ADA North PoolAda North Pool had the great honor of being asked to join the friends and family testnet. The TLDR is the progress is great. Overall the experience has been great and documentation, features and overall experience is shaping up well in the opinion of this pool operator.
We also added a hardware encryption usb drive in preperation of cold staking key storage.
The nodes come prebuilt with a lot of features that can be enabled. For example the EKG view that you can set to a port on your localhost.
To end the testnet with a bang we have upped our efforts even more. We added two Germany based xeon 4core computers on 1gb fibers at one of the datacenter of Hetzner where we are now both folding@home, practicing with cardano-node swarm (manager/worker@hetzner) and also adding block propegation for jormungandr to improve our chances of winning slot battles. For our home servers we have a local swarm on its own network (lan based) for the cardano-core that is in touch with the cardano relay nodes (in ip addresses relay1.adanorthpool.com and relay2.adanorthpool.com and also the remote servers @ relay3 and relay4) and thus should work fine even if one of the internet falls down. We also have full UPS backup in both the home servers and in the datacenter. I think we are now on a path to become far more secure in our operations even in the event of internet failures or power outages.
Folding@Home is going solid with participation previously by the whole ANP family of computers. Onwards we will be using ANPLAPTOP (4 core) ANPSERVER2 (its a 12 core so have idle capacity for this) Both the ANPHERTZNER servers (4 core) + ANP FAMILY computers that are 8 core and 4 core and with GPU computation as well.
ADA North pool is scaling up with a new relay node system in preperation of cardano-node where we will have several relays:
relay1.adanorthpool.com 12core 64gb ecc ram mellanox connectx 4 lan location home@Norway 0.5gb fiber
relay2.adanorthpool.com 4core 16gb ecc ram intel lan pro location baremetal@Germany 1gb fiber
relay3.adanorthpool.com 4core 8gb ram intel lan location home@Norway 0.5gb fiber
[email protected] privat ip 8 core 64gb ecc ram mellanox connectx 4 lan. Location home@Norway. 1gb fiber.
After quite some work this weekend we have some of the basics of docker and managed to make our own docker swarm based on an in-house composer.yaml file that you can find an edited version of you can use as an example for yourself here https://gist.github.com/Willburn/5c40e6b05010623ad8c596bcedc0c19b
The docker image itself you can find the Dockerfile for here: https://github.com/Willburn/docker
Here is the local ANPSERVER2 Nodes with the terminal output to verify that indeed they work inside a swarm cluster
Here you can see all 3 computes (2 servers 1 laptop) in action with cardano nodes running initiated from the swarm manager:
And here is the whole operation center in one view:
For the community you can find a dockerfile on github https://github.com/Willburn/docker and I hope in the future I can write a guide for the community on how to get up and running docker image based cardano-nodes.
After quite a tedious back and fourth with a Manjaro real time kernel managing to break the bios and needing to do a flash/cmos clear finally the ANPSERVER2 computer is up and running. As tradition (for ANP anyhow) my daughter has put some good luck charm stickers on the computer. Due to this being more stranious than what I had originally envisioned I have put on hold doing container learning for one more week but the plan is to make a docker swarm with the two servers and a laptop to orchestrate according to demand. One server will be the more fail safe ubuntu and the other will carry more of the nodes and more recent kernels with the rolling releases of arch linux based distros.
Today the first batch of equipment for our second server arrived. We are considering naming our second server oro8 after the Oroborus snake of life/death cycles with the 8 symbolizing the eternal ring cycle. But probably we will name it ADA NORTH POOL 2 (ANP2). Main server will use Ubuntu for stabile operations while the 2nd server will use the more rolling updating distro called Manjavo for faster implementation of new kernel/hardware support. The stable server will likely host the pools and the more rolling updating server will hold a majority of nodes (but both will run nodes).
I have been pondering this for quite a while and I have seen other pools gain competitiveness by having multiple pools with lower fees. I want to remain competitive and at the same time encourage decentralization with having bare metal servers in house. My plan now is to launch ANP and ANP2 with 2% fees for the main net if the pledge mechanism will allow for this to be competitive. The following hardware should be here in a week or so:
Ryzen 3900x (12 cores)
Gigabyte MB with support for ECC RAM
64GB of 2667 ECC RAM
Mellanox Connectx 4 Network card (I really love this card for its network performance vs price)
Fractal Cabinet (More air flow and less silent than my other server but if its too noisy I will switch to water cooling)
2 TB PNY CS3030 NVME
500MB PNY CS3030 NVME
I have not decided yet if I will run both pools from main server and all extra nodes on the other or one pool on each of the servers but will test out models as we approach main net and during performance testing of haskel nodes.
Fractal Chasis
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Fractal Design ION+ a 760 Platinum power supply (important for power effiency that keeps running costs down.)
To reduce costs that we instead can look into putting back into the community the ADA North Pool server will host its own SSL cert renewal / maintainance with CERTBOT – this will allow us to add another 75 usd per year in foundings to Cardano Kiva Lending team or other community initiatives ADA North Pool wants to support.
As we are not stronger than the community we build around Cardano ANP has decided to divert back founding into supporting projects in the ecosystem on top of supporting charity projects. First up is Mike Fullman’s pooltool.io that has become a central hub for information regarding pools performance. To be clear in no way will us supporting pooltool.io make us have any special relationship with the site and they will report our performances correctly as can be verified from other explorer sites as well.
