My KOReader Syncthing Journey

[MrCarl]

Hey.

To preface, I want to share that I'm not the brightest bulb in the box. This post may be redundant, or completely over complicated, but I had fun doing this, so I thought I'd share on the off chance that this would be interesting for anyone else.

I love syncthing with all my little heart, and I've learned a lot about linux recently out of boredom, so I thought that this project would be a perfect marriage of the two. In the past I had tried to setup syncthing using the KUAL plugin, but I couldn't get it working. This sent me down a rabbit hole with manually installing syncthing and messing with iptable configurations and firewall garbage that I didn't have much success with, and remembered very little of (remember my 25W personal problem).

So, below is the culmination of my tinkering and it's been working for me really well. This, in theory, should work on any ereader, but I've only got kindles so you're on your own.

Inspired by: Anarcat

1. Download the Syncthing ARM32 binary
2. Extract and transfer just the syncthing file to the /mnt/us/ folder on the kindle.
   • I've put the file in /bin/ but on my wifes kindle it wouldn't let me write there. Maybe I'm dumb, but /mnt/us/ seems to work just fine.
3. OPTIONAL: Open KOReader terminal and create the alias s and point it to /mnt/us/syncthing
4. Enable SSH Server
5. run s from KOReader terminal to run Syncthing from here out
   • Config file is located in /mnt/us/koreader/.local/syncthing/config.xml if you wanna dink around.
6. To connect to the WebGUI run

   ssh -p 2222 -L 9999:localhost:8384 root@READERIP

   on a computer replacing READERIP with the ereaders local IP
7. Now you can access the kindles syncthing WebGUI with 127.0.0.1:9999 in a browser. Super cute

For me, I made sure to set folders as Send Only or Receive Only to prevent file breakages because of the infrequency of connection to the server. i.e. the hashdocsettings folder I have set to Send Only on Kindle and Receive Only on my server so if I accidentally delete a file or folder it wont update to my kindle when I connect. And vice verse for my books folder.

Thanks for reading!

Also I'm new to BBCode, so, sorry if this doesn't look pretty. Also, I'm not a networking genius so this may be insecure and I wouldn't leave syncthing running all the time. Make sure to set up a GUI password and username.