This is a continuation of PART 1
Hardware:
Raspberry Pi projects like RaspiBlitz and RaspiBolt are great, but the Pi feels barely powerful enough anymore to run a node. With an all-in budget of $200-$300, you can have something much more powerful.
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q. $100-$200. I got a Quad Core i5-6500T. 32GB DDR4 RAM for $152, free shipping. Not bad.
- 2TB NVMe M.2. You can snatch a decent one for $120.
Software:
Even though node services like Start9 and Umbrel are great (and I continue to use them), they still constitute chokepoints that can become vulnerabilities. Not to mention, the only way I know of to make a reliable backup of the Core Lightning (CLN) node, is with a natively-ran instance over command line interface. As I mentioned in Part 1, The Mines of Linux is the only path forward.
The core of it is based on the video tutorials from MinistryofNodes and 402PaymentRequired. Make sure to follow them and zap some sats their way!
When it comes to installing everything as someone non-technical, I always get a headache when I have to look at written instructions. That is why almost all the tutorials here are VIDEO tutorials, so you can literally follow step by step. There will still be some bumps here and there, since the OS they are working on probably has different software installed, which means you might run into dependency issues, but these are usually minor hiccups that are easily remedied.
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Electrs or Fulcrum: I seriously considered these 2 choices for indexer. If you only use Sparrow wallet, Fulcrum might be better. But I tried to connect other wallets like Electrum and Green Wallet to Fulcrum and it did not work, so if you use many wallets, maybe Electrs is the way to go. Fulcrum does seem to be faster though. Check out the side by side Comparison.
- Electrs: Github, Tutorial
- Fulcrum: Github, Tutorial (Bonus: Tor access is not setup in the tutorial. You can get the instructions from Raspibolt’s site)
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Mempool Explorer: Github, Website, Tutorial (Docker) There are a couple different ways to install the Mempool explorer. Docker is probably the best and easiest one from the “Advanced Installation Methods.” However, MinistryofNodes’s tutorial does not cover how to make it accessible over TOR. I spent many nights trying to figure it out to no avail, so if anyone knows how to enable TOR access over docker, please feel free to let me know. In the end, I resorted once again to Raspibolt’s amazing written instructions, and opted for the full manual installation.
The last thing you need is to install CLBOSS, the automated node channel manager, so you won’t have to bother balancing channels or fussing around with it. CLBOSS’s github page comes with installation instructions, but they are confusing as hell, and there isn’t a single video tutorial. Thus, it took me hours, for something that should take minutes.
This is the key: After you install all the dependencies, download the source code and unzip it, you need to first execute: “autoreconf -i”. Then run “./configure && make && sudo make install”. Without the autoreconf command it will just say the config file is missing. For some reason the latest release doesn’t come with a compiled installer, only the source code.
Also, before being able to generate bolt12 static offers, you will need to enable it by adding “experimental-offers” in the config file.
That’s it! If anyone gives this a try, let us know how it goes!