On occasion I find myself needing to send a file at least a few gigabytes in size to a friend across our slow ISPs but haven’t found a satisfying solution. I usually end up creating a private torrent with the announce address of my own IP. Even though it’s slow - it basically never reaches my max upload speed for some reason, it is at least resilient if there are ever any network glitches.
Does anyone else face this same challenge?
EDIT: Thank you for the awesome suggestions! I have some homework to do on these
Er, wait, are you using Syncthing for its intended purpose of syncing files across devices on your local network? And then exposing that infrastructure to the internet? Or are you isolating Syncthing instances?
Syncthing is not limited to local network. It’s hole punching is one of the major features
The fact that Syncthing seems to solve CGNAT on its own has me wondering why there are not more solutions for the server/home side.
Why does Wireguard or any other VPN not work like Tailscale or Zerotier?
Why don’t torrent clients can’t work with IPv6 to seed more?
Why doesn’t Plex adopt a similar mechanic like Syncthing to expose the media over the Internet instead of being a prisoner of CGNAT?
I know I am just throwing different options with my personal frustrations lol, but I hope you get what I am trying to mean, Plex, torrent and home VPN users shouldn’t become masters at networking, especially when the documentation for the tools IS NOT ENOUGH.
Syncthing is not just for LAN use. Even their homepage mentions transmitting data over the internet
https://syncthing.net/
I’ve been using it to sync devices over the internet for years. It’s also how people use it to sync from say their desktop to their phones, remote server, etc.
If you watch your network firewall Syncthing does reach out to servers on the internet to help it find other devices so e.g. if you enter the other device’s ID (example ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG-ABCDEFG) it can reach out over the internet to find that specific ID to pair with. I think Syncthing uses a sort of DHT resolver to find other devices, I know on my firewall I had to whitelist Syncthing’s servers to make it work.
I was going to try to link you some references but their forums seem to have connection issues at the moment, you may want to search around later if you’re interested how Syncthing works over the internet.
Syncthing is designed to be used over the internet, it’s why it supports NAT hole punching, relay servers, and discovery servers.
It’s very much a WAN solution too. I use it to push my files to a Pi Zero W that’s 200 miles from my house. I use it as an off site store of my files. The Pi is connected as an untrusted device in Syncthing so that all files sit encrypted at rest.