Logging function

[SecretArea]

Hello, is there a way to enable a log of successful and unsuccessful login attempts and messages in the server part of the syncplay? I'd like to know what's going on under the hood.

[Et0h]

The Syncplay server doesn't have built-in logging because it's not something we use for our public server which is one of the main use cases we have developed around. The issue of successful/unsuccessful logins isn't really relevant for our public servers because they are not password protected, and instead the room names become the de facto passwords.

The regular Syncplay server application notes failed login attempts by printing something along the following lines to the console:
Client drop: 127.0.0.1 -- Wrong password supplied

Depending on your OS, you might be able to pipe these messages to some sort of log file.

This will not tell you about successful login attempts. If you want that then you would need to modify the Syncplay server source code and either build your own version or run from the source code.

The password checking function is within protocol.py and is called _checkPassword which is called from the login function called handleHello.

If you are logging personal information then will probably need to consider the relevant legal requirement of the countries in which you operate. For example if you have logging then you may wish to specify this in your server MOTD (to complement the longstanding warning in the Syncplay client which states: "Do not use Syncplay to send sensitive information.").

If you want usage states then you can specify a --stats-db-file as per https://syncplay.pl/guide/server/

[SecretArea]

Thank you for such a detailed answer! I tried using the --stats-db-file key, I didn't quite figure out what it was for, but I couldn't get the server to write anything to the database.

[Et0h]

If you specify --stats-db-file [filepath] as a command line option for the server then it will create a SQLite database at [filepath] assuming Syncplay has write access to the path. If the file already exists then Syncplay will update the file instead. Every hour the server will then go through every room and for each watcher add the snapshot time and the Syncplay version of the user. As nobody is on when you first launch Syncplay nothing will be recorded until 1 hour after the server is launched.

So, that's how data is recorded. You will then have to extract this from the database using a tool such as DB Browser for SQLite. You can then use a spreadsheet to count how many users there is per recording event, which will tell you how many hourly users there are on the server.

It is not very detailed, but that's because it was created for the Syncplay server and all we are interesting in is the general level of usage and the proportion of users on newer/older versions. This information can help inform our decisions on server management and the need for continued backwards compatibility with older versions.

The hourly snapshot interval as defined by SERVER_STATS_SNAPSHOT_INTERVAL in constants.py as 3,600 seconds so if you want to change it then you will need to change that value in the source code.