Nodebox Ansible Script

This is an attempt to turn the awesome Ministry of Nodes video tutorials into an Ansible Script: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCRbH-IWlcW2A_kpx2XwAMgT0rcZEZ2Cg

I'm not affiliated with them in any way and I have no idea what I am getting myself into. Let's see how far I can get.

Progress

Please note: I'm still chugging along all those videos.

I have attempted a full run up until role samourai_dojo with a fresh Ubuntu Server 22.04 installation on 2022-09-18 and it worked well.

Get some hardware and install Ubuntu Server on it
- I'll explain my setup when the script is done
Make sure to install Python & Ansible on your machine.
- I'll explain the fastest way to do that when the script is done
- for Ansible, see https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/intro_installation.html

Clone this repo
Create hosts file based on hosts.sample
Create ./vars/external_vars.yml file based on ./vars/external_vars.yml.sample
NOTE: The ansible-playbook commands can be re-run as often as you want
Execute with ansible-playbook -i hosts step1.yml
- This will only prepare Ubuntu and install docker and Bitcoin Core.
- You should check if it worked via tail -f ~/.bitcoin/debug.log
- Also check if docker ps shows CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
- Let it run over night until the blockchain is fully downloaded
- You can run bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo and compare the blocks value with the latest value shown at https://mempool.space/ to know if your blockchain has been fully synced. Also, initialblockdownload should be false at this point
Then execute ansible-playbook -i hosts step2.yml
- This will install Tor, Fulcrum, Mempool, Dojo
- Fulcrum will need a long time to create its DB as well

After the script has run, you need to do the following:

I will probably script the things above as well at the very end.

These are things that I had to do differently because they didn't work as shown in the videos:

I had to download and install libssl1.1.1 (see discussion here cculianu/Fulcrum#126); I will remove this when a new Fulcrum version is released
The docker installation is slightly different because the installation instructions in the docker docs have since changed.
- we can now use docker compose instead of docker-compose

Notes to self:

Remove libssl1.1.1 installation when Fulcrum1.8.1 is out
It seems like it can all be done in one step, we just should not enable the tor settings in bitcoin.conf for the initial chain download, so maybe step2 should only be for insertin those settings and everything else should be in step1.

Just taking some notes here about useful CLI commands that k3tan shares in his videos:

bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo
- Shows all kinds of info about the downloaded blockchain
- see https://youtu.be/fx_mLXISrfM?list=PLCRbH-IWlcW2A_kpx2XwAMgT0rcZEZ2Cg&t=451
bitcoin-cli getconnectioncount
- Shows number of conntected peers
- see https://youtu.be/fx_mLXISrfM?list=PLCRbH-IWlcW2A_kpx2XwAMgT0rcZEZ2Cg&t=512
bitcoin-cli stop
- Stops the daemon (don't use this, use the systemctl command instead)
- see https://youtu.be/fx_mLXISrfM?t=1161
bitcoin-cli getnetworkinfo
- Gets network info. Use to check if tor is working
- see https://youtu.be/fx_mLXISrfM?t=1692
sudo systemctl status bitcoind
- commands to control bitcoind: start, stop, restart, status
- see https://youtu.be/fx_mLXISrfM?t=1192
sudo systemctl status tor
- commands to control tor: start, stop, restart, status
- see https://youtu.be/fx_mLXISrfM?t=1264
journalctl -fu bitcoind|fulcrum
- see logs of the given service in realtime
~/dojo-app/docker/my-dojo/dojo.sh logs
- see all outputs from all containers that belong to dojo
~/dojo-app/docker/my-dojo/dojo.sh onion
- get the onion address of the dojo management interface

If this appears in tail -f ~/.bitcoin/debug.log and it seems stuck, run sudo systemctl restart bitcoind, now it should continue to sync the chain.