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Comment by neolefty | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing that Syncthing (Pulse) is just like BTSync, except you set it up manually, and that the developers don't have any plans to add peer discovery.

But peer discovery is the whole point of BTSync. Sure, Syncthing/Pulse is an improvement over rsync, but only an incremental one. BTSync, with its peer discovery, is a radical improvement.

Even having a roadmap for peer discovery would make me a lot more interested in it. As it is, no thanks, I have better things to do than maintain N^2 configuration problems.

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There is a global syncthing discovery service. Nodes can locate each other by ID using that service. The code for that server is open source and you can run your own on your own network. Individual nodes on the same subnet can discover each other without the discover service.

You do need to know the node ID and repository ID, and the nodes both need to establish that relationship. But the mutual acceptance of the node ID is how trust is established so I don't see how that could be made optional. They could allow for UI improvements where the user is prompted to add a repository that has been published from another node rather than requiring that to be manually added, but that's just a ui change.

I haven't used btsync so I'm unclear on what specifically is missing on syncthing in this respect. It seems to be pretty good with respect to discovery.

BTSync is a radical improvement in the network protocols but I still can't get the btsync web ui to change my password. You could say that their priorities are in the right place for an open source project, which they are not. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept and most of the implementation of btsync. But they are holding themselves back, leaving an opportunity for projects like Pulse. That said, Pulse is dead in the water without peer-discovery. How do I connect to a peer with Pulse if there is no central server?

I suspect that you have specified a password in your BitTorrent Sync configuration file. Settings set in the configuration file will override settings set through the WebUI (after restart). Consider specifying your password either in the configuration file or using the WebUI, but not both.

Open question: couldn't peer discovery be coordinated over a bitcoin like network?

Seems like a weird and slow way to handle peer discovery. Why not the traditional DHT? There's even a DHT lib written in Go and a package specifically to find peers with the DHT called wherez.

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