When starting with my first headless gridcoin wallet, I decided to write a tutorial to remember the steps I took and maybe even help others in the process.
If you're wondering what a 'headless wallet' is, it means the gridcoin software is installed on a command-line, text-only system. In other words you might not have a monitor connected to the PC (thus headless), and you are probably controlling the machine remotely through an SSH terminal.
This tutorial assumes you have successfully installed gridcoinresearchd on your machine running a debian-based (Debian / Ubuntu / Raspbian / etc) linux distribution. In other words, you already have your wallet created. Gridcoin daemon creates one for you automatically. All you need to do now is to protect it by encrypting it and backing it up.
Step 0 - Make sure your gridcoinresearchd daemon is running
At this point gridcoinresearchd should be installed, synced and running.
If you haven't started the gridcoin daemon yet, do so by typing gridcoinresearchd.
You can verify the daemon has started by typing gridcoinresearchd getinfo.
If the gridcoin daemon has not started yet, it will display error: couldn't connect to server.
If you just installed gridcoin, startup will take a long time as the blockchain needs to be downloaded. Check again tomorrow.
Keep running the gridcoinresearchd getinfo command every now and then until you get some real information out of it. When the daemon has started, it will display something like this:
{
"version" : "v3.7.12.0-unk",
"minor_version" : 7,
"protocolversion" : 180323,
"walletversion" : 60000,
"balance" : 0.00000000,
"newmint" : 0.00000000,
"stake" : 0.00000000,
"blocks" : 1263869,
"timeoffset" : -263,
"moneysupply" : 405006367.25869381,
"connections" : 8,
"proxy" : "",
"ip" : "123.123.123.123",
"difficulty" : {
"proof-of-work" : 8.23948943,
"proof-of-stake" : 6.64471954
},
"testnet" : false,
"keypoololdest" : 1527934157,
"keypoolsize" : 100,
"paytxfee" : 0.00010000,
"mininput" : 0.00000000,
"unlocked_until" : 0,
"errors" : ""
}
Step 1 - Stop bash from storing your password in the history file
Before you encrypt your gridcoin wallet, you should make sure that bash history is not in use. Otherwise your password will be stored in plaintext format in the .bash_history file of your home directory.
To get rid of the history file, edit your .bashrc file:
nano ~/.bashrc
Edit parameter HISTFILESIZE to 0, so your wallet passphrase is not stored in .bash_history file:
HISTFILESIZE=0
Press Ctrl-X and then Y to exit and save the file.
Then logout and login again to your server and check that .bash_history file is empty:
cat ~/.bash_history
If you got nothing as response, it means the .bash_history empty and your password will be safe.
Step 2 - Make your gridcoin wallet file readable only by your current user
Remove the file access permission from other users on the same linux machine.
chmod go-rwx ~/.GridcoinResearch/
Step 3 - Encrypt your wallet.dat file
Be sure to create a LONG passphrase! To do this, use keepass or some other password generation and storage tool. The password should be so complicated that there's no way you can remember it.
gridcoinresearchd encryptwallet <YOUR_VERY_LONG_WALLET_PASSPHRASE>
You will get a message saying something like:
wallet encrypted; Gridcoin server stopping, restart to run with encrypted wallet. The keypool has been flushed, you need to make a new backup.
Start gridcoin server again:
gridcoinresearchd
Wait for the server to start. Again, type the
gridcoinreserachd getinfo
command until you get the proper status message.
Step 4 - How to create a new address for receiving gridcoin
gridcoinresearchd getnewaddress
You will get a gridcoin address and are ready to receive some gridcoin.
To see all your gridcoin addresses, type:
gridcoinresearchd listaddressgroupings
You can now try to send a small amount - for example 1 GRC - to your new address. You can do this from an exchange or from another gridcoin wallet in your control.
To see the combined balance of all the addresses in your wallet, type:
gridcoinresearchd getbalance
Wait a few minutes and you should see the 1 GRC in your balance.
If you're impatient, you can see your upcoming balance before the transaction is fully confirmed:
gridcoinresearchd listreceivedbyaddress
Step 5 - Back up your wallet.dat
This is very important: Backup your wallet!
You don't need to back up your wallet every time you run getnewaddress. The addresses you get are already part of your wallet. I'm not sure of how many addresses are generated automatically with each gridcoin wallet. For bitcoin, it is 1000 addresses. In that case you would have to do a backup for every 1000 adresses you create. The idea is that normal users should only need to do one backup.
I did it to folder "grcbackup" in my home directory.
There is a command 'backupwallet' included in the client, but it seems it's not working at the moment I'm writing this. So you need to do stop the gridcoin daemon, manually copy your wallet.dat and gridcoinresearchd.conf to somewhere safe and then restart the daemon:
gridcoinresearchd stop
mkdir ~/grcbackup
cp ~/.GridcoinResearch/wallet.dat ~/grcbackup/
cp ~/.GridcoinResearch/gridcoinresearch.conf ~/grcbackup/
gridcoinresearchd
Now, move the data somewhere safe. Remember that USB sticks are not a safe way to store wallet data as they usually corrupt data when not used for a while.
Step 6 - Send a gridcoin transaction
If you have unlocked your wallet for staking, you need to first lock your wallet.
gridcoinresearchd walletlock
Then unlock your wallet for 5 minutes (300 seconds)
gridcoinresearchd walletpassphrase <YOUR_VERY_LONG_WALLET_PASSPHRASE> 300
Your getinfo command will now show something like this:
"unlocked_until" : 1527935993,
Do a transaction:
gridcoinresearchd sendtoaddress <ADDRESS_TO_SEND_TO> <AMOUNT_TO_SEND>
To lock your wallet again:
gridcoinresearchd walletlock
Step 7 - Unlock your wallet for staking
If you have several thousand GRC, you might want to consider staking to receive interest on it. You should have your gridcoin wallet running 24/7 for this to work.
Staking works only if your coins have 'matured'. This means the coins need to have been sitting in the current address and not staked for at least 16 hours.
If your coins haven't matured yet, you can still unlock the wallet for staking. The gridcoin daemon will automatically check for any matured coins to stake.
Unlock the wallet for the maximum time (9999999 seconds, about 115 days) and with an added parameter 'true'. This means it will unlock the wallet only for staking.
gridcoinresearchd walletpassphrase <YOUR_VERY_LONG_WALLET_PASSPHRASE> 9999999 true
Now, when the wallet is unlocked for staking only, you cannot make transactions. You need to lock the wallet and then unlock it again (see step 6).
Check the staking info:
gridcoinresearch getmininginfo
If you don't have any mature coins yet, it will show
"staking" : false
In that case, check again the next day and you will see the following parameters:
stakeweight.valuesum - amount of GRC you are staking. Should be same as the amount of coins you have in the wallet.
time-to-stake_days - estimated days to staking (receiving interest)
More info on the various parameters can be found here:
https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Gridcoin-Research/wiki/StakeMiner
Have fun!
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below!
IMO CLI is not headless its command line , the QT interface is a separate application paired with the distribution and releases. I was in hopes this was going to be similar to the review I did on Moises's Android remote control for gridcoinresearchd as the reviews seemed that people did not understand that it was a remote control for the daemon and not local and remote and when you install gridcoinresearchd you can remote control it via the RPC port 9332.
Although it is good to periodically write a how to use your Gridcoin client for Linux newbs but the QT interface is not required for use of the client. I would assume you could use the QT interface by itself and remotely control a wallet say having it running gridcoinresearchd and the listen=1 rpcport=9332 and rpcuser=username rpcpassword=password along with rpcipallow=ip and then a separate machine just like Moises's Android remote control but use the QT5 front end remote for a daemon running on Linux remote or local ( firewall forwards if needed ). But again , its nice to periodically have someone post a " How to use your Linux installed Gridcoin client for newbs " post here on steemit/reddit or other sites since they get buried in the newer posts although if you just search Google for " gridcoinresearchd rpc commands " you can find the same info posted here from the Gridcoin wiki and much more " Gridcoin Daemon CMDs " along with running gridcoinresearchd --help.
So again thank you for your post , it's helpful to newer users as we are always gaining new users at different levels of knowledge so these posts are valuable.
Yes, you can use the graphical Qt wallet to control your remote command line wallet remotely. But opening the port is not always possible. This guide is indeed only for using the command line interface. I quess I should have advertised the graphical option a bit too :)
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