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Connection through an SSH tunnel

SSH tunnels

If you - like many masternode owners - have your masternode running on a VPS with access via SSH, then using it as a JSON-RPC gateway will probably be the best option for you.

For security reasons, the TCP port used for JSON-RPC communication (9998 by default) should be blocked by the firewall on Dash masternodes, and the Dash daemon itself will only accept connections from localhost. For this reason, you will not be able to connect to your Dash daemon and use the JSON-RPC service directly over the Internet. However, if you have SSH access to this server, you can create a secure tunnel that connects the local machine to the remote JSON-RPC service so that the DMT application sees the remote service as if it was working locally.

The communication is set up as follows:

  • an SSH session with the remote server is established over its public IP and SSH port
  • a random port is selected from the pool of unused ports on your computer to play the role of the local channel's endpoint
  • within the established SSH session, a secure channel is created that connects the local endpoint with the listening JSON-RPC service port on the remote server (127.0.0.1:9998)
  • DMT connects to the local endpoint and performs JSON-RPC requests as if the Dash daemon was working locally
 Local computer ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━> SSH session ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━> remote_server:22
           ┃- connecting to 127.0.0.1:random local port           ┃ - listenning on 127.0.0.1:9998
 DMT app ━━┛                                                      ┗━━━ Dash daemon JSON-RPC

Configuration

Enable JSON-RPC and "indexing" in the Dash daemon configuration

The procedure is similar to the RPC/indexing procedure for a local RPC node scenario.

  • Log in to the server running the Dash daemon (dashd) with a SSH terminal.
  • Change to the dashd configuration directory: cd ~/.dashcore
  • Open the dash.conf file with your preferred text editor: nano dash.conf
  • Enter the configuration parameters listed here.
  • Stop the dashd process: ./dash-cli stop
  • Start dashd with the -reindex parameter: ./dashd -reindex

Keep in mind that the last step can take several hours to complete. If running on a live masternode, it may be best to wait until immediately after a payment was received to carry out the reindexing.

Configure connection in DMT

  • In DMT and click the Configure button.
  • Select the Dash network tab.
  • Click the + (plus) button on the left side of the dialog.
  • Check the Use SSH tunnel box.
  • Check the Enabled box.
  • Enter the following values:
    • SSH host: IP address (hostname) of your remote server
    • port: SSH listening port number of the server (usually 22)
    • SSH username: username you are using to establish a connection
    • RPC host: IP address of the network interface where dashd listens for JSON-RPC calls (127.0.0.1 by default)
    • port: TCP port number on which dashd listens for JSON-RPC calls (9998 by default)
    • RPC username: enter the value you specified for the rpcuser parameter in the dash.conf file.
    • RPC password: enter the value you specified for the rpcpassword parameter in the dash.conf file

Instead of entering parameters related to the RPC configuration, you can click Read RPC configuration from SSH host to try to read the values directly from the remote dash.conf file.

  • Make sure the SSL checkbox remains unchecked. Also, if you decide to use only this connection, deactivate all other connections by unchecking the corresponding Enabled checkboxes.
    SSH configuration window
  • Click the Test connection button. If successful, DMT will return the following message:
    Connection successful