How To Run Ethereum On An Old Laptop

A decentralized immutable append-only public ledger.
By running a node that connects to the blockchain network, you become part of it and help decentralize it further, propagating the principle further, pat on back!
My other usecase is, I want to connect to the network directly so that I can deploy my smart contracts directly and not use other node as service services for deployment like Infura.io
So here is how I approached in joining the ethereum main network (aka mainnet) using my old personal laptop.
I’m using my old HP x360 laptop to run Ethereum on it. It has 16 GB RAM with 512 GB SSD secondary memory, along with it I’ve inserted [[Sandisk Extreme 2 TB SSD]]. I’m following this article to follow the process of setting it up. These are the following steps I’m undertaking:

1. Format the SSD it to ext4 using the command sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sda2.

2. Static mount the external SSD to /mnt/eth.

3. Then do sudo chown -R user:user /mnt/eth to own it. Now you can read/write to disk with user privilege.

4. Enabled the UPnP option on the router so that the node can be connected with other peers.

5. Run geth as the Execution Client using the command geth --config ~/.eth/config.toml --http --http.api eth,net,engine,admin with the following config in the config.toml file (some details have been removed for safety purpose):

   [Eth]
   NetworkId = 1
   SyncMode = "snap"
   EthDiscoveryURLs = []
   SnapDiscoveryURLs = []
   NoPruning = false
   NoPrefetch = false
   TxLookupLimit = 2350000
   LightPeers = 100
   UltraLightFraction = 75
   DatabaseCache = 512
   DatabaseFreezer = ""
   TrieCleanCache = 154
   TrieCleanCacheJournal = "triecache"
   TrieCleanCacheRejournal = 3600000000000
   TrieDirtyCache = 256
   TrieTimeout = 3600000000000
   SnapshotCache = 102
   Preimages = false
   FilterLogCacheSize = 32
   EnablePreimageRecording = false
   RPCGasCap = 50000000
   RPCEVMTimeout = 5000000000
   RPCTxFeeCap = 1e+00
   
   [Eth.Miner]
   GasFloor = 0
   GasCeil = 30000000
   GasPrice = 1000000000
   Recommit = 2000000000
   Noverify = false
   
   [Eth.Ethash]
   CacheDir = "ethash"
   CachesInMem = 2
   CachesOnDisk = 3
   CachesLockMmap = false
   DatasetDir = "/mnt/eth/ethereum/.ethash"
   DatasetsInMem = 1
   DatasetsOnDisk = 2
   DatasetsLockMmap = false
   PowMode = 0
   NotifyFull = false
   
   [Eth.TxPool]
   Locals = []
   NoLocals = false
   Journal = "transactions.rlp"
   Rejournal = 3600000000000
   PriceLimit = 1
   PriceBump = 10
   AccountSlots = 16
   GlobalSlots = 5120
   AccountQueue = 64
   GlobalQueue = 1024
   Lifetime = 10800000000000
   
   [Eth.GPO]
   Blocks = 20
   Percentile = 60
   MaxHeaderHistory = 1024
   MaxBlockHistory = 1024
   MaxPrice = 500000000000
   IgnorePrice = 2
   
   [Node]
   DataDir = "/mnt/eth/ethereum"
   IPCPath = "geth.ipc"
   HTTPHost = ""
   HTTPPort = 8545
   HTTPVirtualHosts = ["localhost"]
   HTTPModules = ["net", "web3", "eth"]
   AuthAddr = "localhost"
   AuthPort = 8551
   AuthVirtualHosts = ["localhost"]
   WSHost = ""
   WSPort = 8546
   WSModules = ["net", "web3", "eth"]
   GraphQLVirtualHosts = ["localhost"]
   
   [Node.P2P]
   MaxPeers = 30
   NoDiscovery = false
   BootstrapNodes = []
   BootstrapNodesV5 = []
   StaticNodes = []
   TrustedNodes = []
   ListenAddr = ":30303"
   DiscAddr = ""
   EnableMsgEvents = false
   
   [Node.HTTPTimeouts]
   ReadTimeout = 30000000000
   ReadHeaderTimeout = 30000000000
   WriteTimeout = 30000000000
   IdleTimeout = 120000000000
   
   [Metrics]
   HTTP = "127.0.0.1"
   Port = 6060
   InfluxDBEndpoint = "http://localhost:8086"
   InfluxDBDatabase = "geth"
   InfluxDBUsername = "test"
   InfluxDBPassword = "test"
   InfluxDBTags = "host=localhost"
   InfluxDBToken = "test"
   InfluxDBBucket = "geth"
   InfluxDBOrganization = "geth"  
   

   ``

6. Run the consensus client:
   1. mkdir prysm && cd prysm; curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm/master/prysm.sh --output prysm.sh && chmod +x prysm.sh
   2. ./prysm.sh beacon-chain --execution-endpoint=/mnt/eth/ethereum/geth.ipc --checkpoint-sync-url=https://beaconstate.ethstaker.cc

This is how the final results looks to me and I <3 it! Yay! This is actually my macbook where I do all my work, but here I’ve sshed into my HP laptop connected to Tailscale, which is another piece of software I love!

After toiling hard for last 3 days, running the #Ethereum mainnet on an old laptop locally, with #geth as execution client and #prysm as consensus client! pic.twitter.com/2eQbZ41kK0

— souvikhaldar.eth (@s0uvikhaldar) January 12, 2023

Happy Hacking!

References

1. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/