fullnode.md

Bitcoin Full Node on AWS Free Tier

Provisioning

• Launch one T2 micro instance, using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS AMI.
• Open SSH and Bitcoin Protocol TCP ports: 22, 8333.
• Attach 40GB EBS (General-Purpose SSD) volume for blockchain storage to /dev/sdf.

The pricing should be ~3$ for the first year (assuming 30GB upload per month). See here for more details.

Installing

(based on the following reddit post)

• Run as superuser:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/opt/swapfile bs=1M count=1024
$ sudo mkswap /opt/swapfile
$ sudo swapon /opt/swapfile 
$ mkdir ~/.bitcoin/
$ sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin
$ sudo apt-get update -y
$ sudo apt-get install bitcoind -y
$ sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdf

• Add the following to /etc/fstab configuration:

# /dev/xvdf is EXT4 filesystem under /home/ubuntu/.bitcoin
/dev/xvdf /home/ubuntu/.bitcoin ext4 defaults 0 0
/opt/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Mount them using:

sudo mount -a

• Torrent bootstrap.dat for speed, as described here.
• Use the following configuration file (.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf):

server=1
daemon=1
connections=40
rpcuser=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
rpcpassword=YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
disablewallet=1

• Use the following traffic control script (.bitcoin/utils/tc.sh) for bandwidth throttling:

#network interface on which to limit traffic
IF="eth0"
#limit of the network interface in question
LINKCEIL="1gbit"
#limit outbound Bitcoin protocol traffic to this rate
LIMIT="200kbit"
#defines the address space for which you wish to disable rate limiting
LOCALNET="172.31.0.0/16"

#delete existing rules
tc qdisc del dev ${IF} root

#add root class
tc qdisc add dev ${IF} root handle 1: htb default 10

#add parent class
tc class add dev ${IF} parent 1: classid 1:1 htb rate ${LINKCEIL} ceil ${LINKCEIL}

#add our two classes. one unlimited, another limited
tc class add dev ${IF} parent 1:1 classid 1:10 htb rate ${LINKCEIL} ceil ${LINKCEIL} prio 0
tc class add dev ${IF} parent 1:1 classid 1:11 htb rate ${LIMIT} ceil ${LIMIT} prio 1

#add handles to our classes so packets marked with <x> go into the class with "... handle <x> fw ..."
tc filter add dev ${IF} parent 1: protocol ip prio 1 handle 1 fw classid 1:10
tc filter add dev ${IF} parent 1: protocol ip prio 2 handle 2 fw classid 1:11

#limit outgoing traffic to and from port 8333. but not when dealing with a host on the local network
iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 8333 ! -d ${LOCALNET} -j MARK --set-mark 0x2
iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m tcp --sport 8333 ! -d ${LOCALNET} -j MARK --set-mark 0x2

• Use the following logrotate script (.bitcoin/utils/rotate.conf):

"/home/ubuntu/.bitcoin/debug.log" {
        daily
        missingok
        rotate 5
        copytruncate
        compress
}

• Use the following crontab:

@reboot bitcoind
@reboot sudo /home/ubuntu/.bitcoin/utils/tc.sh
@daily logrotate /home/ubuntu/.bitcoin/utils/logrotate.conf

Testing

• Run bitcoin server and watch its log file:

bitcoind
tail -F ~/.bitcoin/debug.log

• Connect to its public IP from https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/, to make sure it is accepting connections from other nodes.