Another historic moment ADA North Pool has now been lucky to be selected for a block to be produced in two epochs in a row. Also this epoch our block was produced successfully and took 0.0033 seconds from wake up time until finished time.
Author: Eysteinh
Given we are at a quite historic moment I tought I should give some praise to some of the people (I have definitively not an overview of all the amazing work done so feel free to add in comment other persons who made an impression on you) that has made an impression on me during the early days of testnet.
#historyofcardano https://twitter.com/adanorthpool/status/1205999519881682945 https://twitter.com/adanorthpool/status/1206000325058027520 https://twitter.com/adanorthpool/status/1206000921261625344 https://twitter.com/adanorthpool/status/1206002426530213888 https://twitter.com/adanorthpool/status/1206002803170250753 https://twitter.com/adanorthpool/status/1206003318872559619
Finally a tiny sneak peak: Daedelus reward wallet is coming very soon!
ADA North Pool joined the official 0.8.2 Incentivized Test Net (ITN) Friday the 13th December 2019. We look forward to providing staking to all of you and a glance at pooltools.io shows the competition will be stiff with the delegator the one to benefit. I hope you would still consider our pool among the other great pools on offer and hopefully we can all together make this ecosystem thrive.
Youtube link to historic moment when we went from Epoch 0 to Epoch 1.
On another note I made a typo for the ITN description and the pool is described with only 1 TB of RAID 1. In actuality the pool has 2 X 4 TB Seagate Enterprise Exos disks together with two Kingston A2000 500GB NVMe’s. Will update it at some point later in the test phase.
I plan on starting my pool with a fixed 5% cost of delegators profits and adjust according to demand. Currently the server is fairly tested over time and I know the hardware itself runs fine. I have tested the UPS as for example in this video where power was shut down and the network and computer kept running. Scripts are ready and can automatically pull latest updates from Github, compile it and restart the server pool service and in a simplified way that I can even do this in work and it would take me roughly 5-30 seconds to update and a few minutes to compile source files depending if genesis hash / trusted peers changed. I have prepared routines for updating the server while running the pool so to shave off any down time from this as well. With that said I am not a Sys-op by career and I will for sure have a learning curve in this experience. I expect something will break / go wrong and that I will have to learn from it. In the end I am here for the long haul and I have learned a lot in this process already in the last 2 weeks. I hope I can build trust by being frank, showing my hardware, showing what I do with my software and what plans I have will also be communicated on these pages. I hope you will join me on this journey and we can have this staking pool grow.
A very interesting discussion regarding saturation point for staking pools can be found in the Cardano effect episode 64 and not to reveal too much but I learned something new myself on a misconception I had on the subject. I felt we started off a bit slow but after that the discussion picked off pace and hopefully you the viewer find it usefull as well.
Had a fun weekend with my daughter Hannah helping me build the server and throwing in a ton of gaming stickers on every surface of that server for good luck charms 🙂
I have moved from wordpress hosting due to often down times on the site and instead hosted it on the Ada North Pool server with nginx, wordpress and with Cloudflare as DNS. This ment I had to import the posts from wordpress hosting. Hopefully this means a stable and secure webpage from today and onwards.
I had some qualms regarding showing hardware or not because it is an issue of security vs building trust in community. I landed on thinking I have security measures as a “fish” in the big ocean and that if I scale I would probably buy more equipment and security measures. Besides – its fun learning this as I go along and nice to enjoy comments and feedback from readers in that journey. I am pretty happy the powerdraw will be around 65 watt max even for a server that has a lot of horsepower. So without further ado here are some current hardware that I picked up today:
To prepare for the coming testnet period with incentive rewards ADA North Pool has invested in hardware that should scale well for the next coming years. Here are some of the highlights (most brands are left out for security reasons):
For redundancy we have gone with two 1200 watt UPS from PowerWalker that will be our backup source both for the routers to keep internet up and running but also for the computers to keep them running during a power outage.
Two 4 Terrabyte enterprise disks in raid 1 that are tested and meant to run 24/7 and with a high reliability and long age before mean time of failure. Draws roughly 10 Watt in operational mode and some 5 watts in idle mode. The reason for such large capacity was a study I did where I saw on main net the largest epoch could consume up to 1.7 Gigabytes of disk space. So to scale well for the future we have room for 4000 gigabyte 🙂
Two NVME 500 Gigabyte disks for the server operation system. Draws around 2 watts in operational mode and less than a single watt in idle mode.
64 Gigabyte of 2666 MHZ error correcting ram. This will make sure the server is stable in a 24/7 environment where you could risk with regular ram having at least an 8% chance of a failure on regular types of RAM per year according to some studies, but these RAM are error correcting so will avoid this risk.
Ryzen 3700X for 8 cores (16 threads) at only 65 watts. There are some tweaks out there and I will be looking into lowering the wattage to around 45 watts hopefully as I want the staking pool to be as energy efficient as possible.
Finally while I will not detail the motherboard and what type of lan chip it uses, what I can say it is is a very highly regarded and has received many awards regarding stability and energy efficiency and LAN performance. The same goes for a new router that is ordered that has a very high input/output and high hardware specs and enterprise level security solutions.