Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 32. (Read 33677 times)

That's good to keep in mind! I haven't tried yet with a good passive heatsink and no airflow, to be honest, maybe that's indeed not enough.

You're right. I forgot to mention. The temps goes higher only during IBD, when I eventually have to do it. Other than that, it runs smoothly with no major temperature issues.


Yeah that is a fact too. My RockPro64 chip is running a medium heat sink from Pine store, a small PC RAM fan (Revoltec brand). And it probably didn't even need, but it's always good. The NVME drive don't even have a heatsink, so, there's where my concern with temps come.

These are not PC towers or even micro towers. These are very tiny cases with a RPi4 (or rock 64 in this case) and the m.2 drive. There is almost no airflow so you do have to make sure there is enough to keep everything happy. Even a couple of watts in a tight space can get very hot very quickly if there is no air movement.

-Dave

Wait, since when is SSD temperature such a big concern? And since when does a LN node have so much disk I/O going on that it would get super hot?
I run 2 NVMe SSDs in a tower of mine with just simple passive heatsinks on them and they run just fine.
Just a heads up that you might be overengineering here!

I did my own. It's not ready yet because something got in the way in the meantime. But I bought a board of acrylic, took some measures (quite some trial and error, tbh, :p) and cut it, glued it with specific glue for acrylic, used some plastic bolts and threads to place the board on top of them, and I'm now (this is the part that is stalled due to some life issues) trying to program a small chip to control the NVME M.2 drive temperature, conenct the fan to it and then screw the fun as close as possible to the NVME drive chips. It will also use a thermal resistor to read temps and the fan will change rpms accordingly!

The ones I saw (cases) in the official site are too big, metal and expensive, for my taste. And don't even remember if I could mod them to reuse the old fans I had here!

And for those who are using a 'node in a box'

If you are using a Raspiblitz to run over tor it's s single click and a reboot.
For mynode it's insert $99 and click a and reboot as it's a premium feature
Umbrel also can use TOR, not sure of how to configure it. Setting up an umbel box is on the to-do list.

So if you are a bit twitchy about setting up / running a linux box you can still run it all on TOR thanks to the work of the people who made these devices.

-Dave

Kohas787 will be so happy that he can start spam-calling the nearest FBI office, and report that his neighbor is running a Lightning node from the basement, earning $5.00 in routing fees per week.

If only somene wrote a guide in how to run a Lightning node over the TOR network, https://stopanddecrypt.medium.com/running-bitcoin-lightning-nodes-over-the-tor-network-2021-edition-489180297d5

Hey, just want to plonk a link to this topic here for anyone interested in running a LN node in the USA:
Devastating "Infrastructure" bill in US - contact your representatives

Apparently they want to treat node operators as brokers due to 'facilitating transactions'.
Maybe worth following if you're located there..

Both of mine are running cool and the fan barely be heard. But, that's just my units.


Did you find / do you have a nice case that supports that card?
Everything I have seen is either big and expensive or looks like cheap plastic.


There is a line
#arm_freq= 700
With the above line commented out max by default is 1400, so if you uncomment it and put in a number lower then 1400 is will never go above that.

-Dave

note that the Pi CPU can be underclocked in /boot/config.txt.... somewhere, somehow



you can get even more control using open source BIOS, which became available for the RockPro64 recently (check coreboot.org)

About the underline statement, yes there are some issues but there is a solution. I can't tell it because I'm also not aware how to work around it, but I know it is possible. The c-lightning telegram channel is one of the best places to ask how to run a pruned bitcoin node and c-lightning. Sooner or later you'll get the solution.



Let me tell you about another great solution. And if you're willing to spend a bit more and use an NVME M.2 drive, consider a RockPro64 SBC. It's way faster than Raspi4 and it supports the mentioned superfast drives. The downside is one 4Gb of memory, even so, it's way better than Raspi4.

@BlackHatCoiner, this is towards you too.



My experience with my RockPro64 + Samsung NVME M.2 (128Gb) + 1Tb external drive (Western Digital), I don't complain about any fan noise. I am using an old PC RAM fan and a heat dissipator. During the hashing of the entire blockchain, what heat up the most was in fact the NVME drive. The heat sink did it's job along with the small fan.

In my point of view, LND pros is just the fact that you can open a channel towards someone that already opened a channel towards you, but C-Lightning have more pros. Lighter, less resources hungry, more configurable, and yes, the fact that you can write a plugin in pretty much any language, is a must! This is a door wide open for any dev to contribute. I'm amazed how it is not yet filled with people building plugins.

Anyway, I don't want anything else other than my RockPro64 board (raw Debian in it), and I install solely what I want, the way I want and when I want. Full control... Period!


PS:
Actually, there is a plugin to deal with C-Lightning + Bitcoin pruned node. Check here.

Sure, you can give it a try. Although, you will have to install everything manually rather than use some out-of-the-box solution.


I copied the block data from my computer. I didn't want to waste time so I started the sync while I was waiting for all parts to arrive.


Somewhere around one week. The sync was not even halfway through. It took less than a week on different hardware. See this topic.

C'mon no!

I'm waiting to finish the syncing of my node so I can install ElectrumX on it. I gave up on the node OSes, as I want to do it all from linux, command line by line. I was also facing issues with the outgoing connections; sometimes I hadn't even one node connected which was so annoying. Tried umbrel & myNode which left me unsatisfied. I am now trying Raspibolt which is better. (Due to the running from a linux OS)

I remember reading that it took you a lot of time in the past, but forgot how much exactly, so here're my questions for you since we have the same hardware;

• How long did it take to sync your full node?
• How long was it taking to sync the ElectrumX before you give up?

Interesting - since it was mentioned in this thread that lnd pulls way more on the resources than c-lightning, maybe it's worth a try with c-lightning?

Oh damn. Yeah I'm not kidding when I say with a Pi (model 3 though) it took me weeks for the IBD!

With all these issues, I'm wondering why even so many people bother with SBCs then. I mean for nodes. They're great to put on / in a robot or other embedded environment, but a new Pi Model 4 with 8GB RAM and 1TB SSD + case and PSU runs about 200 bucks from the top of my head.

You should easily be able to get a used laptop or Intel NUC with 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD and much more power (and thus quieter at the same load) for ~200.
It's also cleaner than a RPi with external drive dangling around and you get a screen and keyboard 'for free'

I personally use an old laptop with broken keyboard and partially broken screen, but it was free (someone wanted to throw it away) and runs very nicely after I reapplied thermal paste, installed a fresh Debian OS + installed a larger HDD. I also modded the fan to run off a 5V rail at continuous speed instead of ramping up and down all the time. The nice thing is the battery is still good for a bunch of time, so I can unplug it to move it around and when the power cuts out it remains up. Built-in 'UPS'.

I was running LND on the Pi. I don't think it matters; It would have been hot with c-lightning as well. I don't remember how much CPU LND was using on average. I believe that bitcoind was stressing it the most.


I bought a 1 TB Sandisk Extreme USB SSD. I am still using it in my current build (I didn't want to spend any extra money on another internal drive) and it seems to be working as well as other SATA SSDs.

I also tried running ElectrumX on the Pi but I couldn't stand the noise of the fan which started kicking in even more frequently. The initial sync was taking so long that I eventually gave up.

Oh, now that you mention channel opening: an issue that has been very annoying for me a few times already, is that I can't have multiple channels with another peer. I'm sure it's more clean and more c-style to have 1 larger channel instead of 2 small channels, but there are situations where you'd rather add another channel instead of closing and re-opening for example. No idea why exactly it's not possible in c-lightning, but annoying from a day-to-day user perspective imho.

That's good to know. So it was hot with c-lightning or lnd? And did you then use an external SSD or how did you manage the storage?

Yup, thanks for including that info! Will probably be the first big "LN FAQ" that actually tells people to "just get a larger drive" XD Since it's honestly a pain with pruned, and maybe worked in the past or something but tons of users run into issues with it lately.

I have been using c-lightning for quite some time now and I am really satisfied with it. I am not a developer, though. All I care about is stability and some useful features. I really like that you can easily open multiple channels via a single command (unlike LND which I believe requires user to construct a transaction manually using PSBTs). We have been also experimenting with dual-funding here.

I ran into some problems with macaroons while using LND. It's been a long time ago so I can't give you the exact details.


I also used that case (without the m.2 slot) for my build. Nevertheless, the Pi was getting quite hot very often despite the built-in fan and included thermal pads. Also, the fan is a little bit noisy above 50% of its maximum speed. I eventually moved my node from the Pi to a normal server.


Thanks! As you already know, I am working on the update of the first post. I will make sure to include this piece of information.

Alright, sounds good! Then maybe I'll buy a Pi 4, SSD etc. as well and build one more node, eh, every additional node helps!

Oh damn, thanks for digging that out for me, must have missed it. I was also under the impression that they encourage to 'use it for more than just full node + miner' but then maybe better not to touch it, indeed.
One idea might be to run lnd within a Docker container. That shouldn't affect the Apollo since it's kind of capsuled in its container, I guess - finally a scenario where Docker might actually make sense. Let's see... Not sure yet.

So far so good, I have been so busy at the office beyond the initial install and adding some BTC and opening some channels I have not done a lot of testing.
I have used RPi and raspiblitz before so other then the case / drive type change it's all the same so I don't think there will be any issues.




The problem is that they may or may not rely on some package that is different then what you need for what you want. Update the wrong thing and.....
Although they do say you can install other packages and even encourage it. It still worries me that if what I need to run has a dependency that is slightly newer / older then what is on the unit it can cause an issue.
They say it's only system level changes but still would rather not have to worry about it. That's just me you may have more free time to shrug it off and start fresh.

-Dave

That's good to know! With RPi 4, correct? How was the experience so far?

What do you mean? I mean the SBC is some Orange Pi or one of those 'Raspberry clones' that have more power, but still a regular old ARM mini SBC. How would it prevent me from SSH'ing into it and installing c-lightning for example?
I know, 512GB is quite limited, worst case I'd in the future replace the SSD, it's a normal m.2 (NVMe afaik).

Yup, I'm aware of that, but worst case I could take out an m.2 SATA SSD from my workstation and replace it with something better (should probably do that anyway )