Topic: [OpenSource live USB OS] BitSafe, a safety deposit box for your bitcoins. - page 3. (Read 19567 times)

Have you seen rsnapshot?  It is a super simple way to do backups.  The only problem is that it doesn't have any sort of encryption.  maybe if you connected it with truecrypt, that could work.

In my searches, I also came across http://duplicity.nongnu.org/. I haven't used it yet, but it sounds like it would be easy to do encrypted and compressed backups.


EDIT: You really do have strict firewall rules!  I added some code to "tor-route-disable" to get bitcoind and namecoind to accept rpc commands.

Sure, just edit the BITSAFE_MIN_FREE variable in the bitsafe.live.conf. Now that I look at it, it's really a bad name.... I'll change it to something more intuitive.

I'm working on a script that downloads, checks and installs a copy of the chain from a trusted source.
Regarding alternative/thin client, for now i'll stick with the official client only.


Well, Truecrypt could be useful for managing backups. For now, I added it on a side branch.

Fair enough   To be fair, when I wrote that, I'd just installed BitSafe and needed a way to decrypt my already encrypted wallet.  Didn't really cross my mind that the storage partition would end up encrypted anyway, but now that I've managed to install Truecrypt once and decrypt my wallet, I won't need to worry about it again.

The persistent storage is already encrypted. How many times do you want to encrypt your wallet?

Is there any chance you can include Truecrypt as part of the default install?    That'd be awesome

I'll be installing this tonight, good work   I agree though that I'd much prefer the current blockchain (or most of it, obviously) to be included by default.    It's such a painful task downloading that thing, I hate doing it

On that note, I'd love to see Electrum included with this in the future.  Would make a good match I think.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/announce-electrum-lightweight-bitcoin-client-50936

I ended up using the IMG instead of an ISO.

It took me a few steps to get it working on Mac with VirtualBox like I want it to.  (I don't have a machine that I want to boot from USB)

1. Convert the IMG to a VDI: VBoxManage convertfromraw -format VDI binary.img binary.vdi
2. Go into VirtualBox and create a VM with a harddrive w/e size you want (I chose 20GB, although it doesn't seem to be using all of it)
3. Clone the data on your new hd using:
VBoxManage clonehd –existing binary.vdi newhd.vdi
4. Launch VirtualBox and boot into the VM
5. sudo apt-get install gparted (not sure if this part matters)
6. make an EXT2 partition with label "live-rw" that fills the rest of the HD (not sure if this part matters)
7. Run the "Format Storage" tool.  This overrote my large image with a 1.86GB crypt-luks.

Is there anyway to make this encrypted storage larger? I am running both bitcoin and namecoin and need the storage to be larger.

How did you get bitcoin to use /storage/bitcoin instead of $HOME/.bitcoin?  I can't seem to find anything that sets that path, but I want to do the same for my namecoind. EDIT: aha! I found the wrapper scripts in src/chroot_local-includes/usr/bin/storage_wrappers/

I'll have some more pull requests up soon (mostly just fixing typos in docs and comments). I really like the notification scripts when anything happens.  Great work so far!

I'm building an IMG now.  Wish me luck.

I noticed that tor was installing from the debian repos.  The Tor Project recommends that you use their repos to be sure you get updates ASAP.

https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian

I changed my build system's sources.list, but I've never worked with live-build before, so I'm not quite sure if I need to make a sources.list for live-build.

You mean bitcoin or the OS? The bitcoin I use is the binary release from the homepage and no, i did not incude any library or binary for upnp in the image. Please note that I set up iptables to drop all incoming traffic, so you may want to soften it a bit.


That's because of the auto/config script: every time you use lb config you launch the standard configuration (note the " Executing auto/config script." debug output).
To avoid this, either use the noauto mode ("lb config noauto -b iso", or iso-hybrid) after a normal "lb config" or edit the auto/config script setting --binary-images to iso.

Did you build the UPNP support?  I'm adding namecoin to my fork and want to keep it consistent.

How do I build an ISO instead of an IMG? I thought "lb config -b iso" would do it, but that doesn't seem to work.

Version 0.4 released. It's just to update bitcoin client to version 0.5

Version 0.3B released. here are the main changes:

• Fixed tor configuration and added polipo and vidalia.
• Added a custom bitcoin launcher to start it with TOR networking
• Removed iceweasel from build, added a script to download and run it from RAM. Runs on a different user and with TORbutton and noscript exensions
• Added keyboard layout switcher, with "us" and "es" as optional layouts on top of the default layout for the chosen language
• Increased storage partition to 3GB and binary image size to about 270MB. We're still in the 4GB flash drive range.

I manually compiled and added the wl.ko module, and blacklisted the brcm80211 module. I can't blacklist the b44, b43, b43legacy and ssb modules as that would stop many wifi and ethernet interfaces from working. Can you please check if this is working or not? If it isn't, you should be able to make it work just by typing

I don't think TorButton blocks scripts. At least it doesn't conveniently allow you to manage a whilelist, as does NoScript.

So, I downloaded the block chain with BitSafe. Here go my comments:

2GB were not enough for my initial block download, mainly due to debug.log. It grew so much that there was no space left on the 2GB partition. Manually deleting debug.log took care of the problem.


I'm having some problems using the available Tor proxy... Iceweaseal doesn't connect to it after manual configuration, and when I configure bitcoin to use Tor it does not find any peer. I haven't investigated much yet to figure out what could be the reason, I might just be making something wrong.


And he means it!
My initial download, on a Kingston memory stick, took more than 2 full days.

I don't know how bitcoin does the block chain indexation, but I suspect the index is not kept on RAM during block download, and that every new address it finds it just inserts it in the middle of the index, directly on the "disk". That would require moving, in average, half the current size of the index every time it finds a new address. Currently that's ~150Mb. In a USB stick that's very slow.
I suspect it works like that because block download got slower the bigger the downloaded chain was.


To summarize, rb1205, if you want a few more suggestions, here are them:

• A lightweight client like MultiBit could be useful.
• Consider distributing the chain files already indexed with BitSafe. There's really no trust issue in that, as you cannot lie about the largest chain. That won't make bitcoin any less P2P and will speed things up for those which prefer the original client.
  
• Make the storage partition larger than 2GB if possible.

Thank you a lot for this great work of yours. I plan to keep using it, and annoying you with these suggestions.

If you have torbutton, do you need NoScript?  I think it handles all of that for you.

Yes, I already did it, and it works after deleting the blockchain files.

This is probably a problem with bitcoin, then, right? I'll search if there is a bug for this already.

Very cool.  I'd been playing around with building my own live CD, but you beat me to it.

What version of the bitcoin client do you have installed (and what version of libdb++ did you use)?  If I wanted to use my own branch (like one of sipa's with the private key import), what would be the easiest way to do that?  What would be the easiest way to get namecoin installed?  I haven't done much with debian before, but I do know my way around linux/freeBSD.

It looks like you have a corrupt blockchain. It happened once for me when i disconnected the USB drive while bitcoin was running. Can you check that the issue (and the blockchain) disappears when you delete everyting in the /storage/bitcoin folder except for the wallet.dat file?

Thank you!


By the way, today I had a weird error, which I'm not sure if it's related to BitSafe somehow, or bitcoin itself.

I've left my laptop downloading the block chain, not connected to the power supply, until the battery was over. So, there was this sudden shutdown during block download. After I restart and tried to load the bitcoin client again, I got two error popups, with the following messages:

First popup:

EXCEPTION: NSt8ios_base7failureE       
CAutoFile::read : end of file       
bitcoin in AppInit() 

Second popup:

EXCEPTION: NSt8ios_base7failureE       
CAutoFile::read : end of file       
bitcoin in CMyApp::OnUnhandledException()

And after clicking OK to the second popup, nothing happens, bitcoin does not start.

Does this make any sense to you?

I'll check if that fix doesn't block any working configuration, mostly the blacklisting part. If it doesn't, I'll add it to the build.

It's intended: bitsafe will automatically start the persistent partition format utility only if no secondary partitions are found on the current drive. If any is present but it can't be properly mounted, which is your case, you will need to manually start the format script in the system menu as stated in the error message.

That's a problem i'm trying to fix. There's a keyboard layout switcher applet, but it shows the current layout as the only possible choice. I'll look into it.