EDIT 3
Bumping my VPS to 1GB of physical RAM stopped the crashing issue... UNTIL said VPS ran out of disc space.
I added prune=10240 to my ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf file such that the blockchain file would start pruning transaction history upon reaching 10GB filesize (1024 MB * 10 = 10GB).
EDIT 2
This seems to be a memory issue, not a VPN networking issue. I turned OpenVPN off and restarted bitcoind only to see it silently crash again.
I've now added a 1GB swapfile to expand the available memory space (risk is this will cause performance issues for the OS). Will update once again if this solves the issue. If not, I will probably end up trying to upgrade the VPS instance to 1GB of physical RAM from 512MB.
EDIT
Found some interesting stuff in the log relating to tor...
root@sf-vps:~# cat ~/.bitcoin/debug.log | grep tor -i
2016-11-13 16:52:21 Default data directory /root/.bitcoin
2016-11-13 16:52:21 Using data directory /root/.bitcoin
2016-11-13 16:52:21 Using at most 125 connections (1024 file descriptors available)
2016-11-13 16:52:29 torcontrol thread start
2016-11-13 17:08:43 Default data directory /root/.bitcoin
2016-11-13 17:08:43 Using data directory /root/.bitcoin
2016-11-13 17:08:43 Using at most 125 connections (1024 file descriptors available)
2016-11-13 17:08:50 torcontrol thread start
2016-11-13 17:08:50 tor: Error connecting to Tor control socket
2016-11-13 17:08:50 tor: Not connected to Tor control port 127.0.0.1:9051, trying to reconnect
2016-11-13 17:08:51 tor: Error connecting to Tor control socket
2016-11-13 17:08:51 tor: Not connected to Tor control port 127.0.0.1:9051, trying to reconnect
2016-11-13 17:08:52 tor: Error connecting to Tor control socket
2016-11-13 17:08:52 tor: Not connected to Tor control port 127.0.0.1:9051, trying to reconnect
I've installed the Bitcoin software on Ubuntu 16.04. I'm able to run bitcoind -daemon for a few minutes, but after a while the process crashes.
Interestingly, I don't see any reasons in ~/.bitcoin/debug.log explaining why the program might have terminated.
I suspect a couple of things:
Not enough disc space to store the entire blockchain. However, I don't think this is the case as running df - h shows a combined total of only ~41% disc consumption:
root@sf-vps:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 241M 0 241M 0% /dev
tmpfs 50M 3.1M 47M 7% /run
/dev/vda1 20G 6.3G 13G 34% /
tmpfs 247M 0 247M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 247M 0 247M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 50M 0 50M 0% /run/user/0
Server is not able to receive inbound messages as I'm running a VPN. Is it possible that I'm experiencing a networking issue, e.g. inbound traffic to port 8333 (the default for bitcoind) is not being allowed through my VPN? I can't remember how to change the VPN config to allow connections on specific ports, but that's where I'm looking next...
root@sf-vps:~# netstat -nr
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface
0.0.0.0 159.203.240.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0
10.8.0.0 10.8.0.2 255.255.255.0 UG 0 0 0 tun0
10.8.0.2 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 tun0
10.12.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
159.203.240.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.240.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
Thanks in advance for your help :)