fullmetalScience

If you are anything like me, you much prefer a good CLI over clicking around in a GUI.

Now, with Monero it's never "fire up, issue transaction, exit".

Catching up on a week's worth of blocks can mean a long wait - especially if there are anonymity networks between you and the node.

If you decide to cope by leaving the CLI running, you find your tx-notes gone after a reboot. Less recent versions would even loose your sync level. Uff.

You could make it a habit to follow your set_tx_note up with a save, but that's not ideal.

XMRPC

To tackle the issue for myself, I've started to write XMRPC, a POSIX-compliant shell script that allows you to interact with monero-wallet-rpc.

This way you can have the RPC continuously syncing in the background and interact when necessary.

In fact, XMRPC takes care of launching the RPC and also creates a wallet if you happen to be starting from scratch.

The tool is aggressive in that it doesn't require user confirmations. If you tell it to transfer, it will try to do just that - with whatever fee or delay the official Monero client suggests at the given moment.

It can be launched interactively as seen in the image or as "one-shot", where only the command passed as argument is executed (e.g. ./xmrpc.sh balance).

Support for labelling transactions has yet to be added, but some parts of XMRPC have already been powering the OpenAlias-service XMR.ID successfully for a while.

You can check out this first version, tagged 0.1.0-beta, at https://xmr.zone/sxmo-onfire/xmrpc.

The test for improved XMR ID sign-ups has concluded on stagenet and the form is now active for mainnet-registrations of "real" XMR ID's at https://xmr.id.

With this, the parts of the sign-up that do not require human interaction got a boost - while nothing has changed for active XMR ID's. The qualities of those are the same - regardless of when and how they were registered.

For those interested in the test's findings, here's a report for transparency.

If you'd rather be spared the details, feel free to head over to [email protected] instead, where I publish tips and announce software aimed at making your Monero-life easier.

Sign-up Test Report

Three major issues were encountered and taken care of:

DNS outage

Our provider for the xmrid.com (secondary) domain experienced a partial service outage. For a couple of hours the DNS wouldn't return any responses to queries.

Our internal monitoring reported the error at around 11 p.m. local time. Even though the primary domain xmr.id was unaffected, such issues are particularly stressful, as their resolution depends on a third party.

After resolution, the provider explained:

"It was an issue with some domain updates that got triggered by adding records."

Spam detection

Some major email providers categorize messages from @xmr.id as spam, preventing further sign-up instructions from reaching the user.

There is the drawback of the new, form-based approach: Since you no longer message us first, your hoster doesn't know that our response is desired email.

At the time, the best way to handle such a situation is to send us an email or message on one of the other channels mentioned in the description box at c/XMRID.

Emoji support

A user tested the form with an emoji username - thereby reminding us that this "edge case" hadn't been automated by the time.

Adding emoji support demanded most of the resources since the test. It is now working with support for both, Unicode and Punycode submissions and as an added (internal) bonus it also led to establish a more efficient method for automated testing.

Onward

I have decided to leave the stagenet form active for the time being, so that developers and curious users have a playground for testing OpenAliases in Monero. Note that I will clean up names every once in a while.

So, if you want to try an emoji just enter a heart 🧡, an animal 🦅, a ninja 🥷🏿, some flag 🏳️, your favorite ᚱune or a simple (anti-)smiley 😡 into the username field when filling out the form :)

Independent of the topic of registrations, there's an integrators guide around the corner. There are certain things that wallet devs can do to further secure XMR-ID use. Oh, and the guide will be accompanied by a tool for simplified Monero transactions that fans of "suckless" software are bound to love ...

Finally, a big thanks to all the testers who participated!

(Note that none of the stagenet restrictions apply to "real" XMR ID's from https://xmr.id.)

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