Double Syncs
When normally installed, Synclias has the same access to sites as any machine on your network, which means that if a site is blocked completely, the scanner doesn’t function.
This causes what has been termed the “Double Sync” problem, where two Syncs are required to get a site to work completely. It’s more of an inconvenience but if a site isn’t working after a Sync, it’s worth bearing in mind.
Example of the Double Sync Issue
As an example, lets say:
- There’s a site you want to access: website.1234.local but it’s completely blocked by IP.
- This site stores pictures and videos on pics.1234.local and vids.1234.local
When the scanner first runs, it won’t be able to scan the site and discover ‘pics….’ and ‘vids….’, but you’ll be offered to add the ‘website….’ site to the list anyway.
On the first sync, ‘website….’ will work, but it won’t load anything from ‘pics…..’ or ‘vids….’ won’t load, because the VPN doesn’t know about them.
On the second sync, the scanner can read the website’s code, and sees the links to ‘pics….. and ‘vids….’, so this time, it’ll add them both and the site should work fine.
Sites this Affects
They’re fairly rare, mainly it’s any site that doesn’t return anything back at all apart from a “Not available in your country” If a site shows a website but then warns about your location, or something else blocking it, you should get some decent results on the first time through.
Ways around This
There’s really only two ways to deal with the issue:
- Add the machine running the synclias scanner to always route it’s traffic over the VPN, this is easy to do on the firewall, but if you’re sharing that machine with other uses it might not be desirable
- Remember when adding new sites that this could be a problem, and when adding a site use the process “Scan, Sync, Scan, Sync”