Good afternoon everyone,

I trust everyone is having a nice weekend and enjoying their experience in building zencash securenodes.

I have been approached, and I have seen a number of people reporting that they have been experiencing an issue where their securenode tracker software is giving the following error:

Zend error: no auth mechanism defined
Unable to connect to zend. Please check the zen rpc settings and ensure zend is running

This error is related to the internal communication connection between the securenode tracker software and the zend daemon. The securenode tracker software connects to the zend daemon using Remote Procedure Calls or RPCs.

When you run the securenode tracker software setup it parses the zen.conf file for communication connection information: rpcuser=, rpcpassword=, rpcallowip=, and rpcport=. The values that are set for each of the parameters are then saved to files in the config directory of the securenode tracker software.

If for whatever reason you change anyone of these paramaters are changed in the zen.conf file after starting the zend daemon, the setup program for the securenode tracker software will not be able to communicate with the zend daemon even if the daemon is up and running.

Also you will need to ensure that you do not have any spaces in your rpcuser or rpcpassword parameters.

Please note: I do not know how this will work for those using monit. I do not use it and I have not tried this on a node running the zend daemon via monit.

To resolve this issue, stop the zend daemon using zen-cli stop. If you changed any of the RPC config data after starting the zend daemon you will see this error:

error: incorrect rpcuser or rpcpassword (authorization failed)

If you see this error you will need to kill the zend daemon process, run:
ps aux | grep zend
You will see something similar to this:

The first line is what we are looking for and the first number is the pid. We will want to kill that using kill xxx where xxx is the pid.

Once you have killed the process, restart the zend daemon using zend.

Then head to the securenode tracker software directory cd ~/zencash/secnodetracker and delete the following files in the config directory:
rm -rf config/rpcuser
rm -rf config/rpcpassword
rm -rf config/rpcport

Re-run node setup.js.

And finally try running the securenode tracker application using node app.js.

This shall resolve the issue where you are not authenticating the secnodetracker software and the zend daemon.

If you have any questions, or need any help shoot through a message to the #securenodes channel on slack or discord, or post it below.

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