Topic: A full node on RPi: 2 questions (Read 1396 times)

Depends..........
Read the spec sheets for LAN9730 &USB3503 and then decide if you think it is such a good deal.

Depends where you buy your SD cards, I did a year of research on Nand-flash.

The life can be anything from <1,000 writes to more than 5,000, depends a lot on the technology and if it is multi-level or not.

People looking to run nodes on small hardware may have better luck with something like http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G135341370451

(quad 1.7ghz, 2gb ram; $89)

For the base build instructions, I took Unix instruction from the bitcoin distro documentation. I did have to overcome a few issues along the way, mostly by editing makefiles.. Not sure if I remember all the issues though. Here are some:
-- I had to change leveldb.lib dependency to leveldb.a in the bitcoin makefile.
-- I used boost 1.52 instead of the suggested version, which required more bitcoin makefile changes.
-- I had to build leveldb myself, so I had to add include (-I) and library (-L) directory dependencies, plus export LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable

Hope this helps..

I'd be interested in doing this with my PI as well. Could you write up some simple instructions on how to do this? It shouldn't be too difficult to setup, I would imagine, but I haven't done much with my PI since I've gotten it, so I'm still a little clunky with it.

I'd be more interested in a write up/tutorial than an ISO I've got to write to my card.

Awesome, thanks! I'll try to build a Linux box over the weekend and do this.

Legit concerns, regarding the possible compromises, too. I guess the best I can do is add my own signature to it, at least to minimize the exposure.

I would love to give my abandoned pi
Is there a howto somewhere?
I also would like to have a full p2pool node on it.

Connecting miners to the pi does not work ..... USB issues

It would be most useful to have this done with 0.8 (which is not out yet) since it has much more efficient blockchain management. (e.g. far fewer writes)

Removing wallet.dat, debug.log, and database/  directory (shut down cleanly with the detatch option first), and system logs (e.g. /var/log/messages/*), and then fill the empty space on the media with zeros would remove your personal information, someone who received it from you would need to trust that you did not compromise the blockchain (or the software! for that matter).

You can create an image of the SDHC card by connecting it to a GNU/Linux system, and running dd if=/dev/sdb of=rpi-bitcoin.img   where sdb is whatever device the SDHC card showed up (see dmesg output).

I would not recommend using an rpi for mining simply because it's quite slow and might result in a higher orphan rate— if people are looking for a low power mining solution there are a number of much faster arm boards (and bitcoind will soon use multicore fairly effectively for validation) out there, and small intel x86_64 systems can be quite power efficient especially with power management enabled (w/ bitcoin a node can probably spend a lot of time in low power mode).

Note: there have been some rare crashes on arm with current code that have been reported but haven't been tracked down yet.

I wonder how many write cycles SD card flash is rated for? The sheer volume of HDD flogging that even a good desktop hard drive goes through to update a few days worth of blocks is rather worrying.

I could be being overly paranoid, but it might be worth looking into.

I managed built a full node on RPi and spent the time to catch up with the network. Since it took a while, I thought it would be of a value to the community if I offered up an ISO image or something like that to save time and hassle for anyone who would need it. I have 2 questions in that regard:

1) What would I need to strip off to remove my personal addresses and make it usable by anyone, and
2) What is the best utility to create an ISO from a 32Gb SDHC?