ADA North Pool had its first error that caused the service to have to reset. This took somewhat less than 1 second so did not in any way affect the pools ability to produce blocks but in line with transparency and since we are in TestNet phase this is reported here on server status updates.
Sensitive IP data edited away. A connection error caused an error (code 24 – reported to IOHK) and this caused our service to terminate.As can be seen by the service active stat since 22:03:44 the service rebooted and where back up again roughly 1 second later. Given that you have a small time frame window to produce blocks this would not have affected the pools ability to produce a block only giving it a slightly higher time from wake up to finished if unlucky.
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.
Another historic moment 0.8.2 ITN Epoch 2 block scheduled and produced in slot 3116.
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.
ADA North Pool was selected for block production on Epoch 1 Slot 3116 and it was produced successfully at 20:57 UTC 14th December 2019. Another historic moment for ADA North Pool and hopefully the first of many blocks to be produced!
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.
View from server monitors from the start of the 0.8.2 ITNScreenshot capture from pooltool.io exploring the 0.8.2 ITN
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.
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.
Now I am full circle again where I stared with wanting to be involved in the staking process and trying to make sure that we have geographically and hardware diverse Staking Pools.
I believe it is important the little guys have staking pools and that Cardano is both geographically, individually and hardware wise diversified to protect from attack vectors like governmental attacks, specific hardware vulnerability attacks or cloud based attacks etc. If you agree maybe you could delegate some of your stake with my staking pool?