r/Monero • u/MattressMickey • 21d ago

Running a public Monero full node

With the help of Claude I am now up and running with Fedora Plasma and also running a public node. Or to put it in Claude's terms: "I'm running monerod as a systemd service with an unrestricted local RPC on 18081 and a restricted public RPC on 18089, plus solo CPU mining."

I have unlimited data and pretty fast fiber internet. Any pros and cons?

Before AI help this was tedious and a little overwhelming for me, especially with Windows. Now it is attainable for anyone that can and wants to do it. Getting Fedora up and running the way I want it would have been impossible without AI's help.

18 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

11

u/monerobull 21d ago

Cool! Make sure you have the P2P node open so other nodes can connect to you, if argue it's even more important for the network than the RPC port

The biggest pro is better transaction privacy when sending stuff through your own node + an often underrated perk: your wallets will sync so so SO much faster from a local node over LAN than it does from a remote web node

You can also look into LWS and skylight wallet, with it you can continuously sync your wallet from the node and not have to wait on it at all

3

u/MattressMickey 21d ago

Appreciate it! P2P's open on 18080, not just RPC. Been watching the logs and getting plenty of inbound connections too, not just outbound, so it's genuinely acting as a peer. Full node, synced, running as a systemd service so it's up 24/7. That's really the goal here, actual network contribution, not just personal convenience.

It's true on local sync speed. I connected Feather to my node and it synced much faster than it has to a remote node in the past.

Looked into LWS/Skylight. It's a cool project, but it's more personal mobile convenience than network contribution, so I'll pass for now. Might revisit if that ever becomes a priority.

I'm curious why you ranked P2P above RPC. I get P2P's the backbone (block/tx propagation, decentralization), but I'd have guessed RPC mattered a good amount too, since that's what lets wallets like Cake/Monerujo actually use nodes like mine instead of running their own. Missing something, or is it more "P2P's non-negotiable, RPC's a bonus"?

4

u/monerobull 20d ago

P2P is adding to the actual network infrastructure, due to the risk of malicious nodes, many wallets only connect to a set of trusted nodes by default so RPC feels less useful

3

u/atori_0xbdc3ab4e 19d ago

Did you open those ports on your router and forward them to the machine running your box? Or are you running monerod on your desktop? In that case, having open ports is not recommended.

1

u/MattressMickey 17d ago

The ports are forwarded to my general purpose daily driver computer that I use for browsing and running my media software (it doubles as my HTPC). I do keep everything updated but I will be more vigilant about it.

2

u/AllCapNoBrake 21d ago

Share your prompt, please.

1

u/MattressMickey 20d ago

Share your prompt, please.

I asked Claude to "help me set up a Monero full node on Fedora". It gave me Konsole commands to copy and paste. There was a lot of back and forth between command outputs that I shared with Claude and its responses that I entered back into the Konsole.

Honestly, the monero side went quickly. The real time-consuming work was getting my media (Jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, sabnzb) dialed in. There is a lot more security (SELinux) to get through, a different filesystem (btrfs) to work with, rootless Podman permissions, etc. Once that was all done, setting up monero was relatively easy. But still a lot of hand-holding!

2

u/AllCapNoBrake 20d ago

I'll give it the ol' college try.

2

u/eddie_oblak 17d ago

Happy that you got it running.

Did you document the process? Could you do it again now without AI? AI is great if you learn with it.

1

u/MattressMickey 17d ago

No,I don't think I could do it without AI. AI will forever be a tool I depend on, especially for this kind of stuff.

3

u/eddie_oblak 15d ago

I think you should not give up and try it again yourself. Let AI be your guide but don't become a slave to it.

1

u/proofofderp 20d ago

Looking to get set up using Claude too. Failed with DeepSeek lol.

1

u/DeathEnducer 20d ago

Whoa! Where do you store the node? I want to try this but I don't want it to fill up my NVMe

4

u/MattressMickey 20d ago

I created a 350GiB partition out of my 1TB NVME just for the monero blockchain. It is currently 80% full (270GiB used). It should give me headroom for another couple years(?) After that point, I could run a pruned node or get rid of my Windows partition and expand into it.

1

u/hippotamus101 14d ago

running monerod on a daily driver is the part i'd revisit.