Thursday, January 31, 2019

Ethereum on ARM. Geth and Parity clients update. Status.im, IPFS and Swarm packages. Raiden Network and Trinity client installers.

EthArmbian [1] is a custom Linux image for the NanoPC-T4 ARM SoC [2] that runs Geth or Parity Ethereum clients as a boot service and automatically turns the device into a full Ethereum node.

Once powered up, the image takes care of all steps, from setting up the environment to running the Ethereum client and synchronizing the blockchain.

This is a new release of the EthArmbian image for the NanoPC-T4 ARM board. Ethereum is evolving quickly so it is time to include some other interesting pieces of the ecosystem. Changelog:

Ethereum clients update (Geth 1.8.21 [3] and Parity 2.2.7 [4]). Swarm is now included in the Geth Debian package
EthArmbian kernel and OS updates
Minor first run improvements
Local script for client packages upgrade
Status.im 0.10 server
IPFS 0.18
Raiden and Ethereum Trinity client installers

Download links

Armbian_5.74_Nanopct4_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.4.172-geth.img.zip

Armbian_5.74_Nanopct4_Ubuntu_bionic_default_4.4.172-parity.img.zip

Note: The only difference between both images is the default client that runs at boot time. You can switch between Geth or Parity at anytime.

For further info regarding installation and usage please visit Github README [1]

Status.im, IPFS and Swarm

Status [5] is a decentralized messaging & browsing app (using the Whisper protocol). And as any P2P system, it needs… peers. So if you want to support it, status is now included as a systemd service, configured in whisper and mailserver mode.

You need to start it manually as it doesn’t run by default:

sudo systemctl start status.im

And, if you want it to get started on boot you need:

sudo systemctl enable status.im

Configuration options are located in /etc/ethereum/status.im.json.

Why run a Status node? (from their FAQ):

Currently, we don’t provide any incentives for running Status Nodes. We are working hard to solve this problem. Our intent is to increase the size of the Whisper network, thereby improving how “decentralized” and safe our platform is.

Another reason is privacy. In the current setup, nodes that are running as Mail Servers are trusted. This means that such a node can communicate directly with the Status app using a p2p connection and some metadata might leak. If one wants to avoid that, the best option is to run a Mail Server on your own and configure it in the Status app.

Another important piece of the so called web 3 is decentralized storage. The most mature option available is IPFS [6] which is now included as a systemd service as well. You need to start it manually as it doesn’t run for default:

sudo systemctl start ipfs

If you want IPFS to get started on boot you need to enable it by running:

sudo systemctl enable ipfs

You can tweak config options in /home/ethereum/.ipfs/config file (particularly, you may want to adjust the StorageMax parameter).

Swarm [7] (Ethereum decentralized storage solution) is available as a binary. You may want to take a look at the official docs to start testing it.

You can run these clients along with Geth or Parity client with no performance issues.

Raiden and Trinity

As you may know, Raiden Network [8] is a Layer 2 scalability solution (similar to Bitcoin's Lightning Network). Trinity [9] is a new Ethereum client developed entirely in Python (and already working on the beacon chain).

You can install both clients by running its corresponding bash script. Take into account that both are in alpha stage so expect some trouble and give back feedback to developers, if possible. They are not properly packaged yet so the script installs them directly from Github (it takes a while).

Installation: Type (as ethereum user):

install-trinity

install-raiden

You can now run "trinity" or "raiden" commands.

Note on Trinity: If you experience this issue: “trinity: error: Timed out waiting for database start”, try to increase wait_for_ipc() “timeout” value in /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/trinity/utils/ipc.py [10]

Ethereum nodes FUD

We’ve been seeing lately a lot of misinformation about Ethereum blockchain size and other kind of FUD.

Stick to the facts. With Parity, it just takes several hours to get a full node up and running and you need about 140 GB of SSD disk size (2-3 days with Geth and 150GB of disk size). So, you could run a full node for several months even with a 256GB SSD unit. Don’t listen to this kind of nonsense. Plain and simple: they are wrong.

This "guy" knows [11]