this highly trustworthy post on Ask Ubuntu and my personal experience, the solution simply is to regularly hit Enter until the installation succeeds. A highly professional solution, isn't it?

With that said, I hope this rather niche one was helpful to you or if it wasn't you at least enjoyed wasting your time with it :) . As always, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day...

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