I've been using bitcoin for a few years now but have only used my own wallets, Coinbase, and some other stuff. I thought I should make a full client and put it on the network!
I used Metacloud (Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud) and spun up an extra large Ubuntu 14.04 instance that we had! I logged in and did the following:
sudo apt-get install -y git
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin
git tag
git checkout v0.9.5rc2
From there I looked at the doc/build-unix.md and followed the instructions. They worked perfectly!
sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool autotools-dev autoconf pkg-config libssl-dev libboost-all-dev
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libdb4.8-dev libdb4.8++-dev
./autogen
./configure
make
sudo make install
Once that is done, you can start the bitcoin client by running:
bitcoind
It will tell you that you need to set a password and will suggest one for you. Take the suggestion and create the file ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf and copy the password in there. It might look like:
rpcuser=bitcoinrpc
rpcpassword=6Z3N6zq5....
Now you can start it:
bitcoind -daemon
This will take a while to download the blockchain. You can see all the blocks as they'll be downloaded to the ~/.bitcoin/blocks directory.
But now we have it! A node in the bitcoin service!