This guide is old and outdated.

A partial update has been made to correspond with the new tracker config.json

Good morning all,

I trust everyone had a nice Christmas/Holiday and new year, and I hope that 2018 brings you all the best.

Unfortunately though, VPSdime changed their Terms of Service to include running a Zencash securenode. Their analysis showed that during the times of challenges on peoples securenodes it was grinding other customers VPS to a halt.

I have been asked by a number of people how to migrate from one VPS provider to another. This is a method that I would use to migrate from one VPS provider to another and still maintain the same NodeID, Staking address, with the only change being the IP address.

The goal of this post is to move the wallet.dat and the nodeid to a new VPS provider resulting in only a IP change for the new VPS.

Method 1 - Copying the wallet.dat to new VPS

Step 1 - Old VPS

  1. Stop the zend process:
    if you are using monit run sudo monit stop zend
    or zen-cli stop
  2. Confirm that zend is stopped, run ps aux | grep zend | grep -v grep, if you see 1 line then zend is still running, if you have no lines then move to point 3.
  3. Using a SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) program, log into your VPS instance and navigate to ~/.zen and then download to your local machine the wallet.dat.
  4. Now we need to get the nodeID from the secnodetracker/config/nodeid file or config/config.json, or you can get it from the tracking server later.

Step 2 - Change DNS A Record

  1. You will need to log into your name registrar and change the DNS A record for your FQDN to the new VPS IP address.

Step 3 - New VPS

  1. Configure the new securenode as per a tutorial, however, after running zend for the first time (if using the APT repo), once the zend process has stopped, and confirm that zend is stopped using ps aux | grep zend | grep -v grep.
    SFTP to your new VPS and copy across the wallet.dat into the ~/.zen directory.
  2. Restart the zend process and continue with the configuration of the node as per the tutorial.
  3. Download, install, and setup the securenode tracker software, but before running node app.js, create a new file in the config directory called nodeid. To create this, use your favourite editor while in the secnodetracker directory, mine is nano, so my command will be nano config/nodeid or nano config/config.json and enter the nodeid you previously got from the old VPS config/nodeid file or you can head over to https://securenodes.zensystem.io and connect to the region of your previous securenode and search for your nodes FQDN.

EDIT: If you have the new tracker you will need to add a new line under the "nodetype": "", and add
"nodeid": "xxxx", where xxxx is your nodeid.

  1. Save that file and then run node app.js and look for any errors. You should see a notice that your IP address has changed. If you see that and you are connected to the tracker you are all set.

Step 4 - Decomission your old VPS

  1. Once you have confirmed that your new VPS is connected you can decommission your old VPS.

If you run into any issues or if you find anything that should be updated in this, please hit me up in #securenodes on Discord.

Have a great one