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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.
Categories
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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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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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).

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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)
...
              
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Charity Hardware Pool status updates

ANP Transceivers and cable equipment arrive

It took a while but I am really happy with the custom made trancievers from fs.com that will fit to the brands of my network cards at a fraction of the cost if I bought it directly from the network supplier. This means we will at some point soon have a downtime but I want to have a good epoch – so far we have done 18 out of 19 and we could make up to 10 more this epoch. Given we had some poor luck in draws last two epochs that means I want to wait a bit before doing the rest of the networking equipment. I will update on twitter when the server will have some downtime.

Trancievers and optical cables from fs.com