Category: General

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General

ANP & FUTURE – GOVERNANCE AND LEGAL DSL RESEARCH

One of my first ideas to form out of a domain specific language for obligation contracts with a controlled natural language (CNL) that makes it possible to translate correctly between languages.

So I wanted to write a bit about my background with a master degree in law and also in psychology. I think if I see a opportunity for contribution to the ecosystem in the fields of governance, legal research or also psychology I will try to contribute. It will surely be baby steps but I am going to focus time on writing smart contracts and thinking of easy to implement contracts with real life impact. I think a legal DSL is still years away but I do want to let the public know that there is already much research on the topic and quite old as such (see this thread for an example) and if I see a path towards building such a DSL I would want to take that journey.

My background from psychology was quite varied, from writing on gaming addiction (Everquest then World of Warcraft) before that was even a thing – to studying how teachers facilitated language acquisition in Concordia Language Villages. Same with my law studies that went from varied topics such as child rights law to energy law. I have also been a renewable energy advocate and I represented share holders in a power struggle with share dilution in the company Renewable Energy Corporation – and in that period wrote several analytical works on solar energy – for example this. I have been a stock investor for several years and you can find some of my articles on seeking alpha. So that is some short things about me that maybe could help delegators get to know me slightly better 🙂

I also want to take this opportunity to thank my delegators and if any of you want to get in touch with me feel free to write me an email. I currently expect that ANP also on the main net and setting up a company both for smart contracts, oracle services and as a staking pool and expanding on whatever direction is the most successful / achieving goals seems realistic.

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General

ANP orders second dedicated 1GB fiber connection

Since network capabilities are important for any healthy network service provider like what a staking pool in reality is, I have decided that one of the most important aspect I can improve the pool is in its network capabilities. So to further my already investing into network hardware I am also scaling up the connections to internet as well. A dedicated 1GB fiber connection will also make it easier for me to differentiate the costs of running the pool between my day to day fibre conneciton used at home. Having an extra fiber connection from another ISP provider also gives the pool redundancy. Hopefully this will in retrospect be a good move for the staking pools future.

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General

ANP installs new network hardware

I notice degrading performance in our block production and decided this was a good opportunity to install the Mellanox Connect X 4 card for the server. We have not yet installed the new router as we are waiting on some transceivers but having now installed the network card and it is operational should cut downtime when we do change over new router as well.

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General Hardware Media Pool status updates

Update on ANP Servers

We had a few rough periods and needed to rethink our approach. In that regard we made a new server structure as can be seen below in the image.

This has improved our stability and now our main pool server has had an uptime over a day without any problems. We are converting now around 82% of blocks an improvement of 75% from previous settings.

Finally an update on network equipment: Router has arrived and network cards as well. But we are waiting for the transceivers / cable equipment. Probably by next week we have everything and ready to install. The installation is likely to take half a day or with maximum preparations I could probably manage to get the pool up and running again in 1-2 hours. I will try to select a point in between blocks that is optimal – probably during next weekend.

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Charity General Media

ADA North Pool lends out to Kiva through Cardano Community team

On the cardano forums there has long been an active kiva lending team (see https://forum.cardano.org/t/cardano-community-kiva-lending-team/17613/26 ) and given that we are now almost half way to paying down the hardware of the server I figured it was time to also try and reach out for a good cause. You could argue its selfish in branding the pool but at the same time I hope it is something that also other pools would consider and that it could become a positive thing for the Cardano community that not only has there been an active lending team but also now pool operators help as well.

In any case I have picked two projects from Philippines as that is where my wife came from and it has a special place in my heart. Today is her birth day and we decided we wanted to do something special so we wanted to support Kiva projects in Philippines. I know also well the social system there and I know that a sari-sari store is very much ingrained in the culture there and supporting someone making one is a good cause. The same with jeepneys and motorcycle / tricyle type of transportation projects that is very much part of everyday life.

I had some qualms if I should publish pictures or not but given that these lending projects are public on Kiva and also it could contribute to others wanting also to lend out to them I believe it does more good than bad.

Finaly perhaps this post is also a good time to direct some attention to an idea I have regarding how to cut cost for oversea family members to cut costs for transfers to family members. https://forum.cardano.org/t/possible-idea-for-family-economic-connection/25247

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General Hardware Pool status updates

ADA North Pool invests in new router hardware

ADA North Pool invests in the Mikrotik RB4011 for more powerful router hardware, this gives us capability to utilize some of the amazing performance of the Mellanox Connect-X 4 cards we have purchased. The router can handle roughly 5-5.5 million packets per second worth of routing small packages of 64 bytes (typical for staking pools who only need to transmit small info to each IP address)

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General Hardware Pool status updates

ADA North Pool invest in network equipment

As a first step to a potential data center class capability ADA North Pool as purchased both a Mellanox ConnectX-4 MCX4111A-XCAT 10Gigabit Ethernet Card and a Mellanox ConnectX-4 MCX4121A-ACAT 25Gigabit Ethernet Card. In theory these cards can in optimal situations handle 75 million TCP packets of information per second.

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General Media Pool status updates

ANP produces its 500th block for delegators during ITN testnet

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General Pool status updates

A glance into ANP Server

I tought I would share my current screen setup on the server. I am using terminator bash terminals and hardware monitoring is your standard stuff like Glances, Htop and Iotop. But also I use Chrony for making sure my system clock is up to date and tuned to make sure my network is up to date, both running as services on the computer. I had my own custom made scripts for forking / bootstrap checking but replaced them with the great script Redoracle made. I also run Prometheus, Grafana and Nginx for monitoring and websites and a few security measurements, one of them that I think its fine to mention is I run Fail2ban. I have removed some information that could affect security and replaced with a red bar.

Some of the hardware monitoring. I have a default view and a view also with background scripts (for example I check how well Chrony is doing in making sure my system clock is as accurate as possible)
Currently the hardware is running a main server, 2 nodes and one extra server that I am helping IOHK out testing with. I run an error parser script and I also run the great script from Redoracle mentioned above and with Github link to its repository if anyone else wants to use the same. As you can see from the above pictures we have plenty of hardware resource room to grow utilizing somewhere around 10-15% CPU and around 10% of memory. Connections vary between 2000-4000 and tracked connections are around 13000-15000. In the “do stuff” box I run scripts from time to time like checking how many files open on the system (usually 18000-20000 at any given moment) or watt usage of my Nvidia card (sadly around 18 watt so more than what I expected but luckily since CPU is only at 10% utilization the Ryzen draws less power than what I expected as well.)
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General Media Pool status updates

ADA North Pool will produce its 400th block at roughly 1PM UTC

Celebrating a milestone for ADA North pool we have come a long way since epoch 1 and 2 where we produce one block in each epoch! We have tweaked the numbers even more when it comes to connection settings and believe we have found a sweet spot that will give us even more optimal operations.