How to: Connect to a remote node with the AEON GUI

5 min readSep 11, 2018

Many people starting out in cryptocurrency just want to get their foot in the door and move coins to and from their wallet with ease. The GUI is a great starting point because its mostly point and click before people get comfortable with the lightweight CLI wallet. Both the GUI and CLI wallets can connect to a remote node as well as mobile options such as [Monerujo-io/Aeonwallet](https://github.com/monerujo-io/aeonwallet/releases) for android devices. In this how-to we will be connecting to a remote node with our GUI wallet so we don’t have to run a full node at home with our own hardware.

Disclaimer:

Connecting to a remote node will not allow someone to steal your coins or gain access to your wallet or password.
If a remote node is behind too far on blocks synced, your transaction may get stuck and lost in the mempool. IF this ever DOES happen, all you need to do is delete your wallet.dat file and restore from seed and re-sync your wallet after 48hrs and your coins will show back in your wallet. WARNING!!- DO NOT DELETE YOUR WALLET FILE BEFORE GETTING YOUR KEYS AND SEED TO RESTORE YOUR WALLET OR YOUR COINS WILL BE LOST FOREVER!!!!
Using a remote node does lower your privacy level. If a node operator wants to, they can skim the log files for IP address’ and wallet address’ and tx numbers. If you believe 100% privacy is important, run your own trusted node. If you want a fast, lightweight, but still secure wallet function then use a remote node!
NOTE!! Aeon-wallet.net is not currently functioning on v0.13.1.0 mainnet. Any use of these nodes will cause your wallet to not sync to the latest blocks. Please check out discord for a more up to date list of Aeon remote nodes.

So lets get started moving coins to our wallet with a remote node:

First off we need to download our weapon of choice:

Official AEON GUI: https://github.com/aeonix/aeon-gui/releases
Official AEON CLI: https://github.com/aeonix/aeon/releases
Monerujo-Aeon: https://github.com/monerujo-io/aeonwallet/releases : Please note that this is not an “Official” repo of the aeon development team but many members from the community are using it / recommend it.

For this how-to we will be using the Official AEON GUI wallet downloaded and installed from the github repo. This writeup assumes we know how to use the basic functionality of the GUI already but just want to learn how to connect to a remote node so we don’t need our own.

Lets open the GUI wallet:

Oh no! What is this prompt? Lets click the “Use custom settings” button.

When you open the GUI wallet for the first time it will check to see if you have local daemon running and if not ask if you want to start your local node. Local node is your OWN node running on your own hardware. We don’t want this running for our purposes today so lets click the “Use Custom Settings” button that prompts up. If you have already started syncing your wallet in the past with a local node, you can open the GUI and press the “Settings” tab and it will bring you to the same location on the GUI.

Custom connections settings screen. Make sure you have “Remote Node” selected.

Ok now we are at this screen with a bunch of numbers boxes to click and stuff. Whats all this? Well if you were running a local node on your own computer the “Local Node” tab would be selected and no numbers would be in the address/port boxes. We want the “Remote Node” box selected for our purposes today. Currently displayed is how you would have your GUI set up if you were running your node on another computer on your home network, say a server or other PC that runs a full node 24/7 or when you start it up. We want to connect to another node that is NOT on our home network because we don’t have the ability or space to run a node right?

For this purpose we will be selecting nodes.hashvault.pro as it’s a know working node. Let’s enter this IP address in the “Address” box on our GUI and then make sure the port number auto-fills. If it doesn’t auto fill enter 11181 (port your wallet connects to a node from) and select the “Connect” button to connect our GUI wallet with this daemon to sync it:

Press the Connect button to connect to this daemon! Note, some remote node operators will select a different port but most all are 11181.

Oh hey, some bar is moving really quickly on the lower left corner now and its saying syncing! WOW! We are connected to a remote node, that was quick! Thanks to AEON being so lightweight, it takes a fraction of the time to actually sync with the network, even on a remote node.

As you can see in the lower left corner it says Network status “Remote Node”. We are connected and synced!

But what’s this!!!???!!! Another username and password to enter? But I already entered by password when I opened my wallet! Is someone going to steal my coins if I enter something here? Nope. This function is if a daemon operator sets flags for a username and password to connect to their remote node. Some people use this option if they want to limit those people that use their remote node for bandwidth reasons or personal/security reasons. Don’t worry about this unless you are connecting to a node that requires it.

Well there we have it, we downloaded our wallet and connected to a remote node to sync. If you are connecting for the first time, expect the sync time from block 0 to take a while. It depends on how many wallets / daemons are connected to the same remote node as you, and how many blocks you need to sync still. Good luck and happy spending!