Does location matter?

Staking & Delegation Operate a Stake Pool
#1

Finally have my RADAR stake pool up and running. Been a Cardano investor for over a year now, and was truly interested in being a part of decentralization. Have my own bare metal setup to avoid commercial servers. Brushed up on my coding and between finishing stake pool school and the help of you members, have really enjoyed the process of gaining the understanding to actually be helping the cause.
As I consider actually trying to promote my efforts, I realized via a relay topology map that I’m the only one within hundreds of miles running a pool. Seems like a way to promote what I’m doing as helpful, but does unique location really have much to do with our efforts? Are my remote eastern seaboard relays really somehow improving the network compared to if I was running this in a big city? And if so, is it providing some likely improved transaction speed to the protocol? Or is it just a nice redundancy that everything is not in Atlanta or DC or New York?
I know there’s are 2000+ of us pool operators, and as ‘unique’ as I feel, I’d only want to emphasize honest truths. I really just believe in the project and am exited to do my part, but know I have to do at least some bare-bones promotion to have the inertia to mint blocks.

-Sully

www.radarstakepool.org

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#2

Hi there, welcome to the pool operators pool :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I would say location matters for network resilience and security. When all servers would hypothetically be in new york and new yorks internet goes down then the whole netwerk goes down. It’s better to have a global coverage in this sense.

I can’t think of any other advantages but others might. Good luck!

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#3

Welcome! That’s amazing. Like @ADA4Good mentioned. It is good to have relays in different regions or areas in the case a network goes down. I have my relays on AWS in both US-East and US-West to have some coverage in case a region goes down (not likely but possible).

It is quite expensive to host the minimum specs of 2vCPU and 8GB RAM on a cloud service in comparison to running bare metal. I would recommend setting up more relay points at maybe other family house if you are looking to have more relay spread out and want to save some money.

I messed up having everything hosted on AWS. I have a Pi Relay but I can’t connect it to my BP node since I have it sitting on a private subnet. It would cost too much to try to add the local Pi Node so I’m waiting to expand to other regions on AWS instead.

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#4

Why?
U will need a portforward; that’s all!
Your wan IP address is also private?
Cheers,

#5

Hi Alex,

Sorry for late response. The block producer is sitting on a private subnet on AWS so it has a local IPv4 (I.e., 10.0.0.X). I don’t know how I’d be able to connect the local relay node to the AWS VPC (where the private subnet sits) unless I have a site to site vpn or direct connect (both are services on AWS).

Is it a requirement to have both In and Out peer with my local pi Relay from BP (Setting up BP topology to include local Relay + Relay topology to include BP) or does 1 In / 0 out is okay too?

Thanks,
David

#6

I don’t know how I’d be able to connect the local relay node to the AWS VPC (where the private subnet sits) unless I have a site to site vpn or direct connect (both are services on AWS).

The services provider can’t offer u a public IPv4 for the server? How u access the server from a remote location?

Is it a requirement to have both In and Out peer with my local pi Relay from BP (Setting up BP topology to include local Relay + Relay topology to include BP) or does 1 In / 0 out is okay too?

In ur BP u should have the Relay as IN and OUT peer connection

Cheers,

#7

I have my BP sitting on a private subnet and I have to pay to set up this thing called VPC peering to have my Relay on different regions to talk to my BP node.

I use a bastion host (machine solely for purpose of SSHing into BP). The bastion is on a machine on the AWS public subnet. If I set up my BP in a public subnet, then AWS gives a public IP but I rather keep it secure by setting it up in a public. :open_mouth:

That’s why I am not able to connect my local relay node. I have to pay for additional charges to connect to the AWS network from local.

I could at most have BP peer IN for local Pi relay but kind of stuck on an affordable way to connect OUT for BP with that local node :confused: