Setting up a Raspberry Pi full node
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I’ve been thinking for a while it would be good to set up a full Node for FTC on a Raspberry Pi and it was my initial playing around compiling feathercoind on the Pi for this that lead to me setting up my twitter bot.
If I get a package sorted out that is reasonably simple to set up how many people would be interested in running a Feathercoin full node to help secure the network?
The Peercoin guys have done some great work on this and I am looking at basing a feathercoin full node setup on this.
The Raspberry Pi is just perfect for this job, costs about $50 or $60 to set up and only uses 5W of power to run.
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I am interested.
I think we should try to motivate other people to join somehow.
PPC is offering 10PPC for running a node.
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I hope to have everything sorted within the next day or two. Just checked my node and I now have over 50 connections
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I’ve got 2 ways to put together a Feathercoin full node.
First way is you download my precompiled feathercoin wallet for the Pi which will save you about 5 hours of compiling and the second way is you will download the source and compile everything yourself for those people that like to roll your own.
You can use this as wallet to hold your FTC, but I would recommend against that, just have it online to be a full node.
First set up your Raspberry PI as normal with the latest image of Raspbian.
Next log into your Pi and create the directory .feathercoin (don’t forget the full stop)
Use this command
mkdir .feathercoin
cd .feathercoin
Now we need download the files
wget "https://www.dropbox.com/s/a1lglw8eqvbu62g/feathercoin_wallet.zip"Now we need to unzip the files
unzip feathercoin_wallet.zip
You will now have feathercoind feathercoin-qt and feathercoin.conf
We now need to make them execuatable by using chmod
chmod 755 featehrcoind
chmod 755 feathercoin-qt
You should also change the password in feathercoin.conf
You now have 2 choices, just run feathercoind and wait a day or so it to sync up, or copy your blocks and chainstate directories over to your pi either by ftp or USB and place in .feathercoin
I will at some point upload to dropbox the blockchain so you can just directly download it, but as it is a gig in size it may be a while before I do this.
You can now start up feathercoind, this is all you really need if you are just using it for a full node.
To start it up just use the command
.feathercoind
It will take a couple of minutes for it to start up and you can check on its status by using the command
.feathercoind getinfo
Now all you need to do is set a static IP for the Pi via your router and open up port forwarding for incoming and outgoing on port 9336 and thats it you have a full node.
The above method is the very simple way as you have no firewalls on the Pi, it will not autostart feathercoind should your Pi lose power.
this is the very quick and dirty way to do it.
I will shortly publish some scripts that will automate all the install, install firewalls, set up weekly emails and start the wallet when your Pi boots up and restart the feathercoin wallet when your ISP changes your router IP address if you don’t have a static Ip address