Hello again zennitizens,

This blog edition is the second in the series of frequently asked questions asked on in the zencash slack.

There seems to be some confusion for the location of some of the important files associated with the zend daemon for those who are new to nix based operating systems.

~/.zen and ~/zen

One of the issues that I have seen from time-to-time is associate with the difference between ~/.zen and ~/zen. There are some subtle differences between the two examples that I just gave. You can see that there is a . between the ~/ and zen. This represents a hidden directory location and separate from the program directory that was cloned using git clone https://github.com/ZencashOfficial/zen.git.

Creation and modification of the zen.conf file should be in the hidden directory location ~/.zen

Zend error: no auth mechanism defined after running the setup for the securenode tracker software

A common issue that has been observed where the securendode tracker software cannot communicate with the zend daemon that has been confirmed running on the system resulting in the following error:

2017-10-12 01:23:20 GMT -- Connected to node pool server. Initializing...
2017-10-12 01:23:20 GMT -- Zend error: no auth mechanism defined
Unable to connect to zend. Please check the zen rpc settings and ensure zend is running
2017-10-12 01:23:30 GMT -- Zend error: no auth mechanism defined
Unable to connect to zend. Please check the zen rpc settings and ensure zend is running

If you receive this error, doing a directory listing of the config/ directory in the secnodetracker directory using ls config/ may reveal that you are missing rpcallow, rpcport, rpcpassword, and rpcuser. If this is the case, then it could be related to the incorrect location for the zen.conf.

Verify that the zen.conf is in the correct location of ~/.zen and that the zend daemon is running.

Incorrect configuration of FQDN in secnodetracker setup

An issue that has been reported is a failure of the securenode tracker where it reports:

Cert check: valid=false. IP address does not match. DNS lookup returned
Exception: Certificate issue - DNS lookup returned -IP Address-

This is caused by only entering your domain name in the setup and not the nodename.domainname.

Re-run node setup.js and when asked specify the FQDN including the nodename.domainname.

Restart the secnodetracker software and the exception should clear:

Cert check: valid=true. Servername nodename.domainname matches CN nodename.domainname

zen-cli command quick reference

Here is a list of commands that are frequently used at the command line interface for zen.

Sending ZEN from t-address to z-address (replace t-address with the sending address, and z-address with receiving address).
zen-cli z_sendmany "t-address" "[{\"amount\": 1, \"address\": \"z-address\"}]"
This command can also be used to send ZEN to other wallets and addresses.

Verifying SSL certificate is valid
zen-cli getnetworkinfo
This will return a JSON string with a line that is either:
"tls_cert_verified": true,
or
"tls_cert_verified": false,

List all of the t-addresses on the now
zen-cli listaddressgroupsings

Get a new t-address
zen-cli getnewaddress

Get a new z-address
zen-cli z_getnewaddress

Return the balance of both t-addresses and z-addresses on your node
zen-cli z_gettotalbalance

Return the balance of the private z-address (replace with address)
zen-cli z_getbalance <z-address>

I hope that this post helps you out, shoot through any questions either on here or in the zencash slack.