Introducing VRITS

Operator & Owner:
My name is Theo van Raaij and I’m the operator and owner of VRITS. I’m 54 years old, live in Holland and am a computer hobbyist since 1980. In 1984 I started working as a programmer in mnemonics which they later called assembly language. In 1992 I started my first successful business in IT with the mission to sell computers for a reasonable price. Because of a divorce I was forced to shutdown my business 16 months later. In 1995 I returned to the IT industry as a system administrator. Since then I had many different roles in many fields of IT expertise. My current title is Senior IT Datacenter Consultant and I maintain all equipment within the datacenters (including Azure) of my employer. I have been following Charles Hoskinson since his speech for Ted back in 2014 and started investing in ADA in early 2019.

Pool details:
Ticker: VRITS
Pledge: 280K ADA
Fixed fee: 340 ADA
Variable fee: 0,75%

Website: http://vrits.nl
Contact: stakepool@vrits.nl
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/JneXTjn
Telegram: https://t.me/ThaiTheo
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/760881408000350/

Pool ID: f137e6702bb09babf88cc93c93dffd64379d5d43bdbe3ce870ff5c54

Location: Netherlands, Schiphol-Rijk
Location: France, Paris

Pool infrastructure:
All servers are virtual machines. The total infrastructure consists of 1 VPN server, 1 Management & Monitoring server, 2 Cardano relays, 2 Cardano block-producers (1 in standby mode). The Cardano nodes have 4GB of RAM each, 2 CPU’s (Intel Skylake 3Ghz) and 128GB NVMe SSD. The other servers are running on the same kind of CPU’s and the same kind of storage, however their memory, number of CPU’s and amount of storage have been scaled according to their functionality. The servers can be easily upgraded to a higher plan providing more CPU’s and memory if necessary. All servers are running on Centos 8 and have been hardened according to best practices. All servers are protected by their built-in firewalls (Operating System level), protected by firewalls (Cloud provider level). The Cardano relays are furthermore protected by a DDOS mitigation service. The Cardano relays allows incoming traffic from the internet on the port where the Cardano-node service running. The VPN server allows traffic from a limited amount of static IP’s after I have changed the firewall rule set (Just In Time principle). The Management & Monitoring server allows traffic from a limited amount of static IP’s to provide Live views on how the environment is doing. All other traffic is running over a private network. Only the keys that are necessary are kept on the Cardano block-producing nodes. The Management & Monitoring server sends me alerts by email and SMS. The VPN server tests the Management & Monitoring server on availability and sends alerts by email and SMS. A Talariax Entera at my home office analyzes the syslogs which are continuously being send to him and alerts me by SMS and email if necessary. The Cloud provider that I have chosen maintains a large network worldwide with several 10Gbps fiber internet connections per datacenter divided over 2 or more Telco’s.

Pool redundancy:
Snapshots of the Cardano nodes are being made every 4 hours whilst the 2 latest snapshots are being kept. Each Cardano node syncs her block-chain every minute to additional SSD-based Block storage. Snapshots are taken every month of all other servers. Disaster recovery has been tested a couple of times and gave me a RTO (recovery time objective) of 1 hour and a RPO (recovery point objective) of 5 minutes.
The relay nodes and block producing nodes are spread over 2 different datacenters within Europe. This should give the stakepool an availability of 99,95%.

Operator experience:
I have been installing, configuring, maintaining, administering, documenting and troubleshooting of:
servers, firewalls, switches, IDS, SIEM, SAN, Virtual Infrastructures, Virtual Machines, VPNs, connectivity, Operating Systems, Active Directories, Mail servers and Proxies for over 30 years Furthermore I have trained several other IT professionals, all of this you can check on my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theovanraaij/. Designing high available systems and keeping them up and running is what I do for a living.

Why delegate to VRITS?
You should delegate your ADA to VRITS if you want a stakepool that is up and running almost 24/7 and maintained by an IT professional. VRITS is here as a long term solution to keep the Cardano network running whilst securing your investment in ADA and mine against a reasonable fee. I don’t provide public monitoring solutions yet, but will work on that on a later date. You are kept informed through the website, Facebook and Discord group of any updates regarding VRITS.

Wow, great information here! Thanks for sharing and good luck with your pool!

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