Category: Hardware

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General Hardware Media Pool status updates

History in the making – the dawn of Shelley

Yesterday was a very busy day for me at ADA North Pool. We created the staking pool ANP on the main net at 20:45 Eastern Time the 29th July or the “fork of July” as some of the SPOs have started calling it. I was also on the 100th episode of The Cardano Effect where I said little sensible things and cheered with my Cognac. I was quite tired at that point with 2 weeks of hard work and driving home to operation center. We registered ANPNL on the 29th but had some problems and some users reported not seeing the pool so we resigned it (sceduled for resignation in epoch 209 one epoch from the current 208 epoch). A new pool was registered today the 30th and this is the one you should delegate to. I hope this has caused little trouble for delegaters, but it was better to do it now early than later. Also I made a small video to the community about the dawn of Shelley:

Allready 1.1K views.

All in all a good days work.

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General Hardware Media

ADA North Pool adds new hardware intro video

In preperation for main met Shelley staking pool operations ADA North Pool is making new introduction videoes that will be used as a way for new delegators to the staking pool to get to know me as a pool operator. This video here is about the hardware and will showcase the servers in the home location while also briefly looking at the hybrid model with rented servers in Germany through Hertzner and with Google through its compute engine.

Without furhter ado here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj117hg3HUI

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General Hardware Pool status updates

ANP adds Google VM relays in Australia, Japan and USA

LiveView of the 3 relays in the 3 different continents we are now also covering on top of our Norwegian home servers and German remote dedicated servers.

ADA North Pool and ANP Northern Lights take network infrastructure as serious as we can and we try to evolve whenever we get a chance to do so. In this case we now are using the IOHK nix docker images that we deploy through a docker swarm across the world. We now have 5 public relays in Norway across two different computers with seperate fiber connections and 2 internal private relays handling incomming request to our cores. This on top of 1 ITN pool and 1 ITN relay. We have redundancy through using a mikrotik router (can handle 5 million 64kb packets per second of routing) for a 2nd internal LAN network across the home computers so even if one of the internet is down we can still reach globaly through the other. On top of this we have 2 servers in Germany handling 4 relays (and 2 ITN relays). Finally we have now expanded outside europe with a single google cloud vm (1cpu 4gb) individually in each with premium network infrastructure tier in USA (US WEST) and Japan (Tokyo) while a regular network infrastructure tier in Australia (Sydney) as well. We hope this will mean we can contribute even more to the overall network health of Cardano while also benefitting our own two core pools in our homeservers in Norway ANP and ANPNL.

Full list of relays:
norway1-relay5.adanorthpool.com
norway1-relay4.adanorthpool.com
norway2-relay3.adanorthpool.com
norway2-relay2.adanorthpool.com
norway2-relay1.adanorthpool.com
germany1-relay1.adanorthpool.com
germany1-relay2.adanorthpool.com
germany2-relay1.adanorthpool.com
germany2-relay2.adanorthpool.com
uswest1-relay1.adanorthpool.com
japan1-relay1.adanorthpool.com
australia1-relay1.adanorthpool.com
On top of this we have:
3 ITN relays and 1 ITN pool.
2 Private relays in Norway.
2 pools in Norway.

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General Hardware Media Pool status updates

ANP joins friends and family testnet and adds hardware based encryption for cold staking keys

Ada 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.

Fingerprint identifying 256-bit AES hardware encryption usb.
View of a core node and a relay as of today 14th May.

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.

EKG view of cardano-node with a lot of data.
With a Prometheus exporter built into the node it is really easy to setup Grafana data as well.
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General Hardware Media Pool status updates

ANP New server/node structure overview and update on folding@home

An overview of the latest node structure for Ada North Pool (ANP).
Attribution for logos used: Computer Vectors by Vecteezy

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.

We are currently participating with a good deal of computation for the Cardano team. Stats can be viewed @ https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/244483
Main jormungander server with a pool and 6 nodes.
The main server also hosts a core cardano-node (2nd network lan) and a cardano-node relay (internet)
ANP server 2 hosting 4 cardano-node relays. Server is also folding@home on light setting.
ANP Hertzner servers the two cardano-node relays are up and running. The jormungandr propagators one is up and other is boostraping soon to be up as well. Both ANP Hertzner servers also run folding@home on light to help support the cause.
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General Hardware Pool status updates

ANP 2. SERVER EQUIPMENT STARTS ARRIVING

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).

New hardware structure for ANP with a total of 24 cores (20 not including test laptop) and 136GB ram (128 not including test server) and above 10TB of disk space. Icon graphic: Appareil Photo Vectors by Vecteezy
Chassis ment for watercooling.
a bit more value driven mb than the ultra we ordered last time.
heart of the server 64gb ECC and 12 core ryzen 3900
Fractal design ION+ a very efficient (platinum class) power supply.
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Charity General Hardware

ADA NORTH POOL PLEDGE TO SUPPORT POOLTOOL.IO

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.

ADA North Pool has pledged 5 usd per month to support Mike Fullman’s effort www.pooltool.io

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General Hardware Media Pool status updates

ADA North Pool Video introduction and update on server

So encouraged by Charles post on staking pool making videoes I created one today that you can find here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ4dlmw_Dsg

Currently I just need to do some cable managment but as you can see we are running straight from ISP to pool.

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Hardware Pool status updates

ANP Installs dedicated fiber connection

In these Covid-19 times trival news like this is perhaps not that important but it is an important milestone for ADA North Pool. Today we connected a 1 gigabyte dedicated connection straight to the pool’s Mellanox network card this should help tremendously with capacity as we can now fully unleash the 1 million tcp packet per second capacity of the network card.

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General Hardware Pool status updates

ANP 2ND DEDICATED FIBRE SCEDULED FOR INSTALL WEEK 11

I got word from the 2nd fiber provider (Homenet) that they are coming to install the fibre connection in week 11. That means we will have more redundancy for ANP with one fibre connection dedicated and connected straight to network card and the home fibre connection as a 2nd fibre connection. This should help with robustness for the server and is a stepping stone towards also full redundancy with either 5G or Starlink internet whatever is provided first. (likely 2021-2022).