This development dispatch covers work completed since the Decred v0.1.5 release from June 7th, 2016. Since then, developers have merged 16 pull requests of code into 3 software repositories (for changes, see below). v0.1.6 includes a new tool, dcrinstall, to automate the install, upgrade, and setup process for the Decred software. dcrinstall: https://github.com/decred/decred-release/releases/tag/v0.1.6 Binaries: https://github.com/decred/decred-binaries/releases/tag/v0.1.6 dcrd Fixed an issue with memory alignment on 32-bit architectures (269-2bbfd5f) Fixed an issue that interferes with the new dcrinstall package when checking if .dcrd exists (270-fa72e21) Added a simnet option to the config file (272-e6beeb6) Updated versioning (271-9279321) Credits: @ay-p, @ceejep, @jcv, @jolan, @jrick, marcopeereboom, T909 dcrwallet Moved prompting of passphrases and seed to a prompt package so other tools can call the same prompts (268-b3bd20e) Modified the wallet package to import the database driver directly (269-f2a12cf) Added a non-internal prompt package (273-dfb6bcd) Fixed a build error for the test harness (274-697443a) Updated documentation (275-7bdd976) and versioning (271-1ca9472) Credits: @ay-p, @ceejep, @jcv, @jolan, @jrick dcrticketbuyer Updated the default directory to be OS-specific (10-4297aa0) Updated configuration (13-01a9cd6), documentation (14-e5d08c1, 15-7c3b826), and versioning (12-3505d11) Credits: @ceejep, @chappjc, @jcv, @jolan, @raedah Developer Notes dcrinstall dcrinstall is a tool to automate the install, upgrade, and setup process for the Decred software. In install mode dcrinstall downloads the latest released binaries of dcrd, dcrwallet, dcrctl, and dcrticketbuyer for your operating system and platform, installs them, sets up the config files, and creates a wallet for you. In upgrade mode, dcrinstall replaces your binaries with the latest copies but makes no changes to your configs. Upgrading an existing installation The following steps are required to upgrade a system with Decred that was not installed by dcrinstall. If you already have Decred installed you will need to follow these instructions the first time. The dcrinstall tool expects the following directory layout. In order to upgrade you must copy your current configuration files into the correct location and ensure everything still works. You may also want to copy you executables to the directory dcrinstall expects as well. If dcrinstall detects all configuration files it'll operate in upgrade mode. Upgrade mode only overwrites the binaries in %HOMEPATH%\decred (or ~/decred on a UNIX type OS). The dcrinstall tool records all actions in %HOMEPATH%\decred\dcrinstall.log (or ~/decred/dcrinstall.log on a UNIX type OS). Windows configuration files: Code: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Dcrctl\dcrctl.conf %LOCALAPPDATA%\Dcrd\dcrd.conf %LOCALAPPDATA%\Dcrticketbuyer\ticketbuyer.conf %LOCALAPPDATA%\Dcrwallet\dcrwallet.conf Binaries directory: Code: %HOMEPATH%\decred\ OSX configuration files: Code: ~/Library/Application Support/Dcrctl/dcrctl.conf ~/Library/Application Support/Dcrd/dcrd.conf ~/Library/Application Support/Dcrticketbuyer/ticketbuyer.conf ~/Library/Application Support/Dcrwallet/dcrwallet.conf Binaries directory: Code: ~/decred UNIX configuration files: Code: ~/.dcrctl/dcrctl.conf ~/.dcrd/dcrd.conf ~/.dcrticketbuyer/ticketbuyer.conf ~/.dcrwallet/dcrwallet.conf Binaries directory: Code: ~/decred Run the software Now that you have the files where dcrinstall can find them you can download and run dcrinstall. For Windows open a cmd.exe window then: Code: cd %HOMEPATH%\Download dcrinstall.exe For OSX and UNIX you will also need to make the file executable before runnning it: Code: cd Downloads/ chmod u+x dcrinstall ./dcrinstall and your installation will be upgraded to the latest released version. Clean install If you are doing a clean install (no existing Decred configuration files) you can just run dcrinstall and it will setup and configure all the binaries. For Windows open a cmd.exe window and: Code: cd %HOMEPATH%\Download dcrinstall.exe For OSX and UNIX: Code: cd Downloads/ ./dcrinstall You will be asked to provide a passphrase for you wallet and given the opportunity to use and existing wallet seed if you have one. Log file dcrinstall saves a log file with information on everything it did which you may examine if you need more information. On Windows the file is located at: Code: %HOMEPATH%\decred\dcrinstaller.log On OSX and UNIX the file is located at: Code: ~/decred/dcrinstaller.log Running Decred programs On Windows open cmd.exe Code: %HOMEPATH%\decred\dcrd.exe One OSX and UNIX like systems: Code: cd decred/ ./dcrd Alternatively you can add the directory to your path. For Windows see http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm For OSX and UNIX refer to the documentation for your shell. Public keys The file cmd/dcrinstall/pubkey.go contains the decred public key which is used to check the signed manifest in the release. You can compare the contents of this file to what you get from a keyserver to confirm that dcrinstaller is using the proper key. Important dcrinstall can only install Decred releases v0.1.6 or later (although as described above it can be used to upgrade from an older version). dcrinstall has been tested on Windows 10, Windows 7, OSX 10.11, Bitrig current, OpenBSD, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Raspbian. Due to an issue with the go cross-compiler, binaries are not available for linux-arm64. Users running Linux on arm64 should either build from source or contact the Decred developers for a binary for that platform.
dcrinstall worked like a charm! As a complete aside, I saw this when I was restarting dcrd: Code: 07:31:13 2016-06-23 [INF] DISC: DNS discovery failed on seed mainnet-seed.decred.org: lookup mainnet-seed.decred.org on 10.255.255.3:53: server misbehaving I tried to ping from desktop and the name won't resolve.
Ya, I've hit that many times before. Believe it is a DNS issue. I've updated to use comcast's DNS sometimes and it seems to help usually (75.75.75.75)
Strange crash. Happened a few times. Windows 7 32-bit. The screen keeps scrolling faster than you can see.
Are there any initial conditions that lead to that error ? I have never experienced any such problem with win64 (used occasionally), neither linux64 (used a lot), so maybe win32 problem ? Any antivirus software running etc. ? Other demanding software running ?
There is absolutely nothing special about the system. Really simple install of Win 7, 32-bit. Win system updates done manually. No other software running at the time of crash. Machine typically used to interface a Firewire device and two USB-RS232 dongles. I had 5 crashes around the same time on this machine 13th of July + another few crashes on another equally simple Win 7 32-bit machine. Stable since. No clue why! The thing is I've had crashes before where the dcrd.exe crashes silently but I happened to catch this one crash "in the act".
We hit that error before a long time ago, but I can't remember where we hit it. We're still not sure why it happens, but it's so rare that we haven't looked into it deeply. Please raise an issue on the github so we don't forget about it again. The branch with the new database seems very stable, as I've been running it for almost two weeks on nodes now without issue. When GUI is finished, I will get back to finishing it.