Issues with installing Bitcoin-Core on Fedora 20/Qubes 2 rc1

[Carlton Banks]

Hello all

Problems with getting bitcoin installed and working on Qubes 2 rc1 (which is essentially Fedora 20 using the Xen hypervisor by default)

So far:

• Installed the www.ringingliberty.com repo in the fedora-20-x64 template successfully, as well as the bitcoin-qt and bitcoin-server packages (thanks to Alice Wonder for troubleshooting with that)
• Launched Bitcoin-Qt in a VM that uses the fedora-20-x64 template. Error message states that /var/lib/bitcoin cannot be created as datadir
• Launched Bitcoin-Qt in the same VM, but using the command line to prepend the command with "sudo". Blocks begin to download, but a search shows they are not saving to disk, and the client refuses to shutdown cleanly. etc/bitcoin is created, but var/lib/bitcoin is not
• Created /var/lib/bitcoin as root before launching Bitcoin-Qt. Error generated is:
  
                  Runaway exception
  
                  Exception: N5boot12interprocess22interprocess_exceptionE
                  No such file or directory
• Tried just picking the standard location for the datadir (~/.bitcoin), and the blocks are downloading and being saved (and so permissions are playing some role in this issue). But it seems less than ideal, I fear this will only cause more problems down the line

So, does anyone have any insight to this? Being able to set this up would be pretty useful as a way of making bitcoin use more secure (the idea is to segregate all usage related to using and maintaining bitcoin to this VM).

[RedDiamond]

Do you have SELinux enabled (you can check it by using command /usr/sbin/sestatus)? It can cause those of errors.

[Carlton Banks]

Do you have SELinux enabled (you can check it by using command /usr/sbin/sestatus)? It can cause those of errors.

No, it's disabled (literally 'disabled', not set to 'permissive'). The Qubes developers configure it disabled by default, they're not a big fan of SELinux

There were a few SELinux related complaints from yum when I install the bitcoin-server package, but not when I installed Bitcoin-Qt. They weren't failure errors, the installation was deemed succesful by yum. And of course, I've not used bitcoind, or started bitcoin as a service, so I don't suspect any SELinux issues to be the source of this problem.

[RedDiamond]

I am not familiar with Qubes OS but it looks like there is a common TemplateVM and apps are using separated AppVMs which share the root filesystem with respective TemplateVM. An AppVM has only read-only access to the filesystem of the TemplateVM on which it is based, so therefore an AppVM cannot modify a TemplateVM in any way. So maybe that is the reason why you can write into your home directory but not into system directories.

[Carlton Banks]

I am not familiar with Qubes OS but it looks like there is a common TemplateVM and apps are using separated AppVMs which share the root filesystem with respective TemplateVM. An AppVM has only read-only access to the filesystem of the TemplateVM on which it is based, so therefore an AppVM cannot modify a TemplateVM in any way. So maybe that is the reason why you can write into your home directory but not into system directories.

The issue then becomes that the Template has internet access restricted to the URL's for the enabled repositories for yum, so using the TemplateVM to write the blockchain updates won't work. Maybe the solution is to split the datadir; have the wallet file placed in the read-only part of the filesystem when using the Template, and then have the blocks stored in the default home directory. I'm not sure bitcoin caters for a split datadir though, I will take a look at this.

Edit: this wouldn't work either, the wallet file still needs to be written to. Qubes maybe needs a dedicated build of Bitcoin, for now I'm contemplating just using the home directory as per Debian/Ubuntu.