Category: General

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.

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 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.

ANP is having a friendly competition with the likes of DIGI fortress to help contribute as much as possible to the Cardano team’s folding@home contributing to covid-19 problem solving. In that respect not only are we now using a backup server but we have assigned two more computers to donate cpu and gpu power to folding@home. Let the friendly competition begin 🙂

Ranking can be found here https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/244483