Notes on emercoin setup on Debian 8.2 x64

Background: I installed this on a digitalocean droplet. They’ve been rock solid hosting for me, and very affordable. Tell ‘em I sent you.

I setup a new droplet and did the usual stuff, including the absolutely required disabling ssh login for root user. I like to run things as separate users, so adduser emc came next. As of Debian8 no more editing sudoers, now there’s a simple command: usermod -a -G sudo <user>

Next I downloaded emercoin from sourceforge -

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/emercoin/0.3.4/emercoin-0.3.4-linux.tar.gz
tar xvf emercoin-0.3.4-linux.tar.gz
ln -s /usr/local/src/emercoin-0.3.4-linux/bin/64/emercoind /usr/local/bin/emercoind

emercoind is the headless daemon that you want to run, as the GUI wallet you would run on your desktop is emercoin-qt. I want to use it as a systemd service, so in /etc/systemd/system/ I create a emercoin.service file and start the service by typing:

systemctl enable emercoin.service
systemctl start emercoin

Note that in our emercoin.service file we’re running this as the user emc and they’ll need a config file in their ~/.emercoin directory. This can be very simple, we only need something like this (be sure to put some rpcuser and rpcpassword on first two lines where I’m showing angle brackets):

rpcuser=<usernamehere>
rpcpassword=<userpasswordhere>
rpcport=8775
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1

listen=1
server=1
maxconnections=80
reservebalance=5
gen=0
daemon=1

# activate DNS services for 4 TLDs
emcdns=1
emcdnsallowed=.coin|.emc|.lib|.bazar
emcdnsverbose=4

Now check to see that emercoind is running by typing emercoind getinfo

Mine shows this:

{
    "version" : "v0.3.4emc-1-g48d728d-beta",
    "protocolversion" : 60003,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "newmint" : 0.00000000,
    "stake" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 51987,
    "moneysupply" : 36294315.46409500,
    "connections" : 8,
    "proxy" : "",
    "ip" : "162.243.22.13",
    "difficulty" : 17523505.84215224,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1448052457,
    "keypoolsize" : 101,
    "paytxfee" : 0.01000000,
    "errors" : "WARNING: Checkpoint is too old. Wait for block chain to download, or notify developers of the issue." }

Note that it is still downloading the blockchain. Currently it is on block 51987, and emercoin blockchain is on 134890 at the time of writing according to this emercoin blockchain explorer site.

Also note that to resolve your .emc and .coin domain names, the easiest way is to change your machine’s DNS settings to point to opennic’s DNS servers

Have fun and keep an eye out. If time allows I will write up brief summaries of some of the nice tricks emercoin can do.