X1 Fastnet Node Setup

Configuring your X1 Fastnet Validator Node USE these instructions for either docker based set up or non-docker

SERVER SPECIFICATION I AM USING

My Server is a hosted cloud virtual server. If you want to build your own server then you can but there will be extra requirements. All I list here is valid for hosted servers.

6 vCPU Cores

16 GB RAM

600 GB SSD

32 TB Traffic*Unlimited Incoming

Ubuntu 20.04

All instructions below are based on using Ubuntu. If you are using a different version of Linux then you may need to adjust the commands. All commands that need typing in are in red and you will need to press the enter button after each one.

One point to note is that validation or creation of new blocks isn't possible yet. There will be another version of this chain where people will be allowed to start block production

	Non Docker Installation
	Install PuTTY from https://www.putty.org.
	Open PuTTY on your computer and enter your server’s SSH IP and SSH Port.
	Click the Open button to proceed.
	Enter your SSH username and password when prompted. The screen won’t show the password but will register what you type. It is best to login with root access if possible.
	You are now connected to your server via PuTTY. You can use commands to interact with your server. It is sometimes useful to install ‘go’ as well if your server does not already have it installed. Mine did but it has been pointed out that other people did not have this. Search for Go: sudo apt search golang-go sudo apt search gccgo-go Install Golang sudo apt install golang-go
	To start the install of Opera you first need to download the required files. Run the below command to do this.  git clone You may get an error that says git command is not available. If you do then you can install it very easily. First update the package index by running apt update To install git then run apt install -y git-all You then need to go to the go-opera folder. Change directory by typing cd go-opera Create the Opera Binary by running: make opera Again, if you get an error saying make is not available you can install it by typing apt install make Once this is completed you can check it is there by typing the commands cd build ls This will change directory to the build folder and then list everything in that folder. Move the Opera binary to /usr/local/bin by running mv opera /usr/local/bin Change directory to /usr/local/bin by running cd /usr/local/bin Copy and paste the following. The easiest way to paste in Linux is just to right click where the cursor is. nohup /usr/local/bin/opera  --fakenet 0/4 --db.preset pbl-1 --bootnodes "enode://2d232bb62e95dcbe9056b13e847285e8a29cfc7ec7ddbef5dcae050d54b42e17cd8a7c5d05d11e0bb1df4ab0129f4b42d979073ed4396f393cd47addb3e2ccb9@54.219.181.6:5050,enode://70b4b0baa8c75acc986c2dfcf3b1450cd94dc90a9f84dfc9888c54324bc57c9cd7466551057edc9d86c763593ba638cdda644bd454854804f36d5dce799ca3cc@54.241.209.227:5050,enode://d5b49249df049c171e6c4d837ec320f8b58657a2dbba3b16cf2ca7d108ad3bc2b03a45882c5df492e4c836b7271a3f48e4d4596d44ac2e69495bb4facd7e8821@54.176.89.121:5050,enode://4cb4b4d882bf0d50c27b2def8694160c2e273dc012ccbc9d5eed5e55dd2561c2be41a62bd27cc0b78d38b5812b90099083b0c2af76e7495110e13e2deb72e772@52.8.54.200:5050" 2>> opera.log & Now, if you type tail -f opera.log you will see it is starting to sync. This took about 18 hours on my server but just leave it to do what it needs to do until it is finished.

Docker Based Installation

Putty is required for this as well so please use the instructions above for installing and using Putty.

First thing we need to do is install docker. I am not going to go deeply into what docker is and how to use it as I want to keep this simple but there are plenty of good resources online.

Step 1 — Installing Docker

The Docker installation package available in the official Ubuntu repository may not be the latest version. To ensure we get the latest version, we’ll install Docker from the official Docker repository. To do that, we’ll add a new package source, add the GPG key from Docker to ensure the downloads are valid, and then install the package. All instructions assume that you have root access. If your user does not then you will need to add ‘sudo’ in front of them.

First, update your existing list of packages:

apt update

Next, install a few prerequisite packages which let apt use packages over HTTPS:

apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

Then add the GPG key for the official Docker repository to your system:

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Add the Docker repository to APT sources:

add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu focal stable"

This will also update our package database with the Docker packages from the newly added repo.

Make sure you are about to install from the Docker repo instead of the default Ubuntu repo:

apt-cache policy docker-ce

You’ll see output like this, although the version number for Docker may be different:

Output of apt-cache policy docker-ce

docker-ce:

  Installed: (none)

  Candidate: 5:19.03.9~3-0~ubuntu-focal

  Version table:

     5:19.03.9~3-0~ubuntu-focal 500

        500 https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu focal/stable amd64 Packages

Finally, install Docker:

apt install docker-ce

Docker should now be installed, the daemon started, and the process enabled to start on boot. Check x

systemctl status docker

The output should be similar to the following, showing that the service is active and running:

Output

● docker.service - Docker Application Container Engine

     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)

     Active: active (running) since Tue 2020-05-19 17:00:41 UTC; 17s ago

TriggeredBy: ● docker.socket

       Docs: https://docs.docker.com

   Main PID: 24321 (dockerd)

      Tasks: 8

     Memory: 46.4M

     CGroup: /system.slice/docker.service

             └─24321 /usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock

Step 2 — Installing AND RUNNING THE NODE

Full credit for this package goes to Xen Community member bok11. He created this docker package so big thanks to him.

Run

docker pull bok11/x1-validator  

This pulls down the docker package

mkdir x1

Run

docker run -v x1:/home/opera bok11/x1-validator

You will now see the X1 validator start up and begin to sync. Again, this took 18 hours for me so just let it do what it needs to.

You can check the status of the service with systemctl status x1-validator.service and stop it with systemctl stop x1-validator.services. To see the logs, run journalctl -u x1-validator.service -f

Here I list some useful docker commands. Please always do your research before using any of them if you are inexperienced with Docker. Google is a great resource. As of Docker 19, the complete list of available subcommands includes:

Output

  attach      Attach local standard input, output, and error streams to a running container

  build       Build an image from a Dockerfile

  commit      Create a new image from a container's changes

  cp          Copy files/folders between a container and the local filesystem

  create      Create a new container

  diff        Inspect changes to files or directories on a container's filesystem

  events      Get real time events from the server

  exec        Run a command in a running container

  export      Export a container's filesystem as a tar archive

  history     Show the history of an image

  images      List images

  import      Import the contents from a tarball to create a filesystem image

  info        Display system-wide information

  inspect     Return low-level information on Docker objects

  kill        Kill one or more running containers

  load        Load an image from a tar archive or STDIN

  login       Log in to a Docker registry

  logout      Log out from a Docker registry

  logs        Fetch the logs of a container

  pause       Pause all processes within one or more containers

  port        List port mappings or a specific mapping for the container

  ps          List containers

  pull        Pull an image or a repository from a registry

  push        Push an image or a repository to a registry

  rename      Rename a container

  restart     Restart one or more containers

  rm          Remove one or more containers

  rmi         Remove one or more images

  run         Run a command in a new container

  save        Save one or more images to a tar archive (streamed to STDOUT by default)

  search      Search the Docker Hub for images

  start       Start one or more stopped containers

  stats       Display a live stream of container(s) resource usage statistics

  stop        Stop one or more running containers

  tag         Create a tag TARGET_IMAGE that refers to SOURCE_IMAGE

  top         Display the running processes of a container

  unpause     Unpause all processes within one or more containers

  update      Update configuration of one or more containers

  version     Show the Docker version information

  wait        Block until one or more containers stop, then print their exit codes

Additional notes

You will need to set the number of files Opera can use. This can be done with the command

 ulimit -n 200000

You can check the number of open files with the command

ls -ltr /proc/12298/fd | wc -l 

where the 12298 is the PID of my Opera instance. You will need to change that for the PID of your particular instance. To get your PID run the command top and you will get something similar to below where you can see where I got my PID from.

swap space

It is also useful and advisable to have a swap file activated. A swap file allows Linux to simulate the disk space as RAM. When your system starts running out of RAM, it uses the swap space to and swaps some content of the RAM on to the disk space. This frees up the RAM to serve more important processes. When the RAM is free again, it swaps back the data from the disk. I have 16gb swap space set but you could just as easily use 32gb.

Check swap space in Linux

Before you go and start adding swap space, it would be a good idea to check whether you have swap space already available in your system.

free -h

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available

Mem:           7.5G        4.1G        267M        971M        3.1G        2.2G

Swap:           16G          0B         16G

If you don’t have a swap space on your system, it should show something like this:

free -h

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available

Mem:           7.5G        4.1G        267M        971M        3.1G        2.2G

Swap:           0B          0B         0B

The swapon command won’t show any output.

Create swap file on Linux

First thing first, create a file with the size of swap space you want. Let’s say that I want to add 16 GB of swap space to my system. Use the fallocate command to create a file of size 16 GB.

sudo fallocate -l 16G /swapfile

It is recommended to allow only root to read and write to the swap file. You’ll even see warning like “insecure permissions 0644, 0600 suggested” when you try to use this file for swap area.

sudo chmod 600 /swapfile

Do note that the name of the swap file could be anything. If you need multiple swap spaces, you can give it any appropriate name like swap_file_1, swap_file_2 etc. It’s just a file with a predefined size.

Your need to tell the Linux system that this file will be used as swap space. You can do that with mkswap tool.

sudo mkswap /swapfile

Now your system knows that the file swapfile can be used as swap space. But it is not done yet. You need to enable the swap file so that your system can start using this file as swap.

sudo swapon /swapfile

Now if you check the swap space, you should see that your Linux system recognizes and uses it as the swap area:

swapon –show

NAME       TYPE   SIZE USED PRIO

/swapfile  file 16G   0B   -2

Whatever you have done so far is temporary. Reboot your system and all the changes will disappear.

You can make the changes permanent by adding the newly created swap file to /etc/fstab file.

It’s always a good idea to make a backup before you make any changes to the /etc/fstab file.

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.back

Now you can add the following line to the end of /etc/fstab file:

/swapfile none swap sw 0 0

You can do it manually using a command line text editor or you just use the following command:

echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Now you have everything in place. Your swap file will be used even after you reboot your Linux system.