100% hands-off turnkey AWS solo mining and fullnodes

What’s the launch time in the AWS console? That should let you see when it came up (also, run “uptime”) and which of my AMI’s did you start with, the rc4 one or the sprout release?

uptime =
10:30:35 up 16:27, 1 user, load average: 4.00, 4.00, 4.00

I started with rc4 but upgraded zcash as you mentioned after that.

I’m at a loss, it sounds like zcashd crashed in a bad way…I’d back up the wallet.dat file in case there are transactions in it, nuke the instance and start with a fresh one with the Sprout AMI.

Hello, which Linux Amin do you use HVM or PV ESB? I have a Problem to run sudo…

HVM…what’s happening when you sudo? what exact command are you entering?

@anon47418038 if you manage to make AMIs with xenoncat, we might see 50% increase in sol/s

How can I do it? I have Amazon EC2 Ubutu Server und just follow the user guide Home · zcash/zcash Wiki · GitHub. How can I make AMI with xenoncat?

Believe me, that’s on the list!

I think I want to give your AWS AMI a try. Is there a step by step guide? How should I proceed?

Xenoncat isn’t ported into the main zcashd yet, just 3rd party miners…next week I’m going to look into the status of the former and the stability of the latter.

If you want to fork my AMI, go ahead and give it a go! Like zcash, its all open source and google is your friend. But I won’t do that for free…I’m a volunteer on the zcash project, not a Zcash Co employee or contractor. I have 29 years experience with unix, 33 programming, 21 as a sysadmin, and have been using AWS since it launched…people haven’t been kicking down with the coin yet, so walking you through it would kind of be giving away the store, no? :slight_smile:

Follow the instructions at http://zcash.mercerweiss.com and then once you manage to ssh into the instance, follow the instructions in the README of the ubuntu user’s home directory (basic commands are in there).

I will be writing up a “Total newbies to AWS Guide” soon, I have a chat transcript from walking a friend with zero AWS experience through it. How soon I get to it depends on if I start getting any flow of donations. Until I do, I’m going to be focusing on a variant of zcash that switches out the data store zcashd uses for the wallet, as the version of Berkeley DB they had to switch to at the last minute, which has a different open source license than older ones, makes it so that you can’t sell closed source releases or forks of zcash. So I’m going to be working on that so I can sell: 1) my Windows and Mac ports once they are done and 2) turnkey AMIs with higher performance miners.

I don’t have a day job right now, and after 20 years working for Venture Capital funded startups making other motherfuckers rich, I’m not really interested in having one. My work on zcash itself will always be free and open source (I’ve already had a pull request merged in for the build system), but I can’t afford to keep doing all this for nothing.

My AMI is a stock Ubuntu 16.04 release, with stock zcashd running as user zcash, so for basic linux issues, how to do things with AWS and zcash itself, google, chat and the forums are your friends. If there’s a problem suspected with my AMI’s themselves or their configurations, I’ll gladly provide support for those issues. Otherwise free support without donations is on an as I am available and up to it basis. Because as Jenn Schiffer said, “open source is a prison”.

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A quick (and important!!!) note on wallets and spot instances:

If you are running spot instances, the EBS volume for your instance gets deleted when it shuts down, which means the wallet.dat file is gone, along with any coins you may have gotten lucky enough to mine! So you need to set your spot price high enough to have a chance to grab the wallet.dat file at ~zcash/.zcash/wallet.dat before it goes away!

My next release will have a script you can provide an address to for coins to be swept into periodically and another one to copy the wallet.dat file into the S3 data store on shutdown (which will make spot instance mining easier and less risky).

The script exists, I just need to modify it for running on a release installed from a deb (and add its one dependency to the image). But the testnet was borked yesterday, so I couldn’t mine any TAZ to test it against.

I’ll be providing it for download soon though for the intrepid.

Hmmm would you be interested in coding up a zcash blockchain explorer for some btc? If you’ve got the time and the expertise…

I have a setup script for str4d’s fork of bitcore for zcash in one of my repos someone commissioned the other week, but it needs to be updated to work with Sprout (I’m not sure if he’s pushed the changes for zcash that are needed to his fork yet, I can ping him).

I’d definitely prioritize doing that for some BTC. I wouldn’t wanna code one up from scratch, though shudder

right now whatever someone tosses down the coin for is what’s at the top of my list

Well there are a lot of open source Bitcoin explorers to pull the core code from that I think you could use e.g. Coinbase Bitcoin.toshi.io is available on github to fork. Take a look at explore.zcha.in and let me know if you can catch up to them feature wise within say 30 days. I have the coin and I’m ready to make it rain. I need a dev asap. I’ll worry about mining later. :wink:

yeah they are definitely the nicest looking one feature wise!!!

I’ll poke around! I have 30 days of runway left, so our time frames on things are aligned!! How many BTC are you offering, and is that for an open or closed source release? Closed will of course cost more since I can’t show people code, and I need half up front in any event with the rest on delivery and acceptance.

I’ll shot you an email so we can countinue the discussion privately.

I believe I’m replying to it right now…if your first name starts with the letter 'A" :slight_smile:

Any commands we can use to encrypt/backup/dumprivkey ?