Managing the NavPi through its GUI made managing and staking Navcoin a very simple process. Wanting to use the latest navcore 6.X and moving to a more up-to-date and powerful Raspberry Pi platform made staking more commandline heavy due to the missing GUI component when wanting to stake on a Pi remotely.
Below is a quick and dirty how to on how to move from a NavPi to a headless set up. For this how to I use a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) and the latest version of navcoin 6.x to stake Navcoins, it should work for other Linux based platforms as well.
Disclaimer: This how to was made to work with a lot of googeling and asking a ton of stupid questions to the patient Discord members of the Navcoin #navpi-support channel. It may not be the ‘only’ or ‘best’ way BUT this is how I was able to get staking working for me.
Special Thanks to @salmonskinroll and @aguycalled on Discord. u/Zane_TLI on Reddit for this post and BuckoNZ for this post.
This how to is using the CM4 CM4104032 but as mentioned above it should work for other Linux based platforms to stake headlessly.
Note: 4GB Pi models are minimum but 8GB models are even better.
Assumption is you have a running CM4 (how to can be found here) and ssh access to it
Notes:
screen window session manager to keep things running in case you get disconnected. Here is a quick intro on how to use screenpi@raspberrypi:~ $ screen
Note: When reconnecting to the Raspberry Pi remotely re-connect to the still running window session(s)
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ screen -x
Get the latest Navcoin files from here
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ wget https://build.nav.community/binaries/master/navcoin-6.1.0-arm-linux-gnueabihf.tar.gz
Once downloaded untar the tarball file
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ tar -zxvf navcoin-6.1.0-arm-linux-gnueabihf.tar.gz
Bootstrap you wallet
Bootstrapping is the process of adding a pre-synced blockchain from a trusted source to your wallet, allowing you to skip part or all of the blockchain syncing process. See this article
First let’s create the navcoin data directory. For more info please see this article
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ mkdir .navcoin4
Now we download the pre-synched bloackchain inside the .navcoin4 data directory
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cd .navcoin4
pi@raspberrypi:~/.navcoin4 $ wget https://bootstrap.nav.community/bootstrap.tar.gz
Note: this may take some time as this file is around 3.3GB in size
Then we untar the blockchain tarball
pi@raspberrypi:~/.navcoin4 $ tar -zxvf bootstrap.tar.gz
This next step is only required if you are moving from a navpi to transfer your wallet to your new headless device
Copy your wallet.dat file from the NavPi data directry ~/.navcoin4/ to the new Paspberry Pi data directry ~/.navcoin4/
There are several ways of doing this
scpwallet.dat file from there to ~/.navcoin4/Return to the home folder and start the navcoin server
pi@raspberrypi:~/.navcoin4 $ cd ~
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ navcoin-6.1.0/bin/navcoind -t -daemon -datadir=/home/pi/.nacvoin4 -staking=1 -externalip={IP address} -upnp=0 -rpcbind=127.0.0.1 -rpcallowip=127.0.0.1 -rpcuser=test -rpcpassword=test -upgradewallet &
Notes:
{IP address} refers to the IP address of your Raspberry Pi on your network.-upgradewallet is only required the first time you run navcoind after you imported your wallet.dat file from the NavPi (see step 5) adding the & at the end of the command lets the command run in the background - you can bring the command back to the foreground by running fg %1. More info on using bash jobs can be found here-t option is and does but I saw it somewhere used and it is not throwing an error, so I left it in.navcoin.conf file in the ~\.navcoin4\ directory.The navcoin core daemon should now start in the background. Running a navcore client command will display the progress until the daemon is fully loaded and the navcoin client query executes correctly displaying information.
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ navcoin-6.1.0/bin/navcoin-cli getinfo
When the navcoin daemon is completely loaded the getinfo command should display as follows:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ navcoin-6.1.0/bin/navcoin-cli getinfo
{
"version": 6010000,
"protocolversion": 80021,
"walletversion": 140000,
"balance": 509.85726468,
"private_balance": 0.00000000,
"private_balance_pending": 0.00000000,
"coldstaking_balance": 0.00000000,
"newmint": 0.00000000,
"stake": 0.00000000,
"blocks": 5243678,
"communityfund": {
"available": 183021.10195571,
"locked": 0.00000000
},
"publicmoneysupply": "1089969.49763987",
"privatemoneysupply": "256076.01769613",
"timeoffset": 0,
"ntptimeoffset": 0,
"connections": 8,
"proxy": "",
"testnet": false,
"keypoololdest": 1521769038,
"keypoolsize": 101,
"unlocked_until": 1623302921,
"paytxfee": 0.00100000,
"relayfee": 0.00010000,
"errors": ""
}
Unlock your wallet for staking
To unlock your wallet for staking run the following
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ navcoin-6.1.0/bin/navcoin-cli walletpassphrase 'XXXXXX' 999999 true
Note: Your wallet password will be stored by bash in your bash history. Run the history command and delete the line containing your wallet password with history -d XXX where XXX is the number of the history line that is being displayed when running the history command.
Check that you are staking
Check that you are staking by running the command
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ navcoin-6.1.0/bin/navcoin-cli getstakinginfo
{
"enabled": true,
"staking": true,
"errors": "",
"currentblocksize": 1000,
"currentblocktx": 0,
"difficulty": 966769.0598687404,
"search-interval": 16,
"weight": 50985725640,
"netstakeweight": 3151385231514200,
"expectedtime": 1854275,
"expecteddailyreward": X.XX319001
}
When you see true for both enabled and staking you are staking Navcoin and good to go!!!
If for some reason troubleshooting of the wallet via GUI is required the qt based GUI can be remotely accessed by running a Xserver on either the remote Linux/Windows/MAC machine.
I was using MobaXterm on Windows and had to use the following command to be able to start navcoin-qt remotely:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt-get install libfontconfig1
It should be mentioned that the remote qt X session will get disconnected/stopped when the ssh server connection is closed.