yorickdowne

Overview

Syncing an Ethereum node is largely reliant on latency and IOPS, I/O Per Second, 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 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 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 very conservative choice. The smaller 2TB drive should last an Ethereum full node until at least sometime 2026, with the [pre-merge history expiry](https://hackmd.io/@hBXHLw_9Qq2va4pRt

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.

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.

These instructions have moved.

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:

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

Note: PBSS in Geth >=1.13.0 removes the need to prune manually.

Old content for reference

Overview

Geth (Go-Ethereum) as of July 2022 takes about 650 GiB of space on a fast/snap sync, and then grows by ~ 14 GiB/week with default cache, ~ 8 GiB/week with more cache.

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

I am yorickdowne on github.
I am yorickdowne (https://keybase.io/yorickdowne) on keybase.
I have a public key ASAMH3gm5u914DMwcR4DXVgPeCKqlPdP9Tdurg-LiKUzVQo

To claim this, I am signing this object:

Resizing a netcup VPS disk after upgrading the contract to a bigger one

From the comments, this is possible without rescue mode in Linux.

Identify the root partition / with df -h and lsblk and then run something like the below. This one assumes the root partition is vda3; adjust for yours.

df -h output, this shows /dev/vda3 as the partition for /:

/dev/vda3       2.0T  1.9T   20G 100% /

	#! /bin/bash

	# http://linuxcommand.org/wss0150.php
	function error_exit
	{
	echo "$1" 1>&2
	exit 1
	}

	# http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/70859/why-doesnt-sudo-su-in-a-shell-script-run-the-rest-of-the-script-as-root