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General Media Pool status updates

ANP with 2nd walkthrough video

In this video I share with the viewer some of the experiences I have had with my time in the Friends and Family testnet period for cardano-node and walk the viewer through making a node certificate, creating staking keys and as bonus contents we look more into docker swarm, pro’s and con’s of docker containers for cardano-node and community scripts.

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhx6IQRrbBA

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General Media Pool status updates

ANP creates cardano-node scripts for learning purposes

They say one of the best ways to learn how something truly works is to build it from the ground up. So I took that to heart and decided to build some scripts instead of using some of the other great scripts out there. And I could not resist putting in some ASCII for ANP logo in there as well 🙂


Create address and .vkey .skey:
https://gist.github.com/Willburn/32fb6c5bf69e85258320bc7be7a24db5

Simple send transaction script:
https://gist.github.com/Willburn/b91cde5227826be465e21bcc6be9cf88

Multiple (2) transactions:
https://gist.github.com/Willburn/5240f6f2fc45e49a1bc01af183ae5dfd

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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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Charity General Media

ANP DONATES AGAIN TO KIVA AS PART OF CARDANO COMMUNITY LENDING TEAM

This month we used both new founds and some of the money repaid from the two last projects and lend out to the following project: https://www.kiva.org/lend/1944562

In total we have lent out 75 USD in projects so far.

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General Media Pool status updates

MILESTONE FOR ANP WITH 2000+ BLOCKS PRODUCED DURING EPOCH 109

It has been quite a ride for ADA North Pool and as a staking pool operator I have learned a lot during these 109 days. I am grateful for the trust delegators have put in my pool and I hope to continue improving also for the main net. Thank you to every delegator who made it possible for ANP to produce 2000 blocks during the ITN.

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General Media Pool status updates

ANP joins ISPPA

ISPPA – Inter Stake Pool Peering Agreement

In spirit with the Cardano incentivised testnet and experimenting on models of pool operation several pools have together formed an “Inter-Stake Pool Peering Agreement”

In total these pool operators have produced well over 42000 blocks all together and have proven over time to be reliable pool operators securing 24/7 operations of their pools. For comparison this is roughly the same size as all the blocks produced by the largest multi pool combined. On average the pool operators produce around 12% of the blocks in the network in any given epoch.

The main intention of this agreement is to test for and try to achieve an even better networking infrastructure and propagation of blocks than with each pool operator running on his own during the ITN. It involves connecting the pools and relay nodes as preferred meaning that these nodes will form a huge cluster located all over the world that will be constantly inter-connected and exchanging data. The preferred option technically adds a fourth layer of communication on top of the 3 communication layers of Cyclon, Rings and Vincity. It does not mean that the pool operators are going to exclude other pools from their information flow as we are firm believers in decentralization. It also does not mean the operators are running a common business but will stay independent entities.

Finally as this is an ITN we hope to collect data and see if this model of operation can give improvements to the already steadily improving network of Cardano nodes all around the world! We will welcome collaboration at a later point but for now want to keep a steady sample size to compare data.

Pool operators AHLNET AIJOU ANP BAKE BAKE2 BCSH CALM CHEAP CHKN CLIO1 COOL CSP ELMO HAPPY HRBR HRMA HRMS ITALY KIWI LIEBE LOVE MERRY MONKY SAND SEXY SEXY69 SOBIT STACK STDN STR8 VIPER

https://isppa.info/

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Charity General Media

ADA North Pool joines Cardano community effort for research on Covid-19

In light of the recent post on the Cardano Forums ( https://forum.cardano.org/t/cardano-foundations-community-management-team-supports-folding-home-for-covid19-research/31523 ) ADA North Pool has decided to support this effort by dedicating the backup computer node to folding@home to support the community effort to help research on Covid-19. We would like to thank the Cardano Foundation for encouraging such an effort.

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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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General Media Pool status updates

ANP ADS BLOCK0 FETCH SERVICE TO COMMUNITY

With Jormungandr 0.8.11 you can fetch the genesis block with http(s). Enabling this functionality will not only reduce load on the IOHK trusted peers, but also reduces your bootstrap times, all you need to do is add the fetch block0 service in your node_config.yaml or in node_config.json.

JSON configuration

{
  "log": [
    {
      "format": "plain",
      "level": "info",
      "output": "stderr"
    }
  ],
  "http_fetch_block0_service": [
    "https://adanorthpool.com/bootstrap"
  (you can add multiple addresses here as well)
  ],
...
                    

YAML configuration

---
log:
- format: plain
  level: info
  output: stderr
http_fetch_block0_service:
- https://adanorthpool.com/bootstrap/
(you can add multiple addresses here as well)
...