Bitcoin Cash full node learning experience.

[Klee]

Dragged out some unused computer parts to be able to run a Bitcoin Cash full node for learning and for the lol's.

Cpu: Amd Phenom 940 4 core black edition running at 3.3 Ghz
Cpu cooler: AMD Oem that was never used until now since the fan on the aftermarket cooler is on its last legs.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4 socket AM2+ Ultra Durable
Ram: 4 Gigs DDR2 1066 GSkill
Video card: Nvidia GTX 650
Hard Drive: One HGST 2 TB. I expect a lot of reads and writes and these things last forever almost.
Case: Antec 900 case with Blue case fans.....increases the coolness factor.
Power Supply: Thermaltake 430w
Operating System: Ubuntu 16.04.02

Information for running a Bitcoin Cash Full node under Linux is pretty sparse but I found easy to install instructions.
Bitcoin ABC Ubuntu repo has been updated to serve 0.14.6 • r/BitcoinABC
Took all of about two minutes to install.

Now its downloading the Blockchain and that will take a quite a while.

If your wondering why Bitcoin Cash since everyone seems to be screaming that its a crap alt coin now, its not the "real" Bitcoin ect, its because currently it only has about %5 of the network hash rate has that bitcoin has and really needs some more full nodes.

It's also important to consider the low network hash rate because it started out at the fork with %100 of the Bitcoin mining difficulty and when the difficulty auto adjusts downward it will have WAY less difficulty compared to Bitcoin for a few weeks or months, well assuming Bitcoin Cash does not crash and burn.

And that will allow me to run my KNC Jupiter Bitcoin asic miner, at ~625 GH/s by the way, to maybe mine a few coins.

All the hardware is already paid for so except for electricity it will be all profit if any, but I am thinking of getting another power supply for the miner.

After it finishes downloading the blockchain I'll need to configure everything and forward port 8333 to the node.

I'm not too worried about security since it will not have any important data on it at all, but hopefully I wont get DDoS'd or hammered on too much.

 

[Klee]

 

[JazzFaucet]

Just out of curiosity, is the Jupiter a stand-alone appliance? By which I mean, do you simply plug it into your network and away it goes, or do you need a machine with the block chain on it as described in your first post to act as an intermediary between the Jupiter and the big bad Internet?

 

[Klee]

Was having issues due to the node program only connecting to a handful of other nodes with severely limited the download speed of the blockchain plus causing issues with also connecting with regular Bitcoin node which caused errors with the blockchain and spit out database errors.

I discovered you can specify only Bitcoin ABC nodes by i.p. address from a list I found on Reddit and that increased the download speed massively.

Will post later with more info.

 

[Klee]

Just out of curiosity, is the Jupiter a stand-alone appliance? By which I mean, do you simply plug it into your network and away it goes, or do you need a machine with the block chain on it as described in your first post to act as an intermediary between the Jupiter and the big bad Internet?

It's a stand alone asic miner that uses a BeagleBone Black computer running Linux as a controller. You configure it via a web interface.


I read some info online today that it is probably too old to be profitable except for maybe a VERY short time.

 

[Klee]

Showing the increase in download speed of the blockchain as I manually added nodes to connect to.

After adding about 8 or 10 nodes to connect to and running for an hour or so.

 

[Klee]

It seems to download the blockchain real fast until it is about 3 years behind then the download drops to almost zero, has done this three times. I changed a couple of things and started downloading the blockchain all over again.

When I mean slow i'm talking 33k dialup speeds.......sssslllllooooowwwww.

I pointed it to the newest most up to date nodes I could find and went ahead and opened up port 8333 to this pc so hopefully it will finish in a day or two.

 

[Klee]

Router stats:

Not too bad for being WAY out in the sticks, 20 miles from the closest Walmart if that tells you anything, and about 1/8 the speed compared to my workplace.

 

[Klee]

It stopped downloading the blockchain again and crashed, this time with less than a year behind.

But I figured out what is going on, it was filling up my var partition with error logs.

I had created a 5 gig var partition, I usually do that so if something real bad happens and all else fails I can at least run a live cd and look at the logs.

Everytime Bitcoin ABC encountered a error it wrote to the log until there was no more room and then it locked up.

Also Ubuntu 17.04 is recommended not 16.04.02

So I installed Ubuntu 17.04 on a single / partition with a 4 gig swap space, and reinstalled Bitcoin ABC so I guess I'll see if it can fill up a 2 TB hard drive with error logs before it can finish the block chain download.

 

[Klee]

Same issue, it downloads a good portion of the blockchain then grinds to a halt.

It starts to "Process blocks on disc" and spits out error logs that are multi gigs in size.

It seems that once it starts the other nodes boot me and no longer send me data.

After googling the error it looks like a hardware issue.

Smartutil says the disk is good.

Looks like I will install it on one of my dual Xeon boxes and give that a go.

 

[Klee]

Ok i'm through messing around, time to get serious.

Installed it on my dual Xeon E5-2620 box with 64 gigs of ram, installed a spare 2 TB drive got to love a board that supports hot plug.

Downloading the blockchain on it now to see how that goes.

The only difference is I added -disablesafemode to the /usr/bin/bitcoin-qt command. Read something about that will keep it from erroring out if the blocks are larger than expected which is the case with Bitcoin Cash and shoud be fixed in the next version of Bitcoin ABC.

 

[Klee]

I have not added any nodes manually yet.

Also it seems to be using less ram, only about 2 gigs so far.

 

[amalurk]

It is has been a long time since I messed with this but I seem to recall downloading a big chunk of the block chain as single download in my web browser from somewhere, maybe link in forum at bitcointalk, and then importing that into the node software to catch me mostly up to date. That saved hours and hours of time versus syncing with the node software. Then I ran the node program to catch me up the last few weeks or months to the present that wasn't in the big download. You might look for that.....

 

[Jeggs101]

Do you make Bitcoin cash from the full node operation?

 

[Klee]

It is has been a long time since I messed with this but I seem to recall downloading a big chunk of the block chain as single download in my web browser from somewhere, maybe link in forum at bitcointalk, and then importing that into the node software to catch me mostly up to date. That saved hours and hours of time versus syncing with the node software. Then I ran the node program to catch me up the last few weeks or months to the present that wasn't in the big download. You might look for that.....

The block chain for Bitcoin Cash has no official download other than syncing with the other nodes. Bitcoin has a download thats compressed thats updated every day but Bitcoin Cash does not.

 

[Klee]

Do you make Bitcoin cash from the full node operation?

No, only ways to get it is to buy it or from mining.

 

[Klee]

Its fully synchronized and I have forwarded port 8333 to it.

Seems to be working fine.

 

[Klee]

Oh and the Blockchain is 119 gigs.

 

[Klee]

Been running on the dual E5-2620 box with zero errors, but as soon as the next hardfork for monero in september i'll run a full monero node instead.

 

[JazzFaucet]

Is there a benefit in running a full Monero node over and above contributing to the resilience of the network? Is this also just for the learning and the LOLs?