Being An Arch User

An Unexpected Consequence

Hi, I woke up today wanting to make my Raspberry Pi even more useful.

Currently, it’s tasked with hosting this website, and it used to host an email until it randomly stopped working after an update.

Anyways, I tried to setup Syncthing as a pseudo NAS, to let me auto-sync my files remotely without needing both the destination and the source online at the same time.

I installed Syncthing, and setup nginx to passthrough the gui port localhost:8384 for Syncthing to a specific url on my website. This worked, the user interface for Syncthing appeared and I was able to connect to other devices. The problem: no files were being synced.

The exact issue I was having was a tcp connection version mismatch, one device wanted to use 303 and another wanted 301.

I spent probably about 20 minutes tinkering with nginx before realizing that everything was working perfectly and it wasn’t some strange nginx background filtering or conversion. It’s just that I am so used to Arch packages being up to date, that I never even considered that I would have to manually setup the Syncthing repo for the Raspberry Pi.

After setting up apt to fetch the latest version of Syncthing, everything ran perfectly smoothly. I just can’t believe that this is a thing people still have to do to install updated software on Linux. I understand why it hasn’t been fixed, but I would have expected maybe a community wiki+script pre-installed that connects package names to their official PPAs for you. Other distros should probably have one over-arching piece of software that can handle installing pretty much anything in one quick command like Arch does (like the paru command and it’s substitutes). Maybe this exists, idk, and I’m not super interested. I just got used to expecting easily installible updated software on Arch.

Also for anyone interested, I got tired of fixing my Arch install when it rarely broke, so I just switched to Garuda, which has more than all the settings and software I would have setup anyway.

Repair/Reinstallation time from 1-3hrs down to 30min tops.

That’s my weird story for today, thanks for sticking around :)

P.S. I do know that I can install ARM based Arch distros onto the pi, but I’m lazy and it’s already setup. Maybe another day, I’ve been looking into NIXOS, maybe that’s a good choice, we’ll see…