Setting up new plotter

Question around when I set up a new plotter…
I have two machines with full copies of the blockchain. When I set up the new machine, I did a manual add of peer to both the local machines via direct IP address on a 10Gbps network.

The new machine has a bunch of connections and it’s pulling down the blockchain from all over the place, but just sipping at the bandwidth available to it if it just connected locally.

Any way to force it to sync only from local full nodes or should I just manually copy a recent version of the blockchain from one of the other machines and let it catch up?

This, just copy the files in these folders to the new installation (delete the files that are there already):
/.chia/mainnet/db/
/.chia/mainnet/wallet/db/

If you already have two full nodes on your LAN, why are you even trying to add a third?

That’s a very good question and it’s probably just my ignorance. I’m really just trying to add a raspberry Pi to farm the plots. Does that require a copy of the blockchain dB?

I’m curious as it’s not clear to me on if the db is optional in certain cases? The microsd card in the RPi is only 16GB and the mainnet dB is up to around 8GB…

You do not need a full copy of the chain to plot, you don’t need Chia installed at all actually with plotting software such as MadMax only needing your public keys. As for farming with multiple PC’s I suggest you follow the official guide, which details 1 full node, 1 farmer and multiple harvesters per network for optimal results: Farming on many machines · Chia-Network/chia-blockchain Wiki · GitHub

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It’s 8 GB of the mainnet DB + wallet DB at around 3.5 GB/wallet key :sweat_smile:

You can put those DBs into one of your farming HDDs by bind mounting your DB folders to your HDD. For example :

sudo mount --bind /sdcard/chia/db /hdd/chia/db