How to set up a Cardano staking pool for 1.29.0 (CNTools)

Dear Cardano community,

After 5 wonderful and hardworking months as a SPO, I’ve compiled this cheatsheet to setup Cardano nodes (Relays and BPs) using cntools. This document also includes commands needed to successfully configure version 1.29.0 for the Alonzo hard fork (special thanks to @Alexd1985 [CHRTY]). Aside from my personal scripts to enhance the security in my servers, I’ve used the excellent content provided by staking pool operators of our community as source of inspiration to give you all the commands you need to get started. Please consider delegating some ADA to all contributors if possible (Tickers listed in the resource section).

A PDF version is also available on my GitHub repository for downloads.

Hope you find this useful and don’t hesitate to contact me if you need any help!

Best regards,
Vito Melchionna
SPO of GranADA_Staking_Pool [GRANA]
granada.staking.pool@gmail.com
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Thankyou!

I will be setting this up soon!

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links are not taking you to parts of the guide.

Many thanks for the remark! I used a wrong url on all sections. The links should work perfectly now and I also added some navigation to improve the reading experience.

Ideally I would do snapshots with a cloud setup. I messed with rclone and got it to connect to my Google drive but just managed to copy my cnode folder. I am wondering how do I make remote snapshots per week that can restore everything.

Do you know how to do that?

Even though cloud setups for backups and snapshots might seem very attractive and convenient, this approach could pontentialy create a couple of security weaknesses in your servers that could be exploited by a hacker. For instance, when you backup your BP, your pledge wallet, pool keys, SSH, firewall and Cardano ports configurations will be copied as well. Therefore, sending this data to a cloud service through the internet (even if it’s encrypted) it’s not the safest solution because your are opening a door for attacks. Specially, because if a hacker manages to get access to your cloud service’s account, your pledge and your pool will be in great danger. The best way to go is to use hard drives that can be directly pluged into your servers. In this way, this sensitive data never leaves the computer. If you are using a VPS on a data center, just use the built-in snapshot feature that these companies normaly offer. If you take a look at the cheatsheet that I shared, you could create a snapshot of an entire physical volume in a private server using LVM or TimeShift. With these commands, you can also setup daily, weekly and monthly snapshots of your servers.

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