A gorgeous Cardano stakepool
3 June 2021 – Pledge increased to 40 000 ADA
To prove that I’m here for the long term, I’ve increased my pledge from 31 500 ADA to 40 000 ADA.
This was made possible thanks to the rewards accumulated while I had the tremendous luck to have IOG delegation.
2 March 2021 – RAOOL EVOLVES!
Now that I’ve been able to create blocks thanks to IOG delegation program, I’m using my SPO rewards to boost my setup with a new server.
Building this pool with my two Raspberry Pi has been a wonderful journey. But as improvements on the Cardano protocol keep coming, these resilient yet low specs machines won’t be able to handle the coming network load by themselves only. Transitions between epochs often result in CPU/RAM overload giving a hard time for the Pi, especially the one that hosts two relays and the block-producer. It can’t stay that way.
Here comes a new challenger!
This new server will be used as the block-producer and this alone, releasing a Pi from the burden of running two relays next to the block-producer.
The specs:
> CPU: Intel i5-8259U Quad-Core 2.3GHz
> RAM: Corsair 16 GB DDR4 2400 MHz
> SSD: Corsair MP510 960GB
The Holy Trinity
With this new hardware, both Pi will act as a relay solely. On top of that, the new server will be completely hidden from the network as it will stay behind the Pi-relays, with nothing running on it but the block-producer, adding an extra layer of security.
Who is behind?
A Full-time IT Administrator for more than 6 years.
I’m fortunate to work with various environments such as IBM iSeries (AS400), Microsoft (Windows Server) and several Linux distributions, for several banks.
A Spare-time software developer for more than 8 years.
I discovered IT through software development. Since then, I automate everything I can, at work or at home.
Those two descriptions fit in one guy, me!
I’m a stakepool operator (commonly SPO) in my early 30s’, happy to be part of this amazing (r)evolution.
Why am I doing it?
My motivation is driven by two things.
The first one is Technology.
At first, setting up a RaspberryPi to play SuperNes games was pretty cool, but I wanted it to do more than that.
Then, I found its true purpose when IOHK launched the ITN. That’s when I started to dig more on how to configure this pocket-card size computer in order for him to do huge things. For it to be a node of the blockchain, and even build it by creating blocks was an amazing experience.
And I’m really excited to participate actively to this adventure that is clearly designing the future of our society. I was too young to be part of the internet revolution, I’m not going to miss this one.
The second one is about Investment.
Of course, I’m speaking about money investment like I did by buying the servers to host the relays and block-producer, VPS that act as independant firewall for each server, SSDs, etc… and hoping to be rewarded.
But I mainly refer to time investment. I love spending time learning, understanding, implementing, debugging and tweaking this stuff to get the best of it. Rest assured that I don’t do it at the expense of security. As per my professional background and regarding my personnal investment in this matter, I simply can’t afford to lose everything because I would have not put enough time educating myself on how to build this stakepool properly.
How it works
Dante
> Corsair 16 GB DDR4 2400 MHz
> Corsair MP510 960GB
> Ubuntu 20.04
> Hosts the block-producer, isolated from internet
LightSpeed
constant synchronization
with the blockchain
Ebony & Ivory
> 8Go RAM
> Samsung QVO SSD 1Tb each
> Ubuntu 20.04
> Each of them is secured behind a dedicated VPS firewall
> Each of them hosts two relays