Re: Slimcoin | First Proof of Burn currency | Test v0.5 release candidates

The plot thickens...

After I successfully compiled and started the 0.5.0 version mentioned, it still continued to crash randomly, while downloading the blockchain, without any info. I feared a hardware problem, and a look at the Armbian logs showed that the SD card, via the eMMC driver, was doing way too many writing/reading cycles and choked.

The solution was to move the blockchain files to an USB drive and start the Slimcoind daemon with a different datadir option

Code:

/usr/local/bin/slimcoind --datadir=/media/usb/.slimcoin

But even now I was experiencing random crashes, due probably to a certain limitation in the file descriptors on Armbian / Odroid XU4. So I ended up creating a watchdog for the Slimcoin process, called monitorSlimcoin, which is in turn started by a different file, called startSlimcoin.

startSlimcoin file, saved in /usr/local/bin/startSlimcoin

Code:

/usr/local/bin/slimcoind --datadir=/media/usb/.slimcoin

monitorSlimcoin file, saved in /usr/local/bin/monitorSlimcoin (and caressed with a gentle chmod a+x before launching it)

Code:

#!/bin/sh

until slimcoindDaemon; do
echo "Slimcoin daemon crashed with exit code $?. Respawning.." >&2
sleep 10
done

to be sure it will survive reboots, I added this line on crontab, by firing up crontab -e

Code:

@reboot /usr/local/bin/monitorSlimcoin

The natural progression would be to add the mining option directly to the slimcoin.conf file, but atm I don't know if it's generate=4 (the number of cores) or setgenerate=4, and I'm a bit tired. Will do more trials (and, obviously, errors) tomorrow, and report back.

I know this setup is almost unbearably ugly, but it does the job. And the job is to assess how reliable such a device would be for a general purpose Slimcoin node. For those of you not aware, Odroid XU4 has an octa-core ARM at 1.6Ghz, and 2GB RAM, almost like an entry-level laptop, but it only draws 5-10W of power.