Hello Friends,

Recently I bought a small amount of ADA as I like to actually play with the tech I am thinking about investing in rather than just read the white paper and be done with it.  This post is not to give you my views on the coin, so stop reading if that is what you are here for.

Ok, good the rest of you want to know about the wallet and how to get it working. Let's being. 

Daedalus Wallet 

This is a very early wallet (it' an early project) and comes with the usual issues of alpha software, it does not work very well. However, it works well enough that with a little bit of effort you can make it function to a useable level. This post focuses on the Mac but the principals are the same, you will just to change locations of files and such. 

The problem  

When you launch the Daedalus wallet usually for the second time and beyond you are presented with the screen below which it gets stuck at.

This can happen for a number of reasons and step through each of these in turn and see if it fixes it.  

1) Log files to large  

I have had log files over 1 gig and it appears to be stuck whilst either reading from or writing to this file.  Common practice in logging is to create a new log file each day and I assume this will come in a future release.  For now, we can just go ahead and delete the log file and restart and see what happens.  

• Open a finder window
• Press CMD+SHIFT+G 
• Enter the following string ~/Library/Application Support/Daedalus/Logs and press OK 
• Delete all the files in the Logs directory
• Restart Daedalus
   

2) Delete Lock file

Lock files are used to stop an application running twice.  when the app boots up it checks for a lock file and if it is there it aborts the load.  Usually, the application would inform you of this but Daedalus just hangs.  

• Open a finder window
   
• Press CMD+SHIFT+G 
• Enter the following string ~/Library/Application Support/Daedalus/ and press OK 
• Delete the file named .lock
• Restart Daedalus
   

3) Kill the server 

The cardano-node node server appears to be what handles the block information, syncs etc and interacts with the Daedalus wallet.  Sometimes (though it is rare) gets stuck and requires a restart.   

• open activity monitor
• search for cardano-node
• double click it
• press quit
   

4) Blockchain syncing 

This appears to be the main issue and for the record, it is easily solvable, all that is happening, in essence, is the cardano-node decides the blockchain is too far behind and refuses a connection to the Daedalus wallet.  If you leave it long enough it will allow the Daedalus wallet to connect and you start to see the Syncing block message.  This would be easily solved by the Daedalus wallet simply displaying a message saying "syncing with block" or "waiting for a connection" or anything other than "connecting to network" as this is what makes users think its broke, as they have seen it connect in the past. As I say this is an easy fix and I am sure that they are working on it. Unfortunately, however, there is no fix for this other than waiting for the blockchain to update but I can tell you what to look for to see if you are having this issue. 
 

• Open a finder window
• Press CMD+SHIFT+G 
• Enter the following string ~/Library/Application Support/Daedalus/Logs/ and press OK
•  Open cardano-node.log (double click it)

If you see something like the text below  

Last known leaders for epoch epoch #17 are: [43011479, 1deb8290, 6c9e1497, 43011479, 5411c7bf, 1deb8290, 43011479, 5071d880, 1deb8290, af2800c1, 6c9e1497, 43011479, 5071d880, 5071d880, 5411c7bf, 5411c7bf, 43011479, 65904a89, 65904a89, 1deb8290, 65904a89, af2800c1, 43011479, 5071d880, 6c9e1497, 5411c7bf, 65904a89, af2800c1, 1deb8290, 65904a89, 1deb8290, This means that you are still syncing the blockchain and you have to wait. However when you start to see (at the bottom of the file) 94m[node.wallet.servant:INFO:ThreadId 15295] [0m[2018-01-02 01:22:00 GMT] [36mGET[0m [37m:>[0m api    [37m:>[0m wallets   [37mStatus:[0m [32mOK[0m 0.007235s[37m > [0m[    { id=Ae2tdPwUPEZBqFY5qWeVg5ESxj1aauLkJ4iaw2X7EEm8CHtAPiz7HWveGMw meta=(CWANormal/0) accs=1 amount=770578356 pass=False passlu=1512743627.620926s } ] 

This means you are up to sync and the wallet should now load.   

• Open Daedalus.log (double click it)
   

If you get the following message 

 [2017-12-31 01:32:40:0458] [error] CardanoClientApi::syncProgress error: { "stack": "Error: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:8090\n    at Object.exports._errnoException (util.js:1026:11)\n    at exports._exceptionWithHostPort (util.js:1049:20)\n    at TCPConnectWrap.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (net.js:1081:14)",  "message": "connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:8090",  "code": "ECONNREFUSED", "errno": "ECONNREFUSED",  "syscall": "connect",  "address": "127.0.0.1",  "port": 8090 } 

This means Cardano.node is refusing you a connection and as I said you just have to wait for it to sync.

That covers the main issues, please let me know if this works for you.