So I've now got 2 up and running MN and enough coins for a third. Im using vultr.com and have setup one server per MN. Are you guys running more than 1 MN per server, or do you have 1 server per MN?
I have been using a single server for each masternode. I tried to consolidate all of them, and it didn't work out, at least not in my case. By having each masternode on a single server using Amazon AWS type t2.nano (512MB) and 25GB drives, everything seems to be working.
I tried to use a technique mentioned on one of the DASH forums discussed here:
https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1867877What I didn't realize (and this took some hacking) is that even when you consolidate wallets as documented, you still need to have the discrete masternodes running. And this is tricky, because if you follow the instructions and you DON'T have the discrete masternodes running, it will appear, at least temporarily, that it is working.
The false-positive symptom is that your masternodes will appear in the return from
chaindcoind masternode list as
ENABLED (false). This will last only about an hour and then they will be marked as
EXPIRED and finally disappear. This is because the network periodically tries to do some kind of transaction against the port.
In theory, it could be possible set up each master node on the same machine with a different port number. I was going down this path, but I found that running multiple copies of chaincoind (daemon) was using a lot of memory, so much that I'd have to upgrade to a much bigger machine to do it. Also, I could not find a way to "share" the blockchain between the daemons (there may be a way but I could not find it). This means that you have to make a copy of the
.chaincoin directory for each daemon, and it gets messy.
TL;DR - it is easier and cleaner to run each masternode on a separate t2.nano instance. Each one costs $4.95/month to run, so it is kind of like renting a Raspberry Pi.
BTW Generally speaking, almost everything documented in DASH works for Chaincoin as well, so it is a good trick, because native Chaincoin documentation is scarce.
OH PS: I have a great trick that came out of this effort. I have five Chaincoin masternodes on AWS. Each has its own wallet.dat file. What I have done is export all of the wallet.dat private keys, then imported them into a consoldated wallet.dat file called masternodes.dat. That consolidated wallet is now on my Windows machine used with Chaincoin-QT, the Windows client program.
When I imported the private keys, I imported them using
importprivkey <key> <label> where
<label> is the name of the Chaincoin AWS machine (e.g., Chaincoin 1, Chaincoin 2 and so on).
The result of this is that mined coins appear consolidated in the Chaincoin-QT transaction list as shown here:
Very nice. So I can leave Chaincoin-QT up and monitor the mining activities without having to SSH into AWS.