Setting Up The Chia Network On A Synology NAS

This is probably dumb but I'm doing it anyway

Chia is going to be the next big crypto craze. Or at least that's what their website tries to make the case for.

Also, it's just kind of fun to play around with. So that's what this post is about, especially since the HDDs in my NAS are not the recommended method of plotting and farming Chia.

Setup

I'll be using the Virtual Machine Manager of my Synology DS918+ to run a VM with three CPU cores and 2 GB of memory. I configured it to use 3 virtual drives; one with 50 GB of space and the other two with 1 TB each. The 50 GB drive was used to install Ubuntu 20.04.

During installation of the OS, each virtual physical drive was also configured as its own LVM volume group.

Post-Install Setup

Some further configuration of the volume groups where farm-vg0 and tmp-vg0 are the names of the volume groups configured during OS installation:

sudo lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n farm farm-vg0
sudo lvcreate -l 100%FREE -n farm tmp-vg0

Making the filesystems:

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/farm-vg0/farm
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/tmp-vg0/tmp

I added the following to my fstab file to mount the logical volumes automatically:

/dev/mapper/farm--vg0-farm /mnt/farm ext4 defaults 0 0
/dev/mapper/tmp--vg0-tmp /mnt/tmp ext4 defaults 0 0

Chia Install

Following their install guide:

git clone https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain.git -b latest --recurse-submodules
cd chia-blockchain

sh install.sh

. ./activate

Chia Setup

chia init
chia keys generate
chia start farmer
chia plots create -n 3 -b 1536 -t /mnt/tmp -d /mnt/farm -r 2

Conclusions

The above command took about 5 days to complete. That's bad. This setup is bad. But also fun and interesting.