I used to run a BTC node on my desktop. I’ve since decided to run one on a dedicated server running Start9.
When I had a node on desktop, I had around 30-50 simultaneous inbound connections. The most I have now is 3 inbound connections. Is this normal? If not how can I fix this?
The node appears as unreachable on bitnodes.io and I have called the ISP who opened the port no problem when I asked the first time. When asking this time they seemed dicky; multiple support people giving me the run around, not straight answers and making different excuses for why it wasn’t/couldn’t be opened, even though they opened it no issue the first time. Have they seen how much traffic went through the port the first time and are now not opening it? Is there a reason why they would not want to open it?
There’s nothing to fix. You probably port forwarded on clearnet when you were running on your desktop (or NAT busted in some way), so everyone who connected to saw your home internet connection (maybe even your house address, depending on your ISP) to connect to you as a peer.
StartOS is set up to be more private, inbound connections are over Tor… so a bunch of nodes will just skip you for being slower, and bitnodes.io will ignore you because they don’t do Tor. The only peers that will connect to you over Tor are the ones that for whatever reason will really really want to. The ones who connected to you previously for no other reason than because they knew you existed, are now not. You lose nothing.
As for the ISP, and port forwarding to StartOS services, this isn’t possible on v0.3.5.1, nor is there any real reason to do so. On the current version of StartOS Bitcoin is connected to by peers over Tor. You can’t port forward to that. The ISP support probably understand very little of what you’re asking, and probably (hopefully) have no ability to enter into your router and open ports for you… they were probably confused by the request. If though you need to ask for permission to access your router, more likely than not you have an unsafe setup, and you should probably buy your own router and use that.
