Thoughts about new Bitcoin Core setup? \ stacker news ~bitdevs

Hi SN!

I was hoping to get some feedback on this Aunt Jenn setup.

I'm running Bitcoin Core on a Debian 12.6 VM and want to set up a second Debian VM to run electrs using Host-Only Networking in VirtualBox and cookie authentication. Here's my plan:

Configure Host-Only Networking between the two VMs.
Set up Bitcoin Core to allow RPC connections over the network and use its .cookie file for authentication.
Manually copy the .cookie file from the Bitcoin Core VM to the electrs VM whenever Bitcoin Core restarts.
Install electrs on the second VM, configure it to use the copied .cookie file, and point it to the Bitcoin Core node's RPC IP and port.
Start electrs and verify the connection.

I’m aiming to keep the Bitcoin node OS clean to do testing with electrs and others. Then I may create a third VM to run apps to connect to the Electrum server.

Does this approach look good, or should I consider any improvements?

3 sats \ 1 reply \ @bitalion 6 Sep 2024

I think that in the end it all depends on the objective you have. If I were you, I would run the whole environment with just one virtual machine. If the machines are on the host-only network, they have no communication with the outside, so putting that security to connect is unnecessary. The ideal is to set up everything using Docker, you optimize resources. To learn, you have to experiment, and what you're doing is very good for understanding how Bitcoin works.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @jennann OP 6 Sep 2024

Thanks, good point. I do want it to connect to the broader network, so suppose I would want to use Bridged Adapter.