counterweight
e791ffb183
The Onion Monero Blockchain Explorer on monerod-box, published at
exmrplore.contrapeso.xyz. Ten Gatus endpoints green across the node and the
explorer.
── It needs a compiled monero source tree, not a running monerod ───────────
xmrblocks is not an RPC client. cmake/FindMonero.cmake imports 21 STATIC
libraries out of a monero build tree and includes its headers, because it opens
the LMDB directly. The release tarball we install for the daemon ships only
executables - no .a files, no headers - so there is nothing on the box to link
against, and building it means compiling monero first.
Measured on Debian 13, building only the libraries it links:
peak RSS, one cc1plus ~3.2 GB
peak RSS at -j4 ~5.5 GB
wall time at -j4 167 s
source + build tree 195 MB
toolchain 1.6 GB
That rules the box out at ANY parallelism: 768 MiB and 1800 MiB were both
OOM-killed at -j1 and -j2, because a single translation unit over 3 GB is not
something lower -j works around. My first estimate of "~10 GB of disk" was
wrong by two orders of magnitude - that figure describes upstream's full `make`,
which also builds monerod, both wallets and the test suite, none of it linked
here. Disk was never the constraint.
So scripts/build-xmrblocks.sh does the build in a debian:13 container. An
artefact only one machine can produce is one nobody can audit; this way any host
with Docker and ~6 GB reproduces it. It verifies the monero source against
binaryFate's signature exactly as roles/monero does for the daemon, and the role
asserts the resulting sha256 ON THE CONTROL NODE before copying a single byte.
── Three upstream problems, none documented anywhere ───────────────────────
Found by building, not by reading:
1. libasio-dev is absent from upstream's dependency list. That list is
Ubuntu-based; Crow wants standalone asio.hpp, not boost/asio.hpp, and on
Debian 13 the build dies outright.
2. The explorer does not compile against monero v0.18.5.1. v0.18.5.0 changed
get_pruned_transaction_hash from returning the hash to returning bool with
an out-param, and src/page.h still calls the old form. Upstream's
Dockerfile pins v0.18.4.0, which is why nobody has hit it. Patched from an
exact-line anchor, so if upstream fixes it the build STOPS rather than
quietly doing something else. We patch instead of building against 0.18.4.0
because the signed hashes.txt only covers the current release - using the
older source would mean dropping the provenance chain. LMDB is VERSION 5 in
both, so either reads the other's database.
3. FindMonero.cmake hunts for miniupnpc inside the monero build tree with
NO_DEFAULT_PATH, but monero stopped vendoring miniupnp as a submodule.
Fixed with a cache override rather than patching their cmake.
USE_DEVICE_TREZOR=OFF as well - an explorer has no use for hardware wallets and
it drops the generated protobuf units. Verified that xmrblocks still links.
── Two things in the unit that look wrong and are not ──────────────────────
WorkingDirectory is load-bearing: page.h hardcodes TMPL_DIR as "./templates",
resolved relative to cwd at REQUEST time. Get it wrong and the service starts,
binds 8081, and 500s every page. That is also why the health check fetches a
real page and greps it instead of probing the port.
ReadWritePaths must include the blockchain directory even though the database is
opened read-only: monero sets mdb_flags = MDB_RDONLY WITHOUT MDB_NOLOCK, so
LMDB still registers this reader in lock.mdb. With ProtectSystem=strict and
nothing writable the open fails. "It only reads, so grant it nothing" is wrong.
── Timeouts are measured, not guessed ──────────────────────────────────────
proxmox-tank-1 is a spinning-disk mirror and xmrblocks says so on startup.
First start took 98s to open the LMDB before binding (wait_for now allows 300s),
and a COLD index page took 68 SECONDS where the next two took 0.87s and 0.012s
(the check now allows 90s, its unit 180s). The first pass used 90s and 25s and
produced exactly the false failures you would expect.
A stat() bug was caught the same way: `stat` computes a sha1 by default, so
checking that data.mdb exists was hashing the entire 40 GB blockchain. --check
found it before a real run did.
── Exposure ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Caddy on vipy terminates TLS; the upstream is reached over the tailnet, which
needed a headscale ACL entry for tag:monerod-box:8081 - without it the node is
invisible, not merely unreachable, and the symptom is a 502 "no such host".
No authentication, deliberately: it is a block explorer over public chain data.
That includes --enable-pusher, so a visitor can relay a raw transaction through
our node. A choice, not an oversight; flip xmrblocks_enable_pusher to close it.
── Also ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
monerod-box raised 2048 -> 6144 MiB. Not for the explorer: monerod alone had
outgrown 2 GB past ~39% of the chain and was OOM-killed twice in a morning at
1.74 GB anon-rss. Recorded in vms.auto.tfvars because ignore_changes = all means
tofu will not reconcile it. The box now idles at ~1.2 GB of 5.9 GB with both
services up.
No backups, deliberately - binary, templates and chain are all reproducible.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
75 lines
3.4 KiB
YAML
75 lines
3.4 KiB
YAML
new_user: counterweight
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ssh_port: 22
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allow_ssh_from: "any"
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root_domain: contrapeso.xyz
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# Uptime Kuma was decommissioned on 2026-09-11. The monitoring blocks in the
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# playbooks are kept deliberately — the check logic is meant to be rewired to
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# whatever replaces it. This flag keeps them inert until then. See archive/uptime_kuma/.
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# age recipient for all backup artefacts
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age_backup_recipient: "age192wwdaseqej2ggwyp884gtm05c396anp7chr0vr8m47g50fahpyqr9fsza"
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# Public key small-backups-box pulls with
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# Authorised on each source host for an unprivileged, dedicated user only
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backup_pull_public_key: "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIOfIixKMhA9z+Nvyx6ToZIniC8aEgyiInRiboaTTemgX offsite-backup-pull"
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# ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
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# Subdomains. Global because the edge host proxies for services that live on
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# other machines, so no single inventory group covers the readers. Combine with
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# root_domain above to build an FQDN.
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#
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# Moved here from services_config.yml, which 30 plays had to remember to name in
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# vars_files: - a file everyone must opt into is a file someone will forget.
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# ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
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subdomains:
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# Monitoring
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gatus: status
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# VPN infrastructure (spacey)
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headscale: headscale
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# Core services (vipy)
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vaultwarden: vault
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forgejo: forgejo
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lnbits: wallet
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# Secondary services (vipy)
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ntfy_emergency_app: avisame
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personal_blog: pablohere
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# Memos (memos-box)
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memos: memos
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# Mempool block explorer (mempool-box, proxied via vipy)
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mempool: mempool
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# DATUM Gateway dashboard (knots-box, proxied via vipy)
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datum_gateway: datum
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# Monero restricted RPC (monerod-box, proxied via vipy). Not a dashboard:
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# this is the JSON-RPC endpoint Feather points at. Caddy terminates TLS and
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# monerod's own Digest auth does the authentication.
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monero: monero
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# Monero block explorer (monerod-box, proxied via vipy). Fully public and
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# unauthenticated, like any block explorer - the data is the public chain.
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monero_explorer: exmrplore
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# Read by plays across several groups, so global rather than group_vars/<group>.
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headscale_namespace: counter-net
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# ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
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# Domains whose registration expiry is monitored (infra/402_public_monitoring).
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#
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# Registration renewal is a manual act at the registrar, and losing a domain is
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# not recoverable in the way losing a host is - so these are checked daily and
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# alarm with two weeks of runway.
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#
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# root_domain is the estate's own domain; the rest are domains we own that are
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# served from it or from a host in the inventory.
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# ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
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monitored_domains:
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- "{{ root_domain }}"
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- arbret.com
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