yorickdowne

Debian 12 "Bookworm"

To start, read the official release notes.

If your install fits into "vanilla Debian plus maybe a handful of 3rd-party repos", then this guide for a simple upgrade to Debian 12 "bookworm" from Debian 11 "bullseye" can be helpful. 3rd-party repos are handled with a find command.

If you are on a fork of Debian such as RasPI OS, use their instructions, not this gist.

Note upgrade is only supported from Debian 11 to Debian 12. If you are on Debian 10, upgrade to Debian 11 first and make sure to change the security repo as per the release notes. Then once on Debian 11, you can upgrade to Debian 12.

yorickdowne

Overview

Nethermind as of January 2024 takes about 1.1 TiB of space on a snap sync, and then grows by ~ 27 GiB/week.

When it starts to fill its disk, it can be online pruned (no downtime) to free up space again, to around the size of a fresh sync.

Prerequisites

• This is not an archive node. Do not try to prune an archive node.

yorickdowne

eth-docker informal specification

User behavior and threat model

A typical user of eth-docker is someone who wants to become a validator on the Ethereum network, also known as staking or staker, or someone who is already a validator on the Ethereum network and wants to add more validators to their setup. They can be someone who is going to setup their machine at home, someone who is going to use some kind of VPS to host their setup, or some kind of institutional staker working for large staking services or large investors.

eth-docker is an automation wrapper to run an "Ethereum node", consisting of a consensus layer client, execution layer client, and validator client.

yorickdowne

Overview

Geth 1.10.23 fixes a bug in 1.10.22, which would have resulted in missing state in its database. The Go-Ethereum team recommends to roll the chain back and let Geth catch up again, if and only if you had updated to 1.10.22. If you did not, just update to 1.10.23 now and call it done.

This is how to roll back to a previous block when using eth-docker.

Update Geth to 1.10.23

./ethd update and ./ethd up should do it.

yorickdowne

Overview

Syncing an Ethereum node is largely reliant on latency of the storage. Budget SSDs will struggle to an extent, and some won't be able to sync at all. IOPS can roughly be used as a proxy of / predictor for latency. Measuring latency directly is arguably better.

This document aims to snapshot some known good and known bad models.

The drive lists are ordered by interface and then by capacity and alphabetically by vendor name, not by preference. The lists are not exhaustive at all. @mwpastore linked a filterable spreadsheet (legacy sheet) in comments that has a far greater variety of drives and their characteristics. Filter it by DRAM yes, NAND Type TLC, Form Factor M.2, and desired capacity.

For size, 4TB is a conservative choice which also supports a Fusaka "supernode". The

yorickdowne

Sepolia is now on PoS

As of 2022/7/6, Sepolia has switched to PoS. The window to do some mining has closed.

Testnets after merge (original, old content from here)

It's mid 2022, Ethereum is still PoW and motoring towards merge / PoS. Surviving testnets will be Sepolia - currently PoW - and Goerli. Ropsten will be merged and then deprecated, Rinkeby and Kovan won't be merged.

I want to "get ready" for some Sepolia testing pre- and post-merge. Sepolia will not have a public validator set; testing post-merge will be limited to running applications on it. As Sepolia is PoW, I can actually go mine myself some SepplETH. Here's how.

yorickdowne

Overview

I was looking after a Dell PowerEdge R420 server with a hardware RAID card in it, a PERC8 H710P Mini. Connected to this were two WD Blue 3D NAND SATA SSDs in RAID-1, that were handling a write-intensive database: Geth, in this case.

After 11 months of running without problems, I had reason to "resync" Geth, and the server could not keep up with the required IOPS. Symptoms were Database compacting, degraded performance messages for hours, without recovery, and read/write latency in excess of 20/70ms, as measured by sudo iostat -mdx and its r_await and w_await data.

The cause of this was that the RAID controller does not support TRIM on the SSD, and the SSD's performance degraded over time because of it.

yorickdowne

These instructions have moved.

yorickdowne

Overview

Geth, and other execution clients such as Erigon, Nethermind, and Besu, take some time on shutdown to cleanly close their database. When not given that time, they will need to resync upon restart, often for hours. This gist describes the systemd service file parameter to give them up to 5 minutes of time for a clean shutdown.

Steps

• Find your service file. It may be called /etc/systemd/system/geth.service or /etc/systemd/system/eth1.service.
• Edit it using sudo nano FILENAME, and add TimeoutStopSec=300 to the [Service] section. Here is an example of a service file after the change:

yorickdowne

Overview

Running on netcup is not much different from running on any other Linux host. The main difference is that the host is directly exposed to the Internet. Netcup provision Debian, which works well with RocketPool.

Create a non-root user

Log in via ssh: ssh root@IP. Create a non-root user: adduser USERNAME followed by usermod -aG sudo USERNAME. Log in as that user.

Set up SSH key authentication