Epoch 5 was rough on ADA North Pool who only managed to produce around 60% of blocks. Granted it was rough for many other pool operators but ANP prides itself in trying to the best of its ability to produce blocks. To that extent we have utilized our strong server hardware and added a cluster of nodes that will help keep the network stable and performing well. We have also done several more tweaks to the nginx html server to improve its performance so the site is available.
Category: General
First of all I would like to apologize that the webserver has been down for 24 hours. The site was simply not ready for the kind of load that came with the Test Net 0.8.2 ITN when all users of the Deadelus wallet wanted to access it. I have done a lot of optimization these last hours and hope to come back much stronger because of this. Due to DNS propagation it will take 24-48 hours before users see these changes. As I said earlier I am learning this as we go.
In that regard we also had some trouble with bootstrapping simply getting stuck due to the massive amount of bootstrapping calls to IOHK servers. To make sure this is not a problem in the feature we have added both our own backup nodes, private nodes in a pool alliance and added more features to error script logging for automation of handling any incidents.
In short I am still learning but the pool and the website is getting stronger and stronger day by day.
As the 0.8.2 ITN had its first problem with block not moving up ADA North Pool has added a temporary fail safe in an automated script to make sure server resets if the block is not moving up again. More longer term we are working into more advance automation of logging tools (probably trough Greylog) but for the time being this is an easy workaround.
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.
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.
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.