I'm working on a new project. It's an online gambling game where players deposit funds into bitcoin addresses that are tracked/monitored by bitcoind on a VPS. I need some help with designing a setup where there is total redundancy (i.e. no single point of failure).
There are three core systems that I want to have 100% uptime of:
- bitcoind
- MySQL
- Apache (http)
In the past I have had problems with system downtime... What I want to do is setup a system so that 2 (or more) VPS servers have a perfect sync of bitcoind, MySQL and http files. It's fairly straight forward with http and MySQL:
- MySQL I can setup master-master replication
- http I can sync the web files with rsync
But bitcoind is a real struggle. As far as I know you can only backup the wallet.dat when bitcoind is shutdown. So to do a sync of the wallet.dat my script must shutdown bitcoind, copy/paste wallet.dat to a backup, restart bitcoind. As this can all take some time (stopping takes 30~ seconds and starting can take 2~ minutes) and no deposits can be processed during this time I am wanting a better solution... Is there a way I could run bitcoind on two VPS servers and load balance between them? My fear is that when bitcoind generates a fresh 100~ addresses in one wallet it might also generate a fresh 100~ addresses in the other wallet and they would go out of sync!
Does anyone have any ideas for the proper way to set this up? How do big sites like Primedice do it?
I'm also looking for suggestions of reliable non-US VPS providers that accept Bitcoin as payment!
You dont need to backup every second. As long as you have pregenerated the addresses in the pool before like lets say 100000, you only need to backup when you refill again. Dont put the command in the conf as it will automatically refill if you enter your passphrase.
