Linux guide

A linux node can be installed and setup on a personal linux machine, in home server, or in a datacenter.

System requirements

Here is the list of system requirements that should be fulfilled to be able to install Mysterium Node.

Resources

CPU: 1 core
RAM: 1GB
DISK: 500MB free disk space

As an example, a raspberry PI 3 or a VPS with 1core CPU and 1GB RAM is enough to run a node.

Operating systems

Raspbian 9/10
Debian 9/10
Ubuntu 18.04/20.04

Other debian based linux distributions should also be able to run node without any issues.

Prerequisites

In order to complete this setup, you should have a non-root user with sudo privileges.

Installation

Stable release

There are 2 ways to install a stable release of Mysterium node:

1. Native install

On Debian/Ubuntu systems you can use Aptitude and execute:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mysteriumnetwork/node
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install myst

2. Script install

We also provide an installation script written in bash which can be downloaded and executed using this command:

sudo apt-get install curl
sudo -E bash -c "$(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mysteriumnetwork/node/master/install.sh)"

In addition to downloading and installing our Node, this command will also install additional required dependencies like WireGuard if you don't have it already.

Once the installation is complete, check your service status.

Latest non stable releases include bug fixes and improvements that have not yet been pushed for the whole user base and are not guaranteed to work. You should run these releases at your own risk and should also consider backing up your .mysterium folder beforehand just in case.

To get them checkout our launchpad or github releases.

Complete installation

Once the service is installed and running to finish the node installation continue to the NodeUI, where you'll be able to set payout address, manage service settings and check node stats and connections. Instructions on how to find and use it can be found: here.

Also make sure to claim your node in MMN to receive bounties. It can be found here. To receive your key, you'll have to create an account when following the NodeUI onboarding process or add it later in the node settings.

If you can't access NodeUI or service is not working as expected, follow the below instructions on how to check service health, diagnose issues or add extra configuration.

Service health

Check service health

Post installation service check:

sudo systemctl status mysterium-node.service

If everything is working you should see similar output to this:

mysterium@pop-os:~$ sudo systemctl status mysterium-node.service
● mysterium-node.service - Server for Mysterium - decentralised VPN Network
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/mysterium-node.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2021-01-04 00:00:00 GMT;
       Docs: https://mysterium.network/
   Main PID: 1920 (myst)
      Tasks: 30 (limit: 19009)
     Memory: 73.0M

View Node logs

Run the following command to diagnose issues:

sudo journalctl -u mysterium-node.service

To view the real-time daemon logs:

sudo journalctl -fu mysterium-node.service

Save logs to a file

If your node is unable to report an issue through the built-in Node UI or TequilAPI, you may need to save the logs to a file and send them to us via support@mysterium.network.

sudo journalctl -u mysterium-node.service > node.logs

Advanced configuration (optional)

Get current config

When your node is running you can print the config that it has currently loaded by executing:

myst config show

This config can be altered in several ways, which we'll cover below.

Editing the config file

On initial start up node will create a config file which can be editted. The config is located in: /etc/mysterium-node/config.toml.

Any text editor can be used to edit this file. As it's a .toml file formatting and indentation is very important. For further reading follow the official toml guide.

Altering start up options

Editing start up options instead of the config.toml file has one crutial benefit: start up service options overwrite any default or config.toml edited config values and become a single source of truth which cannot be changed at runtime.

Node typically runs as a systemd service, you can find the .service file by inspecting the service, which you can do by running:

systemctl status mysterium-node.service | grep Loaded

The output of this command will be something similar to:

Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/mysterium-node.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)

The file location we can see in parentheses is our .service file location. If you now inspect that file using cat /lib/systemd/system/mysterium-node.service you will find a line similar to this:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/myst $CONF_DIR $SCRIPT_DIR $DATA_DIR $RUN_DIR $DAEMON_OPTS service --agreed-terms-and-conditions $SERVICE_OPTS

This is the line that gets executed when we start up the Node service. Here we're mainly interested in variables that are passed to this command (variables are the strings which start with $ sign for example $CONF_DIR). These variables are defined in a file which is located at: /etc/default/mysterium-node

To edit the node configuration and launch options we want to edit the variable $SERVICE_OPTS adding additional flags to it, which will get passed to our node once it's started. For example if we wanted to change our openVPN and wireguard default ports we would replace it with this:

SERVICE_OPTS="--openvpn.port 4443 --wireguard.listen.ports 52820:53075 openvpn,wireguard"

Note that $SERVICE_OPTS variable should always finish with openvpn,wireguard so any configuration you want to add, must go before that.

To get the full list of configuration options execute: myst --help

Loading the new config

In most cases a simple service reload should be enough. You can do that by running:

sudo systemctl restart mysterium-node.service

After running the restart command make sure to check the service health and currently running config using previously mentioned commands.

If node is refusing to restart and load the changes you've made, you can try to restart systemd daemon itself by running systemctl daemon-reexec

Install development (snapshot) version of the node

Add node-dev repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mysteriumnetwork/node-dev
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-cache policy myst

You'll see similar output to the following:

root@server:~# apt-cache policy myst
myst:
  Installed: 0.42.2+build254103644+focal
  Candidate: 0.42.1+1snapshot+20210209T0736+c7e732d6+build253474985+focal
  Version table:
     0.42.2+build254103644+focal 500
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/mysteriumnetwork/node/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages
 *** 0.42.1+1snapshot+20210209T0736+c7e732d6+build253474985+focal 500
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/mysteriumnetwork/node-dev/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Look for the version that has snapshot in its name such as: 0.42.1+1snapshot+20210209T0736+c7e732d6+build253474985+focal

Copy that name and run:

sudo apt install myst=<snapshot_name>

Your node should be running the snapshot version.

To return to a stable version, run:

sudo apt install myst