Yeah, I’m trying Chia farming with the copious disk space I have. Probably be a waste of effort, but I am learning some interesting things in the process. I started with a simple Windows install and then decided to move to Ubuntu in a VM. The VM farmer can’t plot, but it can do farming all day long. I’ve found that you need to throw more horsepower at it than you would think. I first tried using a Core2Duo with 2 cores committed to the VM. It was struggling mightily with that config. I’ve now moved it over to an i3-7100 system, and with 2 cores it was ok, but still having issues. With 4 cores it seems to be ok now.

There’s a process for migrating the wallet that wasn’t clear to me. I asked about it and got smacked down for asking an obvious question. So, for the other poor souls that end up getting the short end, here’s the process I’m following now, and it seems to be quick and easy. I’m not including every single cd command, so keep in mind you’ll need to keep coming back to the home directory.

First, backup/migrate the mainnet folder under the Chia folder. I think this is in Documents on Windows. Just get a copy of it for now. This has all of your settings and includes a copy of the blockchain. Doing this will save you from having to do a full blockchain re-sync. You’ll only need to do a catch-up from the time you copy it.

I’m doing an NFS connection to my NAS where the plots are kept, but SMB works just as well.

cd /etc
sudo nano fstab
cd ~
sudo apt install nfs-common
sudo mkdir /mnt/chia
sudo mount -a

Once you have the plots available you can install the Chia components. Completing this get’s the application installed, but there’s no wallet or farming config set yet.

sudo apt install git -y
git clone https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain.git -b latest --recurse-submodules
cd chia-blockchain/
sh install.sh
. ./activate 
chia init

This follows the other tutorials up to this point. Now we need to copy the mainnet directory into the right place. On Ubuntu 20.04 this is installed in the home directory for the user you created, in the .chia directory. I temporarily copied my mainnet directory into the plot directory on the NFS server, and then copied it from there into the location in .chia.

cd .chia/
ll
sudo cp -R /mnt/chia/mainnet/* ./mainnet/

At this point we have our config and a recent copy of the blockchain in place. Before we fire things up we need to update the config for the location of the plots and we need to install our wallet key. For the config we’ll edit the config.yaml file. From the home directory:

cd .chia/mainnet/config/
nano config.yaml 

Look for the following section and edit it to match the plot location:

plot_directories:
  - /mnt/chia

Finally, enter your wallet mnemonic with the following command:

chia keys add

I also ran into a problem with the ownership of the files in mainnet coming across as root. Change them with the following, substituting the username you used:

cd .chia/
sudo chown -R chia.chia ./

All that’s left is to start the farmer:

cd chia-blockchain/
chia start farmer
watch 'chia show -s -c'

I use the show command to watch the blockchain start to catch up. Depending how long it’s been offline it will take some time, but you should be able to see how far it has to go.

As of today, the network space has grown to over 4.2 EiB and the expected time to a win keeps extending out. Good luck!