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Metrics

Metrics are meant to be run from many different places in order to get a good picture of the network on a global scale and limit geographic and network configuration bias.

While the ideal configuration would be to have aleph.im Core Channel Nodes run or supervise these measurements, a quick way to get started is to run the metrics from a collection of VPSs around the world from different providers.

Setting up on VPS with NixOS

An easy way to ease the maintenance of the VPSs is to use NixOS, which is a declarative Linux distribution that allows you to define the entire configuration of the system in a single file.

The procedure we used relied on the nixos-infect script, which is a simple script that converts an existing operating system to NixOS. The script has been tested on multiple hosting providers.

https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect

Make sure to add your SSH key to the root user of the VPS before running the script.

Once the system has been converted to NixOS and has been rebooted, you can proceed to add the configuration specific for the metrics.

OVH Specificities

After creating a new VPS on OVH, you will receive an email with a link to the password of the debian user on the machine. You will be prompted to change the password on first login. After rebooting on NixOS, login as root instead.

IPv6 is not enabled by default on OVH VPSs.

nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-24.05 nixos
nix-channel --update

Configure the IPv6 networking in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix with the data from the OVH control panel.

networking.interfaces.ens3 = {
  ipv6.addresses = [ {
    address = "<IPv6 address>";
    prefixLength = 128;
  } ];
  defaultGateway6 = {
    address = "";
    interface = "ens3";
  };
};

DigitalOcean Specificities

When creating the droplet, make sure to select your SSH key, IPv6 networking and to provide the Cloud-init script that will run nixos-infect on first boot, automatically converting the system to NixOS.

#cloud-config

runcmd:
  - curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elitak/nixos-infect/master/nixos-infect | PROVIDER=digitalocean NIX_CHANNEL=nixos-24.05 bash 2>&1 | tee /tmp/infect.log```

Scaleway Specificities

When creating an instance, specify the following Cloud-Init configuration (source):

#cloud-config
write_files:
- path: /etc/nixos/host.nix
  permissions: '0644'
  content: |
    {pkgs, ...}:
    {
      environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ neofetch vim helix ];
    }
runcmd:
  - curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elitak/nixos-infect/master/nixos-infect |  NIXOS_IMPORT=./host.nix NIX_CHANNEL=nixos-24.05 bash 2>&1 | tee /tmp/infect.log

Test locally

Test the configuration locally before deploying it using nixos-generators.

nixos-generate -f vm -c vm.nix --run

Start the service manually to test it and look at the logs using:

systemctl start aleph-scoring-measure.service
journalctl -u aleph-scoring-measure.service

Setting up the secret key

The key is in the format of aleph address export-private-key.

aleph address export-private-key > <key-path>
ssh <server> mkdir -p /srv/secrets/aleph.im
scp <key-path> <server>:/srv/secrets/aleph.im/ethereum.key

Setting up the Sentry DSN

The Sentry DSN is the URL provided by Sentry to receive stacktraces.

echo "https://<...>@<...>.ingest.sentry.io/<...>" > sentry-dsn.txt
scp sentry-dsn.txt <server>:/srv/secrets/aleph.im/sentry-dsn.txt

Configuring or Updating

The service.nix contains the aleph.im specific configuration for the metrics service and a Prometheus exporter.

scp nix/service.nix <server>:/etc/nixos/service.nix
scp nix/aleph-scoring.nix <server>:/etc/nixos/aleph-scoring.nix

Ensure this file is imported by /etc/nixos/configuration.nix or /etc/nixos/host.nix on each server.

Then switch to the new configuration using.

ssh <server> nixos-rebuild switch