In an effort to optimize our server structure we have moved the web server and in the process doubled its capacity (cpu/ram/diskspace) while roughly halving the costs. We have also added more relays some are public and can be seen for example on adapools.com, and some are none public and will not be disclosed location/address.
Category: Pool status updates
Yesterday I discovered I had troubles with my main relay computer that used timesynchronization from Google as a single source of such synchronization. This caused blocks to be produced in the future and my relay failed to propegate blocks correctly. My main server computer used another undisclosed time server but given all blocks are routed through my main relay and another undisclosed relay I cannot rule out this to be the cause of 0 blocks this epoch so far. All relays and servers are 1.24.2 and all files have correct permissions (400) and all are synched correctly now. I appologize to my delegators for not discovering this problem sooner. My only excuse is it only became public knowledge yesterday google had troubles. For the future I will use multiple time synching servers across the globe to avoid this pitfall.
The webserver had a small interuption of service. This was due to an SSL certification change of provider not going as smoothly as planned. The problem has been fixed. The pool servers where never interupted in operation (another server and even if same server not dependant on SSL) so no blocks have been lost 🙂
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:
All in all a good days work.
As promiced when I took down the old dashboard / grafana service I would soon make a new one. I have now a beta version that can be found at the website under menu link “monitor” or through direct link: https://adanorthpool.com/monitor/d/NQQGUr7Gz/monitoring-ada-north-pool?orgId=2
Statistics are currently from main net candidate 1.16.x
ANP Northern Lights logos
After revision of our logos we currently have the following available logos for video/websites and such.
ANP Northern lights logos:
ADA North Pool logos
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.
After considerations and something I have deliberated for the last 3 months I have decided ANP is going to have a 2nd staking pool called ANP Northern Lights. While we are supporters of decentralization and certainly we will not be going massive amount of 1%pools on you guys like 1percent did during the ITN, for competitive reasons we believe a model with 2 pools allow us a lot more flexibility in what cost structure we can offer our delegators. One main reason is we are not in this for charity in itself (but certainly will support charitable efforts if we can afford it like we have done so far with Kiva lending and folding@home) and we are trying to be profitable to such a degree we can continue do do supportive causes like patroning pooltool.io and developing the ecosystem further with our own projects in the future. If you think this is terrible you are free to delegate to others. If on other hand you can see the value I am trying to contribute to the ecosystem like for example my latest presentation during the Cardano Virtual summit we hope you will consider delegating to us or remaing a delegator with us if you have so during the ITN.
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
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