Topic: [Guide] How to run a Bitcoin Core full node for under 50 bucks! - page 2. (Read 2080 times)

When your internet connection drops out, this doesn't hurt Bitcoin Core and it's data files. It's bad when your PC suddenly goes off. If you can detect a power dropout and your UPS is about to run low on energy storage, your PC should close Bitcoin Core gracefully and shutdown OS gracefully. That will keep Bitcoin Core's data files healthy.

Why did you start re-indexing? This shouldn't be necessary when Bitcoin Core shuts down normally.

With a 4TB HDD you have enough space to store an unpruned blockchain on your HDD (current sizes are ~446 GiB for blocks, ~5 GiB for chainstate and ~37 GiB for indexes/txindex (if you enable creation of transaction index)).

Pruning is only to reduce the size of the stored blockchain but has its own disadvantages as a rescan or reindex would likely always redownload the whole blockchain to read through it. As I assume you have enough space on that HDD, in that case pruning makes no sense.

If your current download is with pruning enabled, you would need to stop it, disable pruning and restart the sync of the full blockchain.

You can speed up the sync process of the blockchain if you set at least dbcache=2048 in bitcoin.conf file or to some even higher value depending on how much RAM your PC has. Don't overdo it with too high dbcache value (it's in MiB) compared to total RAM size and what else is running on your PC. With 4 GiB RAM, I'd try with dbcache=1024, with 8 GiB RAM dbcache=2048 (or 3072, maybe 4096 could work, too). With 16 GiB RAM you might be able to use dbcache=5120 which should likely be enough to hold the UTXO set completely in RAM during sync of blockchain.

After the initial sync you can reduce the dbcache value or comment it out by placing a hash # in front of it.

Finally, This month I bought an IPS and Ran it in UPS Mode. It powers up my house for two hours at least. But, My Internet connection drops during the power outage. My PC has only 250 GB SSD and 4TB HDD. My blocks were on HDD. But, After I started re-indexing the blocks, I had to move them to the C drive which is located on SSD. I have only 100 GB of Free storage on my SSD. IDK if it's enough. The most Fraustrated thing is that I was using Prunning, and it started downloading the block again. My Internet speed increased a bit now. But, The progress per hour is still 0.28%. I am still five years behind. Should I delete all the blocks and core Start from the beginning and download the entire block? I don't want to Prunning since I bought an IPS, which can give me some backup during the power outage.

[quote from different thread, but makes more sense here]

Hey, so I just discovered something somewhat similar, somewhat different. Another x86 SBC, but more akin to a Pi, being based on Celeron instead of Pentium, more compact, with soldered components.

With Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB model) being sold for ~$180 USD at the moment, the ZimaBoard [1] may make more sense. For $199 you get an Intel Celeron N3450 Quad Core 1.1-2.2GHz, 32GB of eMMC flash and of course 8GB of RAM.
Compared to that (unreleased - link even went offline, not sure what's going on; a video [2] is still up) SBC you linked to earlier, it does cost double but it also comes with all components of course.
I love how it's x86 and yet still has a very low TDP, passively cooled and lots of I/O: perfect for node applications, due to dual SATA ports and a PCIe x4 for e.g. a boot OS on an SSD.

We talked about this in this thread I believe, but using a notebook may or may not give you reliability issues due to not being designed for 24/7 operation, meanwhile this SBC is specifically made to run a small local server as a private cloud or similar.


[1] https://shop.zimaboard.com/products/zimaboard-single-board-server-for-creators-8g-32gb-linux-windows-openwrt-pfsense-andorid-libreelec-development-board-low-cost-hackable-single-board-server?variant=39283928465606
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4Tp2cpAjc

Actually, if you have bad internet and / or power, it may be very beneficial to run a full node, because you'll be less reliant on connectivity to other peers and could look for old transactions and stuff without working internet connection.
You'll also definitely 'help the network' whenever your node is online - and, in case of an issue like here, you won't need to redownload everything. That's going to be very helpful if you have a slow connection; since every IBD won't take a few minutes or hours like on a fiber connection, but days and weeks. So I'd 100% go get a 1TB SSD and run full without pruning.

Before, I didn't know the difference between a Full node and a pruned node. But I guess I understand now. Someone from this thread suggested me run pruned node because I don't run my computed 24/7. So, It's not going to help the blockchain. I live in a village and the electricity in my village is worse than you can imagine. You may ask, why not use a laptop? Well, I can buy a IPS for my PC. But Internet also sucks here. No electricity means no internet. My ISP Don't use IPS or any other power backup too. Being a farmer's son and living in a village becomes pretty hard now if I compare it with digital equipment. But, I only love nature here. So, The environment forced me to live here.

If you use pruning, then it definitely is.

Bro, It pissed me off. It's been a couple of days now. I don't run 24/7. But, I run it for more than 12 hours daily. I feel like it's downloading the blocks again instead of reindexing. Progress per hour is literally 0.24%. I am still six years behind. I have a slow internet connection; that could be a reason, maybe? I believe 16gigs Ram should be enough with Ryzen 3 3200g.

The Bitcoin Core uses 11% of My CPU (Max) and only 400 MB Ram while reindexing.

You can make a bash alias for bitcoin-qt to be a shell script that checks the argument stack passed to bitcoin-qt and delete any -reindex references to it.

It doesn't even have to be a shellscript, you can make it python if you put a #!/usr/bin/python3 at the beginning.

Since this is a topic about running a cheap node: on hardware such as presented here, it takes me roughly 24h to reindex the whole blockchain. This is with 8GB of RAM though; as I've shown on page 1, upgrading to 8GB exponentially improved the verification time.


Another quick note for AnotherAlt: Make sure not to use bitcoin-qt -reindex again the next time you start it up. Been there, done that - it's easy to quickly go up arrow, enter key; as soon as you do this, it starts another reindex and you can't 'stop' or 'abort' - you'll then have to wait it through another time.

You're 13 years old on re-indexing. You don't download any blocks. It should take less time to finish, but still, it'll take a few hours the least.

Woh. Thank you very much. It's started the GUI. Syncing Headers now. But looks like I am 13 years behind  

Good. Do you see a bitcoin-qt in that folder? If yes, enter in your cmd:

This should open Bitcoin Core (with GUI) and start rebuilding the database. Reply me once you do it.

Thanks, It's Windows 10.


I have chosen the directory Local Disk D because if windows crashes and I formate C drive, I won't lose the backup. That was the plan.
BTW, I have copied all the data to the C drive again and I am on that folder with CMD.

Sure. Others can also help you while I'm away from keyboard.

Yes. What's your OS?

No, you shouldn't reinstall nor uninstall Bitcoin Core. Just open up your command prompt (cmd) to the directory wherein your Bitcoin Core is located. In Windows there's a "Bitcoin" directory inside "Program Files (x86)". Reply if you've found it.

Let's take it one step at a time.

I am sorry, I am totally Noob in this. Could you please help me with how to do it? Do I have to do it using the Command prompt?

---

ah, did you mean reinstall Bitcoin Core without uninstalling it and without deleting any data?
I have tried to open bitcoin-qt, and It opens with the same error.

Your database is likely corrupted. Try wiping out the block index with bitcoin-qt -reindex. This will re-make the database by going all over the blk.dat files, re-validate them and rebuilding the chainstate. It'll take a lot of time.

Have you checked your debug.log for further info?

Can anybody help me with this issue? I have been downloading the block for a while now. I am almost done now. It's happened. I was downloading the block, and suddenly, I had a power outage, and my Computer turned off. After Power-up, I tried to Open Bitcoin core and it's opens with this error "Corrupted block database detected. Do you want to rebuild the block database now?" After I click on Ok, It pops up another error " Error: Error opening block database."

Please check the screenshot below. Is there any suggestion you may suggest that could help me? It's tough to download all the blocks. I have been downloading for over a month now 

To be honest whenever I've had issues with compatibility issues, using Linux seems to always fix it due to their legacy drivers. That's not to say that it doesn't require a little bit of tinkering, but I've had machines running Windows that basically refused to operate, but switching to Linux, and it was a near seamless experience. These days I don't even run Windows at all. Completely ditched it.

Now use Debian, Fedora inside Qubes OS with Xen Hypervisor. Unfortunately, with this method a lot of the compatibility issues is hardware specific to Qubes OS due to its nature.

They normally only specify the types of connections on hardware that are compatible, right? Probably, better looking on the internet to see what's compatible with your exact hardware, rather than using the manual which will be rather generic.

Could be, if it was incompatibility issues I'd like to think there would be more users looking for support on the issue. Although, I do understand that this might be a niche issue.

There are a bunch of cards that *should* work, but if you follow the link that @ETFbitcoin posted manufacturers do have the option of BIOS locking the cards.
Normally Dell does not do this, but since they / the PD did do some custom things to something in them I could wind up spending a lot of time and get nowhere.

OR it could be I just got a bad card.......

Even taking the bottom off to get to the card is a project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiGfj_Rneho

-Dave

I don't know what's the situation with spare parts for those laptops you purchased, but you could try finding hardware maintenance manual and identify all compatible wifi cards.
It's not that hard to follow manual, open laptop and replace wifi cards or any other parts you want, spare parts for used laptops can easily be found on internet or in used computer shops.
I also had issues installing Debian Linux on one of my laptops, but I managed to do it with Debian non-free iso, and alternative option was MX Linux that is based on Debian with some tweaks.