Deleting the contents of ~/.chia/mainnet/run fixes a problem starting chia.

[125devin]

Why could I only find useless advice to delete the blockchain database and reinstall chia for the following problem?

Starting the GUI leads to an endless display of "Connecting to wallet ...".

Starting the farmer with the CLI results in "Failed to create the chia daemon":

          $ chia start farmer
          Daemon not started yet
          Starting daemon
          Daemon not started yet
          Failed to create the chia daemon

Deleting the files in ~/.chia/mainnet/wallet and ~/.chia/mainnet/db, has no effect on the above problem. Restoring the blockchain files in ~/.chia/mainnet/db from a previously working backup also has no effect.

Examining the directory ~/.chia/mainnet/run reveals many "lock" files. Deleting all the files in that directory fixes the problem:

          rm ~/.chia/mainnet/run/*

The GUI starts normally. Alternatively, starting the farmer with the CLI also works normally.

There were numerous files I deleted with "PID" in the name as well as "lock". It might be a good idea to kill or end chia processes that are not making plots after deleting the files in ~/.chia/mainnet/run . I did not have any chia processes running because I also tried rebooting to fix the problem. With appropriate options, the 'ps' command in Linux can list a lot of information about running processes, including the command line issued to start the process:

          ps --headers -ewwo pid,ppid,sess,start_time,wchan:21,ni,%cpu,%mem,thcount,args

Something easier to type would be this:

          ps -Af | grep chia

In Windows right clicking on the Start Menu icon and choosing "Task Manager" will show running processes that can then be killed with another right click and a left click on "End Task".

[125devin]

There is still one more "lock" file in ~/.chia/mainnet/log that may have caused the error logging files to be disabled. I deleted the lock file and restarted chia and logging began again. Some of the log files were owned by root for some reason so I changed that too.

            sudo rm ~/.chia/mainnet/log/.__debug.lock
            chown myusername:myusername ~/.chia/mainnet/log/*

These problems started when I set up an ntfs user mapping for the otherwise empty ssd where I'm keeping the .chia and .chia_keys directories. I hope to boot Ubuntu or Windows and farm chia using the same fully synced blockchain in ~/.chia/mainnet/db on the ssd. I setup symbolic file links for .chia and .chia_keys to the ssd. There are variables in a config.yaml for the file locations but meh.

Chia had been complaining about the file permissions on its ssl keys and suggesting a command to fix the permissions. That required setting up an ntfs user mapping first so that permissions were changeable:

            quit the gui with a click
            chia stop all
            ps -Af | grep chia
            kill any pid for chia but not the grep and plot plotting you'd like to finish
            umount /dev/thessd
            ntfsusermap /dev/thessd

I answered the questions about usernames and groups with my username for both, but root for the root level directory. After I remounted the ssd I still had to change ownership:

            mount /dev/thessd
            chown -R myusername:myusername .chia 
            chown -R myusername:myusername .chia_keys

Finally I could get rid of the warnings about the ssl certificate file permissions:

            cd ~/chia-blockchain
            . ./activate
            chia init --fix-ssl-permissions