Bitcoin Forum

I struggled with MY ISP and their cablemodem long enough and decided its not worth my time and efford to get a local full node working. Thus I bought a VPS a few days ago and now have a working full node on a server that does nothing else.

Stats as of today:

last known block: 286600
Peers: 20/50
Bandwith: 100MBit, no limits on traffic
Bandwith used:

Since I am a bit lazy I dont want to login via ssh everytime I want to see the above (and possible more) stats.

I want a html page that shows basic info about the node. I found this script: http://pastebin.com/wKytLZmc but noone running it.

Please share a link to your full node or what youd like to see on a stats page regarding your full node. The only thing that should be used for it is HTML. The page can be build by a cronjob via python or ruby in the background though.

See: http://humdi.net/vnstat/man/vnstati.html

Or you can be lazy and pipe the console output to a text file and read that with your browser

Thanks, vnstati looks awesome, I thought I had to dump the data from vnstat and feed them into something else "by hand".

A textfile came to mind, but Im not that lazy ;)

Thanks for running this, it's good that more nodes are up that can send out 100mbps instead of the ~2mbps that most home connections can do. When Bitcoin picks a sad node to download the blockchain from, it delays the user getting caught up. A lot of people only run Bitcoin when they send money, requiring a day or weeks to be downloaded at once.

You might as well do something interesting like put up an abe blockchain explorer if you are fronting the bill for services. Also https://insight.bitpay.com/ is newer explorer software.

Are the stats for 26th and 27th you downloading the blockchain after installation? That seems like an awful lot of inbound traffic.

My main problem at home is that I cant get the cable modem/router to properly forward ports to the router I use to configure the network. They somehow "disabled" the DMZ I had. If I enter the URL directly I can still see the DMZ settings, but not change anything. Well some ISPs are just dicks when its their hardware -_-


I dont think Ill run anything else there. The server is very limited (50GB disk, 2 GB ram), but I will consider it should I ever upgrade. I initially thought to make the node available via tor. Ill see how the server handles the node, cronjobs for the stats and apache first.


Yes, the 28th is so low because I didnt start bitcoind when I went to sleep as you can see from the stats below (made with vnstati).

https://i.imgur.com/XXL7g5t.png

Looks like one of the peers I have a connection to is also downloading the complete blockchain as its not yet fully synced (~290k/317k blocks)
Edit: Yes getpeerinfo confirms it. I have a connections to two other nodes that are at 224k and 228k blocks

Next step is to get some nice graphs (currently reading into rrdtool[1]) for the number of connected peers and figure out how many of them the server can handle once fully synced.


[1] www.cuddletech.com/articles/rrd/index.html

my main problem is how broke dpkg packages are on linux XD id have 2 extra nodes is i could fix the damn things. and people say linux is better than windows YEH RIGHT

well after posting i seemed to have fixed the problem XD
blockchain now downloading to my most powerful server and already got 15 connections XD never seen the pretty green bar lit up before

I run it with some modifications, i.e. http://84.200.34.113
I plan to add server uptime and bitcoind uptime to it too, but haven't gotten around it yet.

Morbilas (he wrote the one you linked to, if I'm not mistaken) also uses it on the nodes he sets up: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=582817.0

I came across this which I quite like too: http://176.10.116.242/

Thanks for the links, but it looks like most of them use PHP, not really into that :( My current play is to just make a static html page that displays pictures which get updated by shell scripts in the background.

Very cool graphs. Do you mind sharing the full commands you use for rrdtool to generate those specific graphs please ?
I've only ever played with rrdtools with cacti, but cacti was doing all the work :/

Thanks heaps :)

I am actually not that far with rrdtool, didnt have much time the last days. The pic above is made with vnstati, which is very convenient because it gathers all the data automatically. I plan to change the colors, I saw a pic somewhere where that was possible. Full command for it is:


transparent 0 is not needed AFAIK, just have it in there since I plan to mess with the config files.

Yeah, I posted about http://176.10.116.242/ a while back, but nobody answered (so I guess it's not public domain)...  I imagine it's pretty easy to do, but I wouldn't know how to make something like that.

You could try to make a post in the german section.

Im still working on a rrdtool test setup, update on my traffic:

https://i.imgur.com/ivbPAt4.png

It looks like the peers launch bitcoin-core after work/school/etc and shutdown after the/over night.

I was looking at that, but doesn't seem to be a way to limit it to show traffic by progamid (or by port, incoming port 8333 + outgoing port 8333)....  so it shows all my other traffic too, not just including bitcoind.

May be something other than vnstat out there that will do that, but I couldn't find anything..

ed:  well, the internal stats that bitcoin keeps would work.  which could probably be added if something like what is on 176.10.116.242 was done

They work out of the box. I can personally confirm that no PHP knowledge is needed.  :D




I'm looking into it.




nethogs shows traffic by PID, I don't know how to put that info on a web page though.

Yeah, but the internal stats are messured per peer, or is there a central data point? Since my server does nothing but run bitcoind I doubt there is much traffic otherwise. Well besides me checking the stats and connecting via ssh.

I found this post interesting and thought I would make an info page for my node. I got a few ideas by looking around at different pages and came up with this.

http://188.165.242.83/node/

I created the script in Python and use cron to run it every 1 minute for autoupdate.

If you are interested you can download it from here -  https://www.dropbox.com/s/3g6qho1e2q0z6p6/FullNode.zip?dl=0

This contains the python script and the css file for formatting (the css file goes with the create HTML file)

The script uses 2 external dependencies

hurry.filesize (pip install hurry.filesize)
python-bitcoinrpc (https://github.com/jgarzik/python-bitcoinrpc) You can install this by cloning it and running "python setup.py install"

you will need to edit the script and change the following text to what you want.

RPCUSER
RPCPASS
IPADDRESS
LOCATION

In the coming days I plan to add some graphs, history and make it look a little prettier.

If you would like to donate my address is 1QF271jjauFrfojG42b8frfLz4eNRkzpDy

Hope this is useful to someone

ah, looking good.  like a clone of 176.10.116.242, but not so polished yet.  =p

I guess you were syncing with blockchain, w/ those downloaded amounts...  shame about the BQS nodes..   things like that are one of the reasons ppl complain about slow syncs.  I think it takes .. 3 minutes? ... before it asks another peer for those blocks.

I sent .01 to 13qDi8k6cPvwAEDVGL7TYrGcAgEtKb22jt a while back (176.10.116.242 fellow)..   slick it up some and I'd send $5 or $10 or something.  =p   

I prefer the gray/white/black color scheme...   also, re: 176.10.116.242 and the ping times... if you could have it adjust those to ms that'd be a step up.  Another thing it's lacking is total amount sent & total amount received (which would include the peers it has connected to & disconnected from).  I *think* that information is available in bitcoin-cli, but not positive.

also, there sure are a lot of dead nodes that just receive info and never send anything out (on 176.10.116.242, 130.253.21.121, 195.113.161.13, 219.243.208.60 amongst others appear to just be wasting inbound slots)... *boggle*

I still cant get rrdtool to accept the number of connections. It allways displays NaN even though I follow the tutorial [1]


And when I return $con to std:out it shows as number -_- frustrating.

I modified the apache default page a bit to show some infos for now [2]. Keep in mind its a work in progress. I might have some hours tomorrow to battle with rrd again.

Did any of you ever use it? It looks like a simple and powerfull tool, I probably just miss something.


[1] http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/tut/rrdtutorial.en.html
[2] http://213.165.91.169/

Thanks :)

Yeah I got the idea from that site, Im currently in the process of upgrading it, I think il add a feature to be able to choose a different css file (so it can have multiple themes)!

also I plan on adding the ping time but all mine are currently 0?!?! I know bitcoind gets it ping value from network ping and processing backlog.

I should have something nicer and clearer up in the next couple of days :)

haha, that 1st page is making my brain hurt.  

re: mrflibblehat, that rrd thing should be able to convert those ping times to ms as well.

my bitcoin-cli for example shows;

"pingtime" : 0.13562600
"pingtime" : 2.79798200,
"pingtime" : 0.05269900,
"pingtime" : 0.19598100,

etc... which I believe are 135ms, 2.8s, 52ms, and 196ms?  the 2.8s one also has a "pingwait" : 582.27381700 ... i'm guessing he's DLing the blockchain and computer is overloaded or something.

oh, i thought the charts on #2 looked cool.. just not something I could use, since it's still just taking all traffic & I have many things running heh

Thanks :)

After I did the tutorial twice I though it should be easy. Maybe cacti [1] is something for you? It builds on top of rrdtool, needs php and mysql and other stuff though, so its a bit overkill for what I need. You could feed it with data directly from bitcoind, thus you have only that traffic as well as other information. And if I am not mistake you can compleltly manage it via the web interface.



[1] http://www.cacti.net/

Its working :)

Apparently I did nothing wrong I was just not patient enough. I just used the same script from last time and made a cronjob so it runs every 5 minutes. After waiting some hours rrdtool generates pictures :)

https://i.imgur.com/GOxo73E.png

Edit: moved pic to imgur, since I changed it.

To update I use:


and the above picture is generated by:


Note that the connections.rrd is in the same dir as "canhazpic.sh" and I added linebreaks to make it easier to read.

Its not yet updating via cron as I want to play around some more with the colors and make it look more like this:

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/c3f10d2237b30850781c64fe02143255949febe2/687474703a2f2f7777772e656d65726f73652e636f6d2f66696c65732f73696d706c657272642f66616e63795f737461636b2e706e67

I tamed rrdtool now to do what I want. The below pictures are from this morning. The 24h one is updated every 30 minutes and the 30d one is updated every 12h. Full page is here: http://213.165.91.169/ not sure what to add since I dont want to publish IP addresses or peer informations

https://i.imgur.com/KEEjcby.png

https://i.imgur.com/G3xZDRD.png

Bitcoin users know that their IP addresses are public if they participate in the peer-to-peer network without specifically choosing their peers. The most offending demonstration: https://blockchain.info/ip-log

If you don't want to show the IPs of connections, you can dump your port 8333 connection IPs through a salted hash to make an identifier; bash example:


gives an identifier "b10ea208", nearly as unique as IP addresses.

Privacy is not a concern in that regard. I dont think IP addresses are personal information anyway. Behind most IP's are several users, sometimes companies with 1000's of employees and if someone wanted to hide his/her IP address there are services like tor. But IP addresses connected to is nothing I can make a picture of with rrdtool and I dont want to add php/mysql. Im perfectly fine with a number of connections in that regard. Frankly I think a list of IP addresses isnt that interesting to look at. A full dump of getpeerinfo (see other sites linked above) is a different matter, but I will restrict the information shown to number of bits/connections etc.
# of connections by version might be something to consider, but that would require a very sophisticated script. Get different versions, check if data base for version exists if so update with current count, if not make a new one and add a cronjob to update the resulting picture as well as the html page. Depending on the name of the version used that could probably result in problems along the way.

My full node metrics: http://statoshi.info

I'm running a fork of Bitcoin Core that emits metrics to Statsd, which are then collected by Graphite and rendered with flot graphs by Grafana.

https://medium.com/@lopp/announcing-statoshi-realtime-bitcoin-node-statistics-61457f07ee87

https://github.com/jlopp/statoshi

Very nice, Now I want to get another server running to play with your fork.
There is a strange button on the webpage though, lower right corner: "add a row". When I click it (chrome) it adds an empty row. Not sure what thats about
...ooh, wow. Nevermind I got it.

What is the minimum in terms of disk, cpu and ram you would recommend?


 :o

Yes, Grafana is highly customizable and all of the graphs are editable. You can even build your own charts from scratch, though I have it locked down so that you need the admin password in order to permanently store them. If you compose a chart on statoshi.info that you think would be useful for the general public, feel free to save it as a JSON payload and send it to me; I'll add it as a permanent chart.

As for machine specs, I'm running on a single core VPS with 30 GB of disk (that I'll need to bump up soon) with 4 GB of RAM, though bitcoind only uses about 1.5 GB. My node uses ~150 GB of (mostly upstream) bandwidth per month. I hope to eventually make it easier for people to install the entire software stack required to run a Statoshi instance; at the moment it requires a fair amount of Linux admin skills to install & configure.

Shorena, how do you get the stats from bitcoind?

I just "ask" bitcoind what I want to know. Had to start a reindex yesterday because the DB got corrupted, thus they currently look bad.