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Comment by stragies | Hacker News Reader

The super-annoying thing about that, is that you need a Sync-Server, and an "Identity" server to run this all without having sign in to "Firefox Sync".

The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.

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Mozilla really can’t win can they? They’re the only browser company that even attempts to provide the ability to run your own syncing service, and yet the insinuation is that they’re going out of their way to make it difficult.

Turns out the sum of something’s value isn’t just what it can do but how easy it is to make it do the thing is claims to do.

I'm not sure, that can be stated as fact, but for this subtopic (How to run all FXA and syncserver selfhosted) the docs make it sound easy to deploy/run. As expected, after all, the featureset needed isn't huge for "Maintain a list of tabs per browsers per User, authenticated via some backend plugin for the syncserver". But then you read, that you need to run half a dozen "fxa-something" servers, in addition to the SyncServer. And a clear writeup of those is what I briefly check for every few months, but haven't found yet.

to be clear, by "intentionally" I meant, that I could understand, if it were a business decision to allocate less/no developer time to making the "100% self-hosted"-option very attractive/documented/easy. I did not mean to insinuate intentional hurdle-introductions via code, or some-such.

Is this serious? Your criciticism is that... they offer their service and the possibility to self-host?

No, I meant, they make it look like you could do this all easily without external clouds, but then the Identity-server, which I cannot imagine to be much more complicated w.r.t. functionality that e.g. a Samba4 AD-DC, is/was(last time i checked) basically undocumented and looked intentionally overbuilt (again, comparing with e.g. Samba4-AD). And not open-source (iirc). Also, why can't I use a standard Directory Server, instead of their home-built one-off-solution?

The Firefox Sync Storage source code, licensed under MPL-2.0 and fully documented, is right here:

https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

It includes a Docker Compose setup.

Standard directory servers aren't specifically built for end-to-end encryption, while data in Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Firefox Sync must also scale to support the millions of Firefox users who use Mozilla's instance.

Hi, thanks for replying with information. You seem to more than me about the current situation, i'm happy to learn more.

So the above (synstorage-rs_in_container) is now the only required software needed, and now includes the identity-server portion?

I would really like to use the "beam-a-tab-to-some-other-firefox", been a FF user since before it got that name. But i wanted to self-host all parts, and then found some info, that suggested, that 2 parts are needed: the SyncServer, the above open-source thing, and the Identity-server, on which i did not find much info at the time.

Do you have a link to recent-ish write-up of the current situation, that you can validate to be correct-ish?

Thanks again

Also, w.r.t Directory-Servers/Security: Enterprise printers have been able to authenticate Users with SSL/TLS-secured connection for more than a decade. So why not a "syncserver for URLs of open tabs per User"?

I don't think Mozilla has a recent write-up (blog post) about the Sync Server. The most recent one I found is an announcement from 2020, which explains some of Mozilla's motivations:

https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2020/09/15/the-future-of-s...

But, as you mentioned, the current documentation is here:

https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...

You might also find the unofficial Arch User Repository package, comments, and PKGBUILD file helpful:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-syncstorage-git

I hope it works out for you!

The syncserver is the trivial part. The less-well-documented web of 5-8 fxa-yxzablgt services (FX-Account-server) that you need to also run is the issue. The docker github readme warns against anything but "messing around" type usage, and the last update there was 7 years ago. ( fxa-content-server fxa-profile-server fxa-auth-server fxa-oauth-server browserid-verifier fxa-auth-db-mysql )

I've tried this before, and you're right about it not being easy to follow, at least compared to previous incarnations. The above documentation is for a much older version, and the latest I found is here:

https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...

There's a lot of components directly hooked into Google Cloud that also make it difficult in terms of configuration. At some point I think creating an actual user's guide for this would be good for the community interested in self-hosting this on their own.

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