Quote from: InternetApe on April 02, 2014, 11:45:12 PM

Quote from: dime on April 02, 2014, 11:32:18 PM

Quote from: eduffield on April 02, 2014, 07:28:13 PM

You could run a micro on EC2 for $14/mo to do it.

Important: Please take time to read this!

I see a lot of excitement from people looking to run masternodes, but ensure you know what you are doing. Among them, is NOT putting a masternode on ANY VPS provider.

Here is a checklist of things that could go wrong. Remember it's your 1000 drk sitting in a hotwallet.
1. Remember you did not do the install, you launched an image that was prepared. This is analogous to putting your key into someone else's computer. There is no way of knowing the image is not rootkitted because you are INSIDE the image.

2. VMs are still rather new and there are plenty of host privilege escalation exploits. This means security of your vm is not 100% yours. You are multiplying your risk by the number of other VMs on your VM host, and the network it is connected to.

3. VPS storage is rather primitive and NOT designed for security. Your root storage is NOT encrypted at all. Encrypting a container inside your vm will not do any good because it must be decrypted for your process to run it. Then the VM host has access to it.

4. (offtopic) If you don't have the resources to set up your own machine and are just looking to use a VPS, you may not have general knowledge of hardening your image against vulnerabilities. A few topics to be knowledgeable about include selinux, PaX, iptables, auditd if you run anything else what so ever on the VM.

5. Trusting your provider: those of you who have been in this game long enough will remember countless heists, but the one that rings out in my memory is the one where someone lost a wallet of 25k btc when btc was at $20 USD. He cried over $500k of btc, what was he thinking when 25k btc meant the loss of $30million+? I haven't looked it back up, but as I recall, he NEVER found out how he lost it, and that was the worst part. The only suspicion was that he uploaded a backup of his wallet onto dropbox. Who took it? A dropbox employee? Was dropbox compromised? As far as I know, no one ever found out. No amount of security audits can help find the culprit when the number of doors and windows are an unknown variable.

If you're into darkcoin because privacy is your thing but you don't think twice about online security, I have a VM to sell you.

ps. sign up for your free darksend.it/username at http://darksend.it

We ,Darkcoin team, are planning on putting out an AMI and iso image for people to use.

Even IF you used a rooted image or server, if your wallet is backed-up and encrypted its going to be VERY hard for someone to take your coins.

Now with that said no matter how much something is encrypted and secure, if someone wants something bad enough they can get it. If someone wants your coins and you have it on a paper wallet and someone wants it bad enough they will just find where you put it and take it.

The problems with running a master node is you MUST know what you are doing! You need to be prepared if someone decides to DDOS your node. The reason for the 1000DRK in the wallet is to weed out people that wouldnt know how to manage the issues that could come up.

If done correctly a VPS on AWS or any provider can be secure. enough so that places like netflix run their massive environment on AWS. if your Linux admin foo is great you will be fine.