Home
I'm documenting here my adventures in setting up an Ethereum Parity node on a home NAS box. Planned scope of coverage is,
- Using Docker to run and manage the node
- Building your own Parity Docker image
- Linking to ethstats.net
- Setting up the Parity UI for access from the LAN [work in progress]
- Connecting to MyEtherWallet
Where I'm using Docker it should pretty much translate directly across to other Docker-supporting platforms, at least the command-line bits, but no promises.
There seems to a dearth of straightforward "how-to"s on this kind of stuff, although I did find [this] (https://medium.com/@preitsma/setting-up-a-parity-ethereum-node-in-docker-and-connect-safely-f881faa17686) very helpful in getting started.
The basic hardware is a QNAP TS-253A NAS with 4GB memory. It has built-in support for Docker which is what makes hosting a node relatively straightforward. The processor is a quad-core Intel Celeron N3160 @ 1.60GHz - not the mightiest of beasts, but seems to be up to the job.
I started playing with all this just ahead of the Great Ethereum Network Attacks. My initial configuration with 2x3TB WD Red HDDs and 4GB memory was difficult to keep synced during that saga. I upgraded one of the disks to an SSD, and I upgraded the memory to 8GB. Unfortunately, the memory upgrade turned out to be faulty, and this caused a lot of instability in Parity. I'm now back to the original 4GB memory, though I've kept the SSD, and everything is rock-solid.
As for networking, I'm on 56Mbit/s ADSL (10Mbit/s upload bandwidth). This seems sufficient for about 25 peers, perhaps more now the state cleaning is finished.
QNAP firmware version is 4.2.2 which offers a basic Linux shell via busybox.