Topic: Electrum server on Windows: Fulcrum - page 2. (Read 1423 times)

I've used Fulcrum but can't remember why I it didn't work so I gave up. It could've been down to my SSD or OS config so you'll have to troubleshoot until it's working. Did you locate alternatives ?

I didn't use Fulcrum with a block explorer so I can't confirm that. But it should work.
After giving up WSL (including electrs and BTC RPC Explorer) I no longer reinstalled a block explorer. I am no longer that much active and I also had much less transactions (hence less to check). So what I'll tell are just theories:

* there's a good chance may not be able to connect as long as Bitcoin Core and Fulcrum are not fully synced; I'd expect you get data only after you see the lines I wrote about in the topic start post

* tcp://localhost:50001 looks good to me, I also use 127.0.0.1:50001:t for my electrum when I connect to Fulcrum


* I did use BTC RPC Explorer with Electrs (see this) for quite a lot of time, but sadly last time I've tried something from my steps no longer worked and I gave up. But I think that since then the Electrs doc is more complete and I've avoided Docker for personal reasons and that may be the easy way.

* I recommend Bitcoin core's blocks\index, chainstate, indexes\txindex and Fulcrum's data folder to be on SSD, else it'll be slow

Yes, I have Bitcoin Core running with txindex=1, so no pruning; however, my connection is so slow so I am still only at blockheight 462,528. Since BTC RPC Explorer allows the use of an Electrum server, I have this in my config file for it (which is the address of Fulcrum):


But it's refusing connections when BTC RPC Explorer tries to use it; perhaps because my Bitcoin Core is still not fully synced? Please do let me know if BTC RPC Explorer and Fulcrum work together!

You can definitely use it for the real Bitcoin.

Have you installed Bitcoin Core? Do you, perhaps, run a node using pruning?

Finally, for the RPC explorer, I think it works with Fulcrum, but I need to check to be sure. I 'll do in the next hours and let you know.

I've downloaded it and it started syncing; however, I don't have a single idea on how to use it. I wanted to have a local Bitcoin blockchain explorer, and BTC RPC Explorer(https://github.com/janoside/btc-rpc-explorer/) lacked address indexing, which I need (to be able to find all input and output transactions of any X address). Does Fulcrum has something similiar? I am not sure where to browse the JSON API, the documentation doesn't mention the URL used.

Also I want to use it on Bitcoin BTC, while the documentation mentions Bitcoin Cash, which confuses me further (https://electrum-cash-protocol.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html).

Any ideas? Haven't been able to figure it out yet.

From my experience it happens sometimes a Windows update may take abnormally long (and it can be indeed caused by something fishy related to hardware, since I tend to use AliExpress crap here and there, not paying for "state of the art"). Such an update can easily happen to end via a hard stop and after that point I have ticking bomb which will go off in the next attempt for update or any other, maybe even after months.

Imho, while I agree that my hardware could be better, I also think that Windows updates should be more reliable.
I'm not worried though. Life goes on. As long as the problems can be fixed in a reasonable amount of time... we only learn from them, all good.

And their RMA process is useless. Web chat, then fill out an online form, then wait for the RMA then wait for the pre-printed shipping label that has not shown up yet.

As for the drive going bad, it happens, there were still some supply chain issues going on then, I'm guessing a few corners may have been cut or marginal components used to get things out the door. What I don't get is why no modern OS has something that pops up with SMART errors on the screen or sends alerts that you can configure included with it.

But, it's back up and running with a new drive.

-Dave

I'm surprised that your SSD severely deteriorated after only writing about 12.5 times the total device capacity in about two and a half years power-on time. That seems to me rather unusually low, even for a consumer Samsung Evo device (Samsung writes about a write endurance of ~1,200TBW (terrabytes written) for a 870 Evo 2TB model).

Barely 25TBW compared to advertised 1,200TBW sucks (assuming manufacturer's prefered 1TB equals 10¹² bytes).

Windows server still has monthly updates.
Don't kid yourself there are a lot of packages in linux that are also updated on a regular basis some of which you should reboot after doing anyway.

For my issue it's hardware not software. My drive didn't go bad because of the update or reboot, it was dying but it only came to my attention because the machine would not boot until I acknowledged that it knew the drive was bad.

As for what happened to the setup NeuroticFish had, it might have been the update that borked something in Windows but more and more I am seeing updates on ALL OSs bring out hardware issues that were lingering. Not sure why but it does seem to happen more when you click on the windows update button or type dnf upgrade in your linux console you will find out that your RAM was a bit off spec or that drive was not good or.....

-Dave

I think they use their computer for all kinds of tasks, so using Windows Server isn't ideal due to less software support (e.g. lack of Microsoft Store). LTSC version is great choice though.

Wouldn't it make more sense for you guys to run this thing on Windows Server, or even a LSTC version of Windows 10, if upgrades are that bad?

A server, by design, is supposed to have constant uptime. Windows updates mess with that, because the computers are not designed for server use.

And exactly 7 months after @NeuroticFish had to post about his rebuild I get to post about mine:



On the reboot from yesterdays windows updates it did not come up but sat there with a S.M.A.R.T. error waiting for me to hit F1

So yeah, it's down now. Going to get a new drive and just rebuild it from scratch. There is probably no data corruption, but why take the chance.

-Dave

This needs imho a bump, hence I'll add an update of my situation.


Something bad has happened to my computer. Somehow a Windows update managed to make my Windows no longer start, no matter what I've tried. This means I had to reinstall and this means that I've lost my WSL / Linux under Windows along with what was installed there (an Electrs server).
After reinstalling Windows I've given Fulcrum another chance - it has a proper Windows exe after all - and right now I'm using only Fulcrum.

Some more details: during the past months I've also played with cables and I guess that one was not too good, the data from my external HDD got corrupted. That was the blockchain and the Electrs data. For quick block download I've set up all I've could to SSD and this was also an eye opener.

In my old setup Fulcrum was too slow simply because I've been using it from the external HDD (hats off, Electrs managed to behave well even in that setup). On SSD Fulcrum runs just fine.

My current setup has for Bitcoin data 3 folders symlink-ed to SSD (blocks\index, chainstate, indexes) and also Fulcrum.conf contains for datadir a folder on SSD. The total now taken on SSD is 204 GB, which I can manage. And with this setup it all runs just fine. Keep in mind that while bitcoind I run almost every time I open my computer, Fulcrum I open only when I need to open my Electrum, which is not that often. Still, it's okay.

So if you are under Windows and have some space on SSD, Fulcrum is definitely an option to consider for electrum server.

After start.bat I'm getting the same errors. I've modified settings but I can't make progress. What's happened after getblock errors appeared is Bitcoin Core doesn't shut down. The shut down message box's there but it doesn't shut down so I've used task manager to close it.

I've tested EPS it's working fast. Bitcoin Core's shut down works normal. What I've decided is I'll stop testing until I get a new SSD. If Fulcrum's running Bitcoin Core operation’s affected so I'm placing my SSD responsible. I've download 935MB before getblock errors so it's the SSD. I'll update Fun & learning Bitcoin blockchain downloaded on 1TB Silicon Power 2.5 SSD.

It's not issues, it's just slowness at start/sync on HDD.
And no, I can't tell about SSD because a new SSD was not in the plan yet. (I'd say you know how that goes).

I didn't do any thing special so don't know why errors for missing blocks started to show. It managed 935MB download before getblock errors. I'll modify timeout settings. I'm still trying I don't want to give up unless there isn't another option

Did you find Fulcrum stop/restart issues with SSD or it's only for HDD?

I have even Bitcoin Core on HDD. Yes, I've done the IBD with chainstate and indexes temporarily on a SSD.
Clearly, Fulcrum DB creation will be awfully slow on HDD, but it works. I've done that too.
Imho after the initial DB creation the difference in performance may not be great (if you don't stop Fulcrum).

For me the sync after stop/restart (on HDD) was the thing that made me give up Fulcrum and keep Electrs.

Not quite, it's building its own database by requesting details of past transactions presumably from your local running Bitcoin Core RPC server (your Core should run at least with server=1 and txindex=1 in bitcoin.conf file).

There are some speedup tweeks for this initial database build, but it depends on how much RAM your machine has. Main tweeks in fulcrum.conf are settings for db_mem, db_max_open_files and fast-sync, see their documentation in https://github.com/cculianu/Fulcrum/blob/master/doc/fulcrum-example-config.conf.
I searched a little bit in the issues section on the Github and it seems the Fulcrum author recommends to leave those settings at default, particularly fast-sync is flagged more like experimental for newer versions of Fulcrum (I don't run the most recent one).

But it's not really necessary to fiddle around with the parameters, the defaults should be ok-ish, but slower than possible.

My Fulcrum runs on a Raspi with 8GB RAM (with Bitcoin Core and together with LND) and I had db_mem=1024, db_max_open_files=500 and fast-sync=2048 during the database build. Probably better don't use my settings, see above.

How much RAM does your Windows box has?



In your previous screenshot the sync looked fine. It's strange that Fulcrum complains that blocks are not found on disk. This could be an issue with Bitcoin Core failing to answer all requests from Fulcrum (more a wild guess of mine).

I suggest to report your issue in Fulcrum's Github, the maintainer of Fulcrum is usually quite helpful and knows to interpret the error log messages much better.

The Fulcrum log says something of 8GB for the UTXO cache and available memory seems to say your machine might have 32GiB of RAM (not sure if this also accounts for configured virtual memory or real physical memory only; it says "physical").

I would try to mitigate your sync issue with an increased value for timeout from Core with a higher value than default bitcoind_timeout=30. See also that your Bitcoin Core can handle enough RPC requests from Fulcrum.
Maybe a bit too much on my Raspi but mine has rpcworkqueue=512 and rpcthreads=128 in bitcoin.conf.

You could also run Fulcrum with debug option -d to get more details in its log-file which may give you more clues what's going wrong.

Did you do anything special at the time when the getblock errors started to show up (2023-08-19 16:50:xx)?

It started well but it's stopped the sync after 935MB downloaded. I've deleted the folder to restart but it's the same error. I don't know why it's failed it won't sync. I'll make changes trying to discover what's wrong.



I'll post prices after I've checked newest discounts or deals. $35 prices from Amazon are superb but they're for Silicon Power I won't buy theirs again. I've reviewed my experience with their 1TB 2.5 SSD Fun & learning Bitcoin blockchain downloaded on 1TB Silicon Power 2.5 SSD

Let us know how it goes.
Keep in mind the sync will slow down as you progress, since all the blocks are full and it's a lot more data to crunch, but once it's done it's fine.
I did not do a lot of testing on performance of CPU / RAM will effect it and such since it's an old machine just dedicated to that.

What are the prices over there for m.2 drives?
I tried to find this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PHJCCY3
or this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZGJVTZK
on other Amazon sites but it keeps redirecting me back to the US site.

Both are $34.97 + tax here.

-Dave