To keep it short ADA North Pool now also has a telegram group https://t.me/adanorthpool
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Update on ANP Servers
We had a few rough periods and needed to rethink our approach. In that regard we made a new server structure as can be seen below in the image.
This has improved our stability and now our main pool server has had an uptime over a day without any problems. We are converting now around 82% of blocks an improvement of 75% from previous settings.
Finally an update on network equipment: Router has arrived and network cards as well. But we are waiting for the transceivers / cable equipment. Probably by next week we have everything and ready to install. The installation is likely to take half a day or with maximum preparations I could probably manage to get the pool up and running again in 1-2 hours. I will try to select a point in between blocks that is optimal – probably during next weekend.
On the cardano forums there has long been an active kiva lending team (see https://forum.cardano.org/t/cardano-community-kiva-lending-team/17613/26 ) and given that we are now almost half way to paying down the hardware of the server I figured it was time to also try and reach out for a good cause. You could argue its selfish in branding the pool but at the same time I hope it is something that also other pools would consider and that it could become a positive thing for the Cardano community that not only has there been an active lending team but also now pool operators help as well.
In any case I have picked two projects from Philippines as that is where my wife came from and it has a special place in my heart. Today is her birth day and we decided we wanted to do something special so we wanted to support Kiva projects in Philippines. I know also well the social system there and I know that a sari-sari store is very much ingrained in the culture there and supporting someone making one is a good cause. The same with jeepneys and motorcycle / tricyle type of transportation projects that is very much part of everyday life.
Finaly perhaps this post is also a good time to direct some attention to an idea I have regarding how to cut cost for oversea family members to cut costs for transfers to family members. https://forum.cardano.org/t/possible-idea-for-family-economic-connection/25247
Celebrating a milestone for ADA North pool we have come a long way since epoch 1 and 2 where we produce one block in each epoch! We have tweaked the numbers even more when it comes to connection settings and believe we have found a sweet spot that will give us even more optimal operations.
Had another long night where I tweaked the node cluster (less nodes but more quality to each nodes with more connections and file limits for each) and also optimized the server painstakingly reducing one by one some metrics I know affects the quality the serer has to read and process incoming connections fast until I found an optimal point. After this the server seems again more stable (hoping this time it is going to last for a while!)
Now with the server more stable I have had some time to add more “bells and whistles” type of features so I have now not only a hardware monitoring but also a Jormungandr server monitoring that user can look how the server is doing right here on the web page, I have added these as menu links. As always feel free to contact me for encouragement / suggestions.
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.
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.