Bitcoin Forum

Does anyone have any references on how to setup a full bitcoin node?


-Wave

Just download the bitcoin-qt or bitcoind and you will be a full node

Make sure to open TCP port 8333.

Are you done yet, and how is it going?  Port forwarding can be done automatically if your router supports uPnP. It might take many hours to download the whole blockchain, but once this is done, it's done.   You will be running a full node.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin
is what I used as a refernece :)
has way more than I use or you need :)

you can also addnodes to increase performance (find fast ones)

If you really want to support the network make sure you forward port 8333. If you don't know how, look here: http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=216489

Is there any other benefit to running a full node beyond increasing the diversity/stability of the network?

Im not sure but having more connections would mean that blocks are loaded faster if you have to download blocks for some days. With standard client it can be hard to wait to download the blocks of last days.
Its hard to wait until to get confirmations but even harder when you cant use bitcoins because you miss the last blocks. With more connections this should be faster.

If I have metered bandwidth should I not run a full node to prevent massive data usage? I get 8 connections at max so I'm assuming I should disable uPnP for faster blockchain download?

UPnP allows your client to configure the router to open port 8333, so you can have more than eight connections. Of course, this only works if your router is uPnP-ready.

Will it work even if I do not have a static IP?  I know how to do port forwarding and I want to do this to support the bitcoin network.  Thanks for the links folks, I should have time to read up tomorrow!

-Wave

Hell, that was easy.  I already had the full client running.  I can see the traffic flowing now in my logs via 8333 port forwarding.  However, client still only shows 8 connections.  Will keep my eye on it.

It is cause your router isn't port forward, and your connecting thru uPnP, you need to forward port 8333. Otherwise your not really getting incoming connections.

Yes, it will work regardless of your WAN IP.  Note, however, that your LAN IP (the one assigned by your router to devices within your home network) needs to be static if you want to manually set the router to forward port 8333 to the device that runs your client. This is usually easy to set up through you router settings.

If it doesn't increase it numbers of connections try:

bitcoin-qt.exe -maxconnections=x , while x is the number of connections you would like to have at max.

Niko - Thanks, server has static IP.

Akka - Will give it a shot!

I got it, up to 10 connections now and slowly climbing.

The short of it...

Install bitcoinqt client and sync with block chain
Be sure the computer running the bitcoin client gets a static IP address assigned by your router
Forward port TCP port 8333 from internet to the IP you assigned in the step above
Done ;-)


-Wave

Strange. I never had much traffic or cpu and blocks were loading painful slow with 8 connections. So my guess was that, like with every other p2p-network you only need more partners to get blocks faster. Ok, then the border is somewhere else...

Alright Gents, I have 25 connections now and have relayed a couple of transactions first on blockchain.info.  How do I become a better node?  Static IP?  Forced connections to other fast nodes?  I have 30MBPS down and 6 up...


-Wave

Thanks guys, appreciate the information

whenever i have a significant amt of blocks I need to catch up on, i just connect to one fast node..   then there's no risk of slow peers, taking the 'network' out of the equation

I setup port forwarding to my client last night.  I'm up to 28 connections now.

How do you know you've relayed transactions?  Does the client log that?
Thanks,
Sam

Os2Sam,
Search for your IP address on blockchain.info site is how I did it.

-Wave

Oh, OK.  Obvious enough :).

Well you've helped me move forward a little more.  Hadn't really thought much about setting up port forwarding to my Bitcoin node in a while, now with your, and others, here input I've gotten it done.
Thanks,
Sam

How do you connect to just one node (and know it's fast)? I have to download the entire blockchain, and its going to take days at the current rate.

I just set up mines on a vm. Took about 2 hours to dowoad. Supporting ฿ all the way!

This option only limits your connections to your "x" value.

Is there a reason to limit the number of connections?  If so what is a good number to limit it to?
Sam

Been going a few weeks now, and it seems I average around 60 connections.  How do I improve that?


-Wave

Why does it have to be TCP port 8333?

Why not?  It has to be something.  I guess that is what the programmers decided on when they started the Bitcoin Client development.

It's the default port. You can change it in the config file.

I haven't paid much attention to my "Full Bitcoin Node" in a while.  But today I took a look at my bandwidth usage.  My uplink bandwidth is peaking around 1.4Mb and I'm relaying 7 to 15 transactions a day now.  I was a little surprised by my bandwidth usage though.

Was curious as to what others mileage was now?
Such as:

How many connections?
How many transactions relayed a day?
Upstream bandwidth usage?

Sam

Have not looked at bandwidth.  So, I have my own URL and was thinking or setting up a port forward for a URL so my IP address is not an issue.  Thoughts?  Anyone done this?

Thinking about setting up a full node...mainly interested if you get paid those small transaction limit BTCs that are sometimes asked for in transactions...if not, were do those micro-BTC units get sent to when your over the limit?

Can you guys help me do this on a Mac? I too would like to help improve the network.

I have it. I'm reffering to configuring the port forward to allow for more connections. I'm currently only able to connect up to 8.

can someone compile this for windows? https://github.com/TvdW/bitpeer

Bitpeer is an experimental Bitcoin relay server. Its event-driven architecture makes it extremely fast, and it was designed to be very lightweight.

this is the creator: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/users/4358/tom-van-der-woerdt

the creator donates 250GB a day with this software to the network !!!!!


i need this for windows or linux  ;D but I have no idea how to build this ..  ???

Uhmmm this is a huge security risk. If you want to use a central server I suggest using electrum which has window binaries.

This is a horrible program it does nothing and can be easily converted to a cancer node and hurt the network.

If you want to donate to the network use bitcoin-qt.

okay, but it would be nice if someone makes a modified version of bitcoin-qt for more connections .. I only get 40 connections or something..
Also an external IP detection every 10 minutes for users with a dynamic IP would be nice !
My ISP changes my IP every 24h .. and than the connections drop to 8 because the client doesn't update his external IP !!!!   :-\
I already posted this problem in the dev-forum but I think it got ignored..  ???

The stock bitcoind, accepts default 125 connections, if you want to change that you can add
To your bitcoin conf file. Remember bitcoin is P2P so your not going be be able to connect to a lot of nodes on it's own. You may want to look at
So you can connect to more people.

Can someone please help us figure out how to create a node? I read this thread and still can't figure it out... We are missing something...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380259.0

Just install the bitcoin client and download the blockchain.

Are there any specific or noteworthy improvements on .8.6?

Besides disabled wallet nothing that you can notice. It is under the hood stuff.

I still need help setting up that full node. Mainly because I don't know how to port forward anything -.-

I'll give it a go. Thanks!

someone did a tutorial on it but can't find it :/

It would be good to change default port number to avoid extra attention from ISP.

I updated, don't see the option to disable wallet though??

~Foyz

Besides disabled wallet nothing that you can notice. It is under the hood stuff.
[/quote]

I updated, don't see the option to disable wallet though??

~Foyz
[/quote]

It is a command line flag. "-disablewallet"
[/quote]

Ahh, thanks.. I'm still new to all this, haven't even tried any of the switches yet.. is there any detailed documentation of what the console etc allows you to do?

~Foyz

added a full node, averaging about 60 connections so far.  re-purposed an "older" HP laptop: switched to SSD on it and stuffed more ram.

whats the best place in terms of cost to get a VM at to load a node?  somewhere where bandwidth isn't an issue?
I don't have time to search for a provider, but of anyone can make a recommendation, that would be great!

How do i make Bitcoin Core to NOT be a full node? In Bitcoin Core options i have the "Map port using UPnP" unchecked. I don't have port 8333 open in my router. What else can i do?

Uh, what do you want to accomplish exactly?

Do you not want your bitcoind not communicate to the bitcoin network?

I want to communicate with the bitcoin network, but i want less connected nodes. I remember that 8-9 nodes were normal. Now i have something like 50-60 and it seems that it eats up my computer performance. I may be wrong.

Also add


To your bitcoin.conf

Ah, I see.

Use the -Maxconnections=n command line option to limit the number of connections.  The default is 125.
Sam

Thank you both!

Edit:
Ok found some problems. With the listen=0 option Armory doesn't see the Bitcoin Core client running at all. With the -Maxconnections=n i get 8 connections in Bitcoin Core client but Armory keeps connecting and disconnecting nonstop. I also tried with the listen=0 and let Armory run the Bitcoin Core client in the background but it's just stuck at synchronizing with Network.

Will take these to the Armory thread.

the "n"=the number of connections you want.  If you want 8 connections to the network then you would use the command line such as "bitcoin-qt.exe -maxconnections=8" to start your client.

My mistake. I used the number 8 in my example. It's what i wanted.

New node :)

http://bitstat.tk/ (http://bitstat.tk/)

totally right

What is "listen=0" for ?

Hey All

So I want to help the bitcoin network..


I have downloaded bitcoin core.

It is currently syncing to the network.

Port 8333 is being ported to the server.


I assume this is all correct and i'm contributing .., would it benefit running more and more nodes of my servers that currently have little or no load? Or having too many in the same location doesn't benefit the network?

Cheers!

Once the blockchain has finished syncing then you will start getting more than 8 connections.  At that point your instance can start relaying transactions.

If you install more than one instance on your network, only one IP can have TCP Port 8333 forwarded to it and that is the only one that will relay transactions.  So more instances won't really help at that point.

Thanks for the reply , I would be running them from different up address, would this scenario help?

Thanks

Couldn't hurt.  Especially if they were using different DNS servers or something to make the routes slightly different.  Just try it and see how many transactions the different nodes relay.

this is a really nice side project with a raspberry pi - Running full bitcoin node on raspberry pi.

https://www.google.com.do/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=bitcoin%20node%20on%20raspberry%20pi

Here are the steps to set it up:

(1)Download Bitcoin Core  (https://bitcoin.org/en/download) and install it. If you want to compile from source rather than running a precompiled binary:
* Linux build notes are here (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-unix.md)
* OSX build notes are here (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-osx.md)
* Windows build notes are here (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-msw.md)

(2)Run Bitcoin Core (either the graphical bitcoin-qt or the bitcoind daemon) so that it starts up, but immediately close it once it starts trying to sync the blockchain. This is in order to create your Bitcoin data directory.

(3)Download the bootstrap torrent (https://bitcoin.org/bin/blockchain/bootstrap.dat.torrent). This may take a few hours depending upon your Internet connection, but it will be much faster than downloading the historical blockchain within Bitcoin Core. You can learn more about the bootstrap file here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0). Note that this step will no longer be necessary for Bitcoin Core version 0.10 and above because blockchain syncing has been parallelized across multiple peers and is now faster than bootstrapping from the file.

(4)While you’re waiting for the torrent to finish, you should configure your home’s router (assuming that you have one.) It’s critical that you forward port 8333 on your router to the IP address of the computer that is running your node. If you don’t do this, you will not be contributing your bandwidth to the network and should not run the node. You can check that your port forwarding works using the “check node” tool on Bitnodes.io  (https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/) when your node is running. If you’re running a software firewall on the machine running the node, you’ll also want to ensure that you create a rule to open up port 8333.

(5)If you want to set up automatic monitoring of your node so that you will be alerted if it stops running, after using Bitnodes’ “check node” tool you can click on your node’s IP address to view its status page. At the bottom of the status page you can enter your email address to receive alerts when the node’s status changes.

(6)For your own convenience — to prevent your Bitcoin node from potentially saturating your home Internet connection — you may also wish to set throttling / QoS rules on your router or via software on the machine’s operating system. The procedure will vary from router to router and OS to OS; not all routers support it. If you’re running Linux, you can alternatively use this bash script  (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/master/contrib/qos/tc.sh) to limit the outgoing bandwidth allowed through port 8333. Just change the LIMIT variable to your desired throttled speed.
   
(7)Once the bootstrap torrent finishes downloading, move the bootstrap.dat file to your Bitcoin data directory.
On Windows, this is: \Users\YOUR_WINDOWS_USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin
On Mac, this is: ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/
On Linux, this is: ~/.bitcoin

(8)Run Bitcoin Core. Assuming that you’re running the graphical user interface, you’ll know that it is working on the bootstrap data because it will say “Importing blocks from disk.” If you’re running bitcoind you should be able to see the import occurring if you view the debug.log file in the Bitcoin data directory. Note that this process may take several hours and will be fairly intensive on your machine due to the verifications being performed upon the data.

(9)If you bootstrapped from the historical file, once the import completes, Bitcoin Core will rename the bootstrap file to “bootstrap.dat.old” and you should now delete it to free up hard drive space.

(10)You’re done! Now you just want to keep the machine online and make sure that you upgrade your node by installing new releases of Bitcoin Core.

Just a little question,
looking at the stats for bitcoin core, i can see the connections coming in but its always staying on 8 outgoing? Is this just the way it is or will this rise aswell... bare in mind ive had this running for about a hour now.

thanks

It will have 8 connections while downloading the blockchain.  Once that has completed it will accept incoming connections provided you have port forwarding set in your router for  TCP 8333 to the IP of your machine with the client running.

Hi

It has completed downloading the blockchain and currently has incoming connections. I'm asking the outgoing connections seem to be stuck on 8? Is this correct or will this change as well as it stays live?

thanks

Your client distinguishes between incoming and outgoing connections? I have never seen that.  It has always shown me "active connections".  Mine is currently at 82.

Anyway a socket is both incoming and outgoing.  You can use netstat to see how many connections there are but they should be equal to the active connections shown on the client.

I've got bitcoin core running and in the debug window it details if its a incoming or outgoing connection and then a total of them both. Ill leave the machine going and see what it is saying then.

Just doing my contribution to the bitcoin network!! :D

Mine just has the number of connections in the debug window and on the GUI.  What does it say on the GUI for "active connections" ?

Running the latest QT 0.9.3 with the -disablewallet option on the command line brings a user interface window that shows the incoming and outgoing connections.

On another subject, if you already have Bitcoin Core running on another PC, you already have a copy of the blockchain.  That can be copied to the PC used as a node, or you could place it somewhere on your network, such on a NAS, create a mapped drive on the node running PC and place something like
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe" -datadir=Z:\BitCoinData
(See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory))

where Z:\BitCoinData is the path on your mapped drive (it needs also write permissions for your node PC, as it will update indexes and keep updating the blockchain).
This could be useful if your 'new' node PC has limited storage space on its local drive(s) (however you'll need to run both the NAS and the node PC together).

Cheers

I fired up my newer client and do see the incoming/outgoing now.  I would say it working correctly for your.

I don't know about your other question.  I do think they are working on supporting multiple wallet.dat files I would think that would be similar to what your thinking, but they aren't there yet.

Just pointing out that the blockchain information doesn't have to reside at the 'default' location or even on the same PC that runs the node.  This is a fully supported feature of Bitcoin Core.  I'm running this now on an old laptop with a fairly small hard disk drive, that could not accommodate the full blockchain, so I copied it from one of my other PC's that runs a 'normal' client to a NAS (Network Attached Storage), mapped the path to the location on the NAS to a network drive on the PC running the node, and it works.  It saved a lot of time of downloading the blockchain off the internet, but still took some time to verify the blocks by the node PC.

Cheers

Cool, I didn't know that.

You could also fire up btcd.

"btcd is an alternative full node bitcoin implementation written in Go (golang)."

See https://github.com/conformal/btcd for more info. Need more than 32gb of space.

Still need to open up port 8333 on router.

Is there any simple work around for  isp is blocking port 8333?

It seems to be blocked on the isp level but they deny that fact when it's obvious that the problem isn't configuration on my end  (all firewalls disabled and ports 8333 forwarded in the router but still seems to be blocked and I can't get over 8 connections no matter what I try)