Seednodes

And how to sync a new installation

Everyone will have noticed our funds have been squeezed more and more as the altcoin bear market goes on seemingly forever. In September we moved the Crown home URL to reduce operational expenses and more recently still shutdown the Digital Ocean hosted seednodes. This has been causing problems for people trying to synchronise new nodes/wallets from scratch.

What are seednodes?

The seednodes are the first things a new wallet or node talks to, to find peers from which to sync the blockchain. The URLs are hardcoded into the wallet and when we shutdown the Digital Ocean servers new users could no longer find a list of peers to talk to. So new installations simply sat there doing nothing. The workaround is to manually add some peers, either via the command line (or GUI wallet debug window) or via addnode directives in the crown.conf configuration file.

We are planning to have six new seednodes spread around the world on the following URLs:

europe-01seedns.crowncoin.org

europe-02seedns.crowncoin.net

canada-01seedns.crowncoin.org

latam-01seedns.crowncoin.net

SEAsia-01seedns.crowncoin.org

pacific-01seedns.crowncoin.net

Three of them are currently online, the others will follow soon.

Who is affected?

The issue of the “missing” seednodes only affects new installations or the rare cases where a previously synced installation deletes the peers.dat and restarts.

What are we doing about it?

We were hoping to release a non-mandatory upgrade this week, version 0.13.4.1 which would hardcode the new set of seednodes. While the new version worked fine for linux, the Mac and Windows wallets still had trouble finding peers, staying connected to them and syncing. I don’t know why. No-one else has worked out why and fixed the problem either. Both Artem and Ashot are unavailable to help due to funding constraints. We don’t want to release a new wallet which doesn’t improve the situation for all new users so we are instead

releasing an updated installation script for linux wallets/nodes which adds addnode directives to the config file

publishing this article with workaround instructions for Mac and Windows users

Linux wallets and nodes — First time installations

The installation script can be used for masternodes, systemnodes and wallets. Download it by

sudo apt-get install curl -y sudo curl -o /usr/local/bin/crown-server-install.sh https://gitlab.crownplatform.com/crown/crown-core/raw/master/scripts/crown-server-install.sh sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/crown-server-install.sh

The script offers various options. You can see what they are by

$ crown-server-install.sh -h

Usage: crown-server-install.sh [OPTION]...

Setup crown server or update existing one -m, --masternode create a masternode

-s, --systemnode create a systemnode

-p, --privkey=privkey set private key

-v, --version=version set version, default will be the latest release

-j, --job=job# install/update a pipeline build for testing

-w, --watchdog=level enable watchdog (1=check running, 2=pre-emptive restart on low memory)

-c, --wallet create a wallet

-b, --bootstrap download bootstrap

-h, --help display this help and exit

To install a wallet use the -c option. You can combine it with the -b option to download and use the bootstrap which can significantly speed up the initial sync and drastically reduce the network utilisation.

Although you can run a masternode or systemnode on a Windows or Mac machine, doing so is not recommended and not supported. The wallet which you use to control your masternode or systemnode can be on any platform.

After installing a wallet on your platform of choice you need to generate a node private key for each masternode or systemnode. Instructions can be found in the forum at masternode setup guide or systemnode setup guide. (Note: these guides have not been updated since v0.12.5.3 but the procedures are basically the same)

Once you have the node private key you can install the node on your chosen VPS by

crown-server-install.sh -m -p your-private-key-here

for a masternode, or

crown-server-install.sh -s -p your-private-key-here

for a systemnode. You can use the -b option in both cases if you want to use the bootstrap.

Windows and Mac wallets — First time installations

Download the v0.13.4.0 executables from the links on the wallet download page.

Follow the instructions in the forum wallet setup guide. After it starts the wallet will sit there busily doing nothing because the seednodes are not where it expects to find them.

Shutdown the wallet.

In the data directory edit the crown.conf and add the following 3 lines

addnode=92.60.44.40

addnode=149.248.53.3

addnode=139.180.141.215

Restart the wallet. It should find and connect to the seednodes, acquire some peer nodes and begin to sync.

Syncing on Windoze and Mac is often slower than on linux. Using the bootstrap will almost certainly speed up your wallet’s synchronisation many times over and could reduce the network utilisation by a factor of 10.

Do you need some help?

Contact us in Discord or Telegram.