Cardano pool not making transactions help

[Helios113]

Hello to everyone,

I made a ada pool about a month ago. I quickly realised that running a pool is way past my skill level and after a week I decided to retire my pool.

The issue is that short after making the pool, I started getting error messages and I think my pool no longer functions. I wanted to remove my pledge and then retire the pool. However, when I send a transaction, even thou it says that everything is ok, I never receive the funds and the my pledge doesn’t change. So I am afraid to retire my pool, because then I might not be able to get my deposit back.

So I decided to finally ask for help.

The pool name is [GAP] Glasgow Ada Pool. I set it up following coin cashew’s guide. pool.vet says that my metadata.json hash doesn’t match up but when I update it and wait for two epochs the changes don’t take effect.

Can anyone help me troubleshoot the issues, so that I can retire my pool.

Thanks to all of you in advance!

[Alexd1985]

I can help you if u want
First how is the pool status in glive…before to perform transactions the node should be 100% synced… and also u will need at least 1.29.0 version

[Helios113]

I just update to version 1.30.1.

The status of both the producer and relay is starting in glive. Once in a while, the relay displays this error message:
Could Not Connect to a Running Instance, 3 Failed Attempts in a Row!

Also when I check the relay’s 6000 port it says it is closed.

[Alexd1985]

Ok, if u will want to retire the pool u don’t need the relay anymore

Focus on Producer

Go insdide the mainnet-topology file, delete the relay and add:

{
  "Producers": [
    {
      "addr": "relays-new.cardano-mainnet.iohk.io",
      "port": 3001,
      "valency": 2
    }
  ]
}

save the file and restart the node

Type top and check the CPU… should be ~100% (it means it’s working to start)

Then check glive

[Helios113]

The CPU is at 100%, glive gives syncing now.

Just now it it gave this error again: Could Not Connect to a Running Instance, 3 Failed Attempts in a Row!

Also, maybe an important piece of info. The instance which is running the producer has 8GB of ram. Can that cause issues?

[Alexd1985]

Ooo… yes, can u upgrade to 12G or try to set SWAP file (min 4G)?

[Helios113]

How do I set the SWAP file?
And I think I can upgrade to 12GB, but I can’t do that tonight.

Can we continue here tomorrow?

[Alexd1985]

Of course, anytime

For swap you can find infos on google/youtube

Create a Linux Swap File

[Helios113]

Cheers, thanks for that!

If I make the swap file do I still need to upgrade to 12GB?

[Alexd1985]

If u are lucky and the Producer will start, then I think NO; also u can go inside configuration file and set TraceMempool to false, save the file and restart the node (this way the node should use only 4G of RAM)

Keep me updated

[Helios113]

Hello,

I created a 12GB swap file and I also set TraceMempool to false. After 7 minutes I am still stuck at starting. This is a screenshot of glive:

And this is what top shows:

[fermat]

Hi,

Perhaps another route could be to purge your relay node and reinstall that with the node version 1.29.0. Then construct the transaction on the block producer node with your keys and send it to chain via your relay node.

And on the topic of retiring the pool and those transactions, be aware of the hazzard of losing the 500 ada deposit if you retire the stake address before the end of the epoch at wich the stakepool retires. For more info on that see

Where do unclaimed rewards go to?

Hi there, A time a go I did a stupid thing, I went cold turkey on mainnet without prior knowledge (should have used testnet). I registered a staking pool and not long after that retired it. Both these actions where done using online guides without full grasp of the theory (ow silly me). The situation is that when I retired the stakepool (pool1j3660wj8q4ur8lhfm9ja9grc88eqfkd57gxsqsrwheefk3pv4rr) I also unregistered the staking address of the pool owner. When retiring a pool the initial deposit o…

I did this and lost the 500 ada So dont be like me hehe. Good luck!

[Helios113]

Hello, I actually read your post a while back because I was worried the same will happen to me.

How can I retire the pool without de-registering the address? There is probably a tutorial somewhere, but I feel they tend to skip over details like this.

[fermat]

Then I’m glad that I posted that, don’t want other to make the same mistake. Ill sketch how I think it works, ill go a bit in depth on the inner working. First let me ask you which tutorial did you use? Some tutorials use CNTools which is rather safe. But then again if you don’t know what you are doing things can go wrong quickly.

A stakepool is nothing but two cardano node that are interconnected such that the block producer can only talk to the relay (for safety reasons). This with the addition that there are onchain certificates that register your pool. Each pool has at least 3 important key pairs

• Pool owner keys (there can be more owners but atleast 1)
• The pool owners staking keys (don’t de-register this one before the pool is)
• The stakepool key

Al three keys are in pairs, a verification key and a signing key. Now to deregister a STAKEPOOL one needs to make a certificate of deregistration of the pool. Then after the epoch the 500 ada send to the pool owners staking address which is controlled by the pool owners staking keys. What I did, I deregisterd the pool via the certificate and in the same epoch deregisterd the pool ownerst staking address. Then when the epoch turned there was no place for the 500 ada to go so it went to treasury (this is how all lost ada are handled).

Hope this helps

[Helios113]

Ok update,

After a while, the node is syncing. The ram was issue this whole time. This is how glive looks now:

It says that my kes have expired but I made them 22 days ago, so not sure what that means.
Should I renew them?
Also I updated to 1.30.1, but my air gap still uses 1.29, should I copy the new cli to the air gap or is it ok to use the old version to sign the txs?

[fermat]

Great that your node is syncing again! You can construct your transactions on the air gaped node and sent them via the current syncing node (once it is fully synced ofcourse). It should be no problem that the air gap node uses 1.29 for the construction of the transactions.

[Helios113]

I used the coin cashew guide.

So when I retire the pool, I shouldn’t do anything else until I get the deposit back and then deregister the address? Is there a tutorial on how to do this? Are these steps accurate? Guide: How to build a Cardano Stake Pool - CoinCashew

[fermat]

The section 19 that you linked seems good. This only construct the said de-registration certificate and sends is to the chain. As the end of the section states, after the epoch turn the 500 ada is send to stake.addr (which is contorolled by the key pair I justed called the pool owner staking keys).

[Helios113]

Cool, so once I am synced I will try to make a small transaction as a test and then retire. I currently took down my relay and I am using the producer directly. Can I keep doing that, or should I try to get the relay to work before retiring?

[fermat]

And in addition, to withdraw the rewards from the staking address you can use section 18.11 of that same guide.

Correct, once your a synced you can send the transaction via the block producer, this because you added the IOHK node “relays-new.cardano-mainnet.iohk” to your topology file. So the transaction will propagate trough the network via that node No need to setup the relay.