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Comment by simplehuman | Hacker News Reader

Why does Mozilla make it hard to run the sync server (easily) on our own? Just give a docker file. Instead you need a sync server, your own account server.. such poor technical design. These are small features that will make many stick to Firefox.

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"This is an all-in-one package for running a self-hosted Firefox Sync server. It bundles the "tokenserver" project for authentication and the "syncstorage" project for storage, produce a single stand-alone webapp."

https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver

This doesn't contain the accounts server, only the sync: https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html

Thank you for pointing that out, I don't use the sync feature because I don't like giving too much info to 3rd party services but I never considered running it on one of my servers.

I've just skimmed through this guide: https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html#h...

It doesn't look too difficult and it says that running your own account server is optional. Or does it mean that you can run your own sync server using a mozilla account? I'm not sure I understand how sync server and accounts server interact exactly...

This is exactly the problem. They have just made it hard for no reason. I want concrete information as well with an easy to run guide. It's not clear why I need to use Mozilla accounts.

> for no reason

What's the reason that they should accommodate you and write you a dockerfile?

You can run a sync server that accepts tokens from Mozilla, but I'm not sure it makes any sense that way. The only difference is that you'll have some audit over sync blob store access logs, but that's about it.

I self-host my own weave server which is significantly easier to set up and run. They haven't dropped support for that yet.

Try connecting to it with a new profile on a recent Firefox without jumping through hoops.

Yeah, I know the process isn't exactly straightforward.

If you are currently hosting a Sync 1.1 server I strongly encourage you to migrate to 1.5, we removed the legacy parts of Sync in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1296767 which means it will not work anymore on Firefox 54.

I'll investigate that, thanks. However, the last time I checked I'd have to set up and run a separate account server service as well and since weave still works I had no reason to invest the effort into switching.

Regardless, I'll likely be switching to FF 52 ESR so the point will be moot.

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