Cardano Staking Pool Automation

This repo provides a means to automate the steps of setting up and maintaining a Cardano staking node, outlined by CoinCashew. Special credits to all the contributors of CoinCashew.

Notes

• Need to run dockerfile with a volume that maps to the host, for db, and for the /hot-keys locations
• Need to make sure logs (journalctl?) go to stdout

Chart

• BLOCK_PRODUCER_IP, RELAY_IP - will load upon redeploy of chart (fetches from values.yaml)
• Servies. One service each for relay and block-producer, each w/ external load balancer IP. NOTE: Should use static LB IP
• K8s cluster should be configured to be private
• Consider eventually having topology as a Helm values file configmap (allows for more than one)

Questions

• Is it ok to just redeploy, or do we need a safe container shutdown procedure?
• Should we have a single Docker image for all node types? Y
• How big of a bootdisk is needed in the node pool? 256GB

Next steps

• Cloudbuild CICD to build and push the docker image
• Deployment: block-producer
• Service: Load Balancer IP
• Deployment: relay
• Service: relay - use static IP
• Service account - use static IP

Host steps

Harden Ubuntu server

Install key dependencies

apt-get update -y 
apt-get upgrade -y 
apt-get install -y git curl systemd

Install Docker for Ubuntu: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/ (or use image that comes with your cloud platform)

 curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
 sh get-docker.sh

Create volume

docker create volume cardano_node

Set env variables

Network config

# For testnet: 
export NODE_CONFIG=testnet
# For mainnet:
export NODE_CONFIG=mainnet

Node type and IPs

# For relay node
export NODE_TYPE=relay
# Put in the external IP address of your relay node
#TODO - should be put in unit file
export RELAY_IP=1.2.3.4

# OR...

# For block-producing node
export NODE_TYPE=block-producer
# Put in the external IP address of your block-producing node
5.6.7.8

Set up systemctl

cd /etc/systemd/system
** wget service files from github **
COPY services/cardano-block-producing-node.service .
COPY services/cardano-relay-node.service .
RUN chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/cardano-block-producing-node.service
RUN chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/cardano-relay-node.service

# TODO - need to hard code the IPs in .service files
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable cardano-${NODE_TYPE}-node
sudo systemctl start cardano-${NODE_TYPE}-node
sudo systemctl status cardano-${NODE_TYPE}-node

Notes

Only works for 1 relay.

TODO - create docker volume

sudo docker exec -it

To be run on the relay server HOST

On relaynode1

TODO - adjust so that it calls the command via Docker

Doesn't have to be 33

cat > $NODE_HOME/crontab-fragment.txt << EOF 33 * * * * ${NODE_HOME}/topologyUpdater.sh EOF crontab -l | cat - ${NODE_HOME}/crontab-fragment.txt > ${NODE_HOME}/crontab.txt && crontab ${NODE_HOME}/crontab.txt rm ${NODE_HOME}/crontab-fragment.txt

Instructions for firewall rules (e.g. only relay can access block producer)