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So this past couple of days once again I've been trying to set up Bitcore on Ubuntu on an older laptop. Of course not enough disk space so I have to use an external SSD, yadda yadda.

Last time I tried, months ago, it was an abject failure. It just isn't something possible.

Last time I was able to modify the files and change the working directories and download the blockchain on the external drive, which took like a week working 24/7, only to have the stupid program restart the download every time it finished.

Boggles my mind that the "Bitcoin community" cares so little to fix something like this which would seem absolutely basic if they really wanted "adoption".

At this stage it seems impossible in practical terms to run your own node unless you shell a lot of cash for off the shelf hardware that let's not full ourselves is otherwise mediocre for what it costs. Nobody likes Bitcoin that much, sorry.

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Discussion

hh 1y ago

*let's not fool ourselves

Still in bed.

paulo 1y ago

Is it complaining about data corruption? What’s the error?

hh 1y ago

I did manage to run it last time. But every time I shut it down, it would not recognize the blocks and it would restart the download. After a whole month of this, I gave up.

Yesterday I found a toggle in Ubuntu settings to specifically give bitcoin-core permission to use external drives, so I've spent the night deep-formatting the SSD (took 7 hours) and today I'll start again.

I'll document whatever happens 👍

paulo 1y ago

A toggle in Ubuntu settings? Please do document your progress.

hh 1y ago

Yeah, I hate Ubuntu and the way they do stuff and I'm using it only because supposedly Bitcoin Core should be so easy to use with it... But I lack a lot of Ubuntu vocabulary.

After I installed Bitcoin Core using the terminal, I found some sort of very lame GUI software manager I guess where I could see some settings for whatever piece of software you're looking at, in this case Bitcoin Core. One of which was this very specific "allow it to use external drives" one.

I'll take a pic later when I get to it.

hh 1y ago

Is "assumevalid" an option that I can add to the Bitcoin-Qt.config file? maybe to validate just the last year or so?

paulo 1y ago

hmm, interesting.

I had a data corruption issue that did not resolve no matter what I did with the config files. Turns out the issue was a bad RAM module that I bought to upgrade the rig.

hh 1y ago

I'm getting plan B ready. Hopefully it won't come to that. https://www.baeldung.com/linux/ram-testing

Robin von Mises 1y ago

Which software are you using? I easily managed to get Bitcoin Core run on an old MacBook Air from 2011 running Ubuntu Server. It went smooth.

hh 1y ago

Fresh Ubuntu 22.04 on a laptop that's a lot newer than that, with an i7 processor (7th gen) and 8 Gb memory. None of the cores is working beyond 20%. Memory usage is around 40%.

Swap is at 99.8%, 2.1 Gb out of 2.1 Gb?

Is this the bottleneck? I've no idea.

hh 1y ago

One thing that really irritates the fuck out of me is that on this Ubuntu at least things are run through Snap. This makes things a lot harder than they should be, because nothing is where it's supposed to be, so it's hard to figure out stuff from reading forums and watching videos.

I'm sure it doesn't really have anything to do with the awfulness of the process itself, but it's not helping, that's for sure.

GrumpyGardener 1y ago

I will say that I always configure my swap to be equal to my ram.

2.1gb seems low to me... But gnome will try to index everything in the background and that uses a ton of resources.

If you're on a fresh install while syncing blocks, it I would expect your resources to be pushing the limits. Doesn't really matter though. Just let it ride. I think it took me 3-4 days to sync to the network with the default settings.

hh 1y ago

I didn't think about setting up the swap, it must have been the OS itself.

So do you reckon making the swap file larger or adding another one may help "convince" it to use more RAM too?

GrumpyGardener 1y ago

Could be. I'm looking at my setup and I have 8gb ram and 16gb swap space.

I'm using 3gb in swap and 2.6 ram.

When you use the top command in terminal, what do you see sucking the resources?