So the security contest of August has now ended. One outer relay / webserver had a weaknesses that allowed hackers to learn information and a user was rewarded 500 ADA for this discovery. No user reported either files of the two core servers.
In an emotional moment for me as I have been waiting quite long for the pool to produce the block yesterday ADA North Pool finally made a block. This means delegtors will recieve full rewards in epoch 210 as in the first epoch your performance will be 100% if you produce any blocks.
In preparation to the soon first block producing epoch (granted after some delays) I have modernized software to be as up to date (for example only latest long term support distros) and had a 2nd pass with a critical eye on security. We also made several optimizations so everything is as rigged and ready as can be. Security is certainly nothing I will ever be relaxing on and I am constantly trying to evolve in this area to have as much safety as possible. While I wish I could detail all the new security enhancements I have added the fact is that another security measure is to have as much hidden information as possible when it comes to security measures. Hopefully this is understandable.
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ANP removes public monitoring
Out of an abundance of safety measures I have withdrawn monitoring of some of the relays though the public. While I truly love to make everything as transparent as possible I also have to consider security at every step. Initially when I made the monitoring I also considered the security measures and made sure to only monitor what was safe and in a way that was safe. However I have recently got some convincing arguments that make me adjust my stance. Feel free to get in touch with me if you think the monitoring service is very important to you as a delegator and I will try to look at my options.
During the hard fork party that was later termed “the fork of July” I participated in The Cardano Effect episode 100 representing ANP. Link to episode 100: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tEbLDCDHSk
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ANP Security competiton / contest
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
In preperation for main net we will cancel two Hetzner servers from 1. august. Instead of two 16gb ecc ram servers ANP have ordered a single 64gb ECC ram server with much higher cpu power and datacenter ssd. This means we will have a single German relay (but roughly 4x the power of the previous two servers in Germany) and instead use the google cloud vm’s to spread our relays more across the world. This also actually helps us cut costs so we remain competitive and well within the minimum cost structure that is currently proposed for the Shelley main net.
Server:
Intel Xeon E3-1275v5
* 2x SSD SATA 480 GB Datacenter
* 4x RAM 16384 MB DDR4 ECC
In preperation for main met Shelley staking pool operations ADA North Pool is making new introduction videoes that will be used as a way for new delegators to the staking pool to get to know me as a pool operator. This video here is about the hardware and will showcase the servers in the home location while also briefly looking at the hybrid model with rented servers in Germany through Hertzner and with Google through its compute engine.
Without furhter ado here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj117hg3HUI