There are some risks with hosting your Full Node on your own home network which include potential DDoS attacks, blacklisting your IP from certain locations and costs for bandwidth/power. For these reasons, I’m going to host my Dogecoin Full Node inside Linode which provides me with a gigabit uplink for much faster connectivity than I have at my home & capped pricing for the virtual machine. I’ve logged into Vultr and spun up a Rocky Linux 8 VM and will start from there. If you need to sign up for Vultr, you can use the following referral link which will give you $100 of credit with Vultr that should let you host anything you want for a month or so with a heap of resources to see if you like them as a host. Referral link: https://www.vultr.com/?ref=8916306
Once you’ve spun up your Linode, you can find the SSH details on the machine's summary page. Use these to SSH into your server and then download some pre-requisites for this project with the following commands:
dnf install wget
dnf install tar
Now let’s download and extract the Full Node software using the following commands (1.14.4 is the current release at time of writing but you can refer here for the latest versions: Dogecoin):
tar xzf dogecoin-1.14.4-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
Kick off the installation of the Full Node as below:
sudo install -m 0755 -o root -g root -t /usr/local/bin dogecoin-1.14.4/bin/*
Start the Full Node now with the below command. This will also kick off a download of the blockchain which can take several hours or days depending on the speed of your internet connection.
dogecoind -daemon
If you want to get the status of the blockchain download, you can run the below command to get a percentage of the download progress. Refer to the following website (Dogecoin Explorer — Blockchair) to see the latest block on the blockchain and compare that with blocks in the following command.
dogecoin-cli getblockchaininfo
If you want to stop the Full Node or blockchain for any reason, you can run the following command:
dogecoin-cli stop
We’re now setup to start acting as a Full Node but we haven’t configured the firewall to allow port 22556 through to the server or the startup of this application after the server reboots and these are our last two steps we need to run through. Below are the commands required to create a firewall rule to allow through traffic on port 22556 and a command to create a scheduled task that will start our node after server reboots etc.
firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port 22556/tcp
crontab -e
Paste the following at the bottom of the schedule that comes up (if you don’t have anything currently in here, just paste it in there by itself)
@reboot dogecoind -daemon
To save and exit type :wq! and you will see a message saying crontab: installing new crontab. That’s it!
I’m excited to become a contributor of the dogecoin transactions. The more people that get involved, the cheaper our transactions will become and the more likely it will become that businesses will start accepting dogecoin as a method of transactions.