Seafile client wont connect to server

Seafile client wont connect to server

First off I would like to recommend Seafile if you need a private, secure “Cloud storage” alternative to commercial ones like Box, Dropbox, Google drive, One or any of the other alternatives out there. There are also other self-hosted alternatives, but I haven’t managed to find one as flexible and stable as Seafile.

But, yes there is always a but… Sometimes you run into some kind of problem. My better half told me she wasn’t able to connect to Seafile through the client anymore, what to do what to do. I checked the Seafile logs on the server, nothing interesting there, except the error below:
[12/12/14 20:05:49] ../common/peer.c(949): [Net Error] Peer XXXXXX@XXXXXX-PC (07a0f6f20c) down
[12/12/14 20:05:49] ../common/processors/keepalive2-proc.c(475): [Keepalive] Error from peer 515 peer down
[12/12/14 20:05:49] ../common/processor.c(218): [Proc] Shutdown processor keepalive2-proc(-1090) for bad update: 515 peer down
[12/12/14 20:18:24] ../common/connect-mgr.c(266): Unknown peer 07a0f6f20cbb3df954c6716289b034124dc1dbcc connecting

Well this did not tell me much except it might be client related. I went and took a look at her PC, shut down the Seafile client and started it again while tailing the error log on the server. I noticed that the client took extremely long time to start, so I decided to check the local client’s log files. Surprise, one of the log files was ~10MB, this in itself could cause long load times during start of the client, so I tried packing the log files and let the client create new logs. Problem solved. The client starts fast and it connects to the server instantaneously.

So advice to others that might experience a slow client, long connect time to the server – Check the clients local log files.

Windows users can find it here:
C:\Users\\ccnet\logs\ccnet.log

Linux users:
~/.ccnet/logs/ccnet.log