Had a fun weekend with my daughter Hannah helping me build the server and throwing in a ton of gaming stickers on every surface of that server for good luck charms 🙂
I have moved from wordpress hosting due to often down times on the site and instead hosted it on the Ada North Pool server with nginx, wordpress and with Cloudflare as DNS. This ment I had to import the posts from wordpress hosting. Hopefully this means a stable and secure webpage from today and onwards.
I had some qualms regarding showing hardware or not because it is an issue of security vs building trust in community. I landed on thinking I have security measures as a “fish” in the big ocean and that if I scale I would probably buy more equipment and security measures. Besides – its fun learning this as I go along and nice to enjoy comments and feedback from readers in that journey. I am pretty happy the powerdraw will be around 65 watt max even for a server that has a lot of horsepower. So without further ado here are some current hardware that I picked up today:
To prepare for the coming testnet period with incentive rewards ADA North Pool has invested in hardware that should scale well for the next coming years. Here are some of the highlights (most brands are left out for security reasons):
For redundancy we have gone with two 1200 watt UPS from PowerWalker that will be our backup source both for the routers to keep internet up and running but also for the computers to keep them running during a power outage.
Two 4 Terrabyte enterprise disks in raid 1 that are tested and meant to run 24/7 and with a high reliability and long age before mean time of failure. Draws roughly 10 Watt in operational mode and some 5 watts in idle mode. The reason for such large capacity was a study I did where I saw on main net the largest epoch could consume up to 1.7 Gigabytes of disk space. So to scale well for the future we have room for 4000 gigabyte 🙂
Two NVME 500 Gigabyte disks for the server operation system. Draws around 2 watts in operational mode and less than a single watt in idle mode.
64 Gigabyte of 2666 MHZ error correcting ram. This will make sure the server is stable in a 24/7 environment where you could risk with regular ram having at least an 8% chance of a failure on regular types of RAM per year according to some studies, but these RAM are error correcting so will avoid this risk.
Ryzen 3700X for 8 cores (16 threads) at only 65 watts. There are some tweaks out there and I will be looking into lowering the wattage to around 45 watts hopefully as I want the staking pool to be as energy efficient as possible.
Finally while I will not detail the motherboard and what type of lan chip it uses, what I can say it is is a very highly regarded and has received many awards regarding stability and energy efficiency and LAN performance. The same goes for a new router that is ordered that has a very high input/output and high hardware specs and enterprise level security solutions.
In the last week I have joined a private testnet where we with the help of script collect jcli data and can aggregate the data with others who have joined the testnet. This allows us to understand better for example memory growth compared with number of transactions on the blockchain or how the blockchain database grows. This gives us a better idea on memory requirments, disk requirements and such. I joined after the first article was published ( https://edu.clio.one/ouroboros-at-work/ ) but I am honored to be part of such a group.
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Ada North Pool on the Cardano Effect
Hey all. I (Eystein Magnus Hansen) where on the The Cardano Effect episode 58 (Stake Pool Operators, Jormungandr, Centralized vs Decentralized | TCE 58) and I discussed the need for decentralization and hopefully that the ecosystem will have a good mix of different types of hardware and not only cloud based.
I also discussed how Stake Pools also will be part of a social process and in that regard I have now looked into a logo (pending) to go with name of the site and added SSL so users will feel the website is safe to use. I hope to use this site as a way to communicate with stake delegators to my pool.
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Start of Ada North Pool
Hello, my name is Eystein Hansen and I have been involved in Cardano since around december 2017. Since the very first days I have believed Cardano needs geographical diversification (see for example this post from February 2018: https://forum.cardano.org/t/staking-pools-and-some-issues-that-perhaps-should-be-considered/7711).
I also believe in a working echosystem for Cardano and was part of the group who worked for getting a new board for Cardano Foundation, working with first letter and one of the signers of the second letter (for an overview of the history see #1 https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2018/10/12/an-open-letter-to-the-cardano-community-from-iohk-and-emurgo/ and #2 https://hackernoon.com/whats-going-on-with-cardano-3f2996841b21 and #3 https://hackernoon.com/cardano-foundation-chairman-resigns-following-community-effort-50453efd3d3c ).
After that period of governance change (for the better imho) I worked on two ideas for Cardano BitLaw and Family connect:
bitlaw: https://forum.cardano.org/t/bitlaw-a-legal-system-with-a-dsl-for-cardano-governance/18887
Family connect: https://forum.cardano.org/t/possible-idea-for-family-economic-connection/25247
Now I am full circle again where I stared with wanting to be involved in the staking process and trying to make sure that we have geographically and hardware diverse Staking Pools. Â
I believe it is important the little guys have staking pools and that Cardano is both geographically, individually and hardware wise diversified to protect from attack vectors like governmental attacks, specific hardware vulnerability attacks or cloud based attacks etc. If you agree maybe you could delegate some of your stake with my staking pool?