Agoric Validator Setup

Brief summary

Agoric was founded in 2018 with the ambition to enable developers to rapidly deploy dapps and DeFi markets on-chain using familiar JavaScript components.

Today, we’re incredibly proud to announce that we were fortunate enough to be invited to take part in the Agoric Incentivized Testent which is limited to 150 seats. Below we’ll document how we set up our validator node and how we found the experience.

Website - https://agoric.com/

Specs used

VPS Provider - Contabo
OS - Ubuntu 18.04 64 Bit
Location - Nuremberg
Specs - 6 vCPU / 16GB RAM
Disk - 400 GB SSD

H/W path      Device       Class      Description
=================================================
                           system     Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996)
/0                         bus        Motherboard
/0/0                       memory     96KiB BIOS
/0/400                     processor  AMD EPYC 7282 16-Core Processor
/0/1000                    memory     16GiB System Memory
/0/1000/0                  memory     16GiB DIMM RAM
/0/100                     bridge     440FX - 82441FX PMC [Natoma]
/0/100/1                   bridge     82371SB PIIX3 ISA [Natoma/Triton II]
/0/100/1.1                 storage    82371SB PIIX3 IDE [Natoma/Triton II]
/0/100/1.2                 bus        82371SB PIIX3 USB [Natoma/Triton II]
/0/100/1.2/1  usb1         bus        UHCI Host Controller
/0/100/1.3                 bridge     82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI
/0/100/2                   display    SVGA II Adapter
/0/100/3                   generic    Virtio memory balloon
/0/100/3/0                 generic    Virtual I/O device
/0/100/5                   storage    Virtio SCSI
/0/100/5/0                 generic    Virtual I/O device
/0/100/12                  network    Virtio network device
/0/100/12/0   eth0         network    Ethernet interface
/0/100/1e                  bridge     QEMU PCI-PCI bridge
/0/100/1f                  bridge     QEMU PCI-PCI bridge
/0/1          scsi2        storage
/0/1/0.0.0    /dev/sda     disk       429GB QEMU HARDDISK
/0/1/0.0.0/1  /dev/sda1    volume     953MiB EXT4 volume
/0/1/0.0.0/2  /dev/sda2    volume     399GiB EXT4 volume
/1            veth8989fb1  network    Ethernet interface
/2            vethc8976b7  network    Ethernet interface
/3            veth6913cb1  network    Ethernet interface
/4            vethf15e024  network    Ethernet interface
/5            veth9afdaaf  network    Ethernet interface
/6            veth4f56a2b  network    Ethernet interface

Setting up the validator

As noted above, we decided to use Contabo VPS to host our validator node as we felt that they were very cost effective and were able to meet all the requirements to host an Agoric testnet validator. Contabo is the cheapest VPS around, our setup costs only €8.99 per month which is far cheaper than its competitors.

Setting up the validator couldn’t have been easier. The documentation provided by the Agoric team was meticulous and easy to follow, even Linux beginners wouldn’t have had too much trouble setting up their nodes. Any issues that other testnet participants faced were quickly assisted and resolved by friendly support staff in the Agoric Discord channel.

Setting up telemetry

One of the testnet tasks was to connect our validator to Prometheus analytics as well as Cosmos metrics. For this step you are expected to have a little knowledge on basic Linux administration as you have to allow specific ports past your firewall to allow Prometheus to poll your validator and to get analytics streamed.

As we were running a Ubuntu machine, we simply enabled the ports like so:

sudo ufw allow 26660
sudo ufw allow 9464
sudo ufw allow 1317

There was also another step not fully documented which was to export the following environmental variable

OTEL_EXPORTER_PROMETHEUS_PORT=9464

To tie this environmental variable to the ag-chain-cosmos service, we had to simply stick it into the service file stored in /etc/systemd/system/ag-chain-cosmos.service shown below and then restart the service.

[Unit]
Description=Agoric Cosmos daemon
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=gunnertwin
ExecStart=/home/gunnertwin/go/bin/ag-chain-cosmos start --log_level=warn
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=3
LimitNOFILE=4096
Environment="OTEL_EXPORTER_PROMETHEUS_PORT=9464"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Closing thoughts

Overall we were very happy with this onboarding stage and are extremely excited to work on upcoming stages of this incentivized testnet to assist Agoric realize their huge but realistic ambitions.

We would like to take this opportunity once again to thank Agoric for the opportunity to participate in this Incentivized testnet and hope this is the start of a long fruitful collaboration.