Week 15: W/E 4th October 2019
Each week, this is where we’ll share a high-level summary of key achievements and what’s been going on in the program. Remember, for the very latest technical updates you can follow all the commits and pull requests in the community GitHub.
If you are not already part of the conversation, you’ll find a hive of activity over at the stake pool Best Practice Telegram. With over 2,200 members and loads of engaged users, this is a great resource for anyone interested in contributing to the program.
This channel is also an important source of information for us as we continue to refine the Jormungandr software, how we deliver it and the documentation we provide to your use of it. We’ll soon be adding polling and surveys to the mix – we’re looking forward to getting your feedback on how you are getting on and how we can help. So please keep an eye out for those on the Telegram channel over the coming weeks. Continued thanks to everyone from the community, especially our amazing Ambassadors.
What’s Up
Well, we’re now just over a week into phase 2 of our testnet rollout, with the networked testnet up and running. And we’ve seen lots of new releases already as we tackle bugs and improve usability and stability. We’ve sorted out some of the low-hanging fruit. Now, we are starting to tackle the more complex issues that have been reported to us, for example, node desynchronisation.
This may happen for multiple reasons. The more obvious one would be related to the node entering into an expected/undefined state. We are now working on preventing this. Another reason may be related to how the network operate at the moment. Here, we have set some initial parameters on the network that we might need to tweak a little.
Although we’re still in the early stages, we encourage you to join us. If you haven’t connected your node yet, please go ahead and join in with the testing! For instructions on how to get set up and configured, head here.
Support
With such early code, we expected plenty of bugs and issues. Thanks for helping sniff them all out and keep them coming – you’re giving our QA team plenty to do!
- New issues this week - 49
- Closed issues this week - 15
- Backlog - 33
Previously, we’ve been capturing your bug reports and providing ‘How-to’ documentation on our input-output-hk/shelley-testnet GitHub repository. From next week, to further streamline how we use the information you provide, we’ll be moving all testnet support requests and how-to documentation to the main IOHK Support Portal. So keep those reports coming!
Documentation & Content
The content team spent time this week updating documentation as new functionality was added to the network and usability bugs were fixed. The team are also preparing to deliver some video tutorials to help users with certain tasks. As much as its early days for the network, its early days for the documentation which will evolve as more functionality is rolled out. We’ll continue to improve and refine our content over time, so please do keep your feedback coming on how we can do that and what you would like to see included.
All high-level information and instructional content for using the Networked testnet is hosted here. There are also lots of embedded navigation links, where relevant, to the technical GitHub repository, information about the peer discovery protocol, as well as other associated resources and references to help you as you build out your network.
- We have created multiple scripts for Windows and Linux - https://github.com/input-output-hk/shelley-testnet/tree/master/scripts + tutorials - https://github.com/input-output-hk/shelley-testnet/wiki
- Devops has created Nix based scripts that are in the path when you start a nix-shell
Installer Packages
- New helper scripts in nix and reconfigured to automatically connect to the networked testnet.
- https://snapcraft.io/jormungandrNew snappy package here:
- Run
jormungandr.run -h
for detailed instructions. It supports running as a passive or staking node - New chocolatey package here: https://chocolatey.org/packages/jormungandr
Community Content
Please note, these community resources are shared in good faith for you to use at your own discretion. You’ll always find ‘official’ documentation and instructions within IOHK & Cardano channels.
- Our Community member Kyleo made a great guide on how to build and start a node, create an account and receive ada, a pool and how to delegate to a pool on a Linux Ubuntu build.
- @Stakenuts (Marek Mahut) on Twitter is even showing that he is creating blocks from a moving train. Safe travels and block creation!
- The Cardano Effect’s Rick McCracken is live streaming on YouTube and showing where his node is connected to. I wonder if he can see any strange nodes moving fast in straight lines?
Last but not least, you might want to check out this little film we released earlier today captured on the very first day of the networked testnet. We started with few laptops and some RockPis and got a handful of nodes gossiping together in London. It’s great to see the rest of the world joining the conversation.
That’s it for now!
Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team