Week Two: W/E 5th July 2019
Well, we’re two weeks into the rollout program and it has been another busy one for the Shelley testnet. While we’ve been moving things forward on the coding and content side, the community has been hard at work too. We’ve seen even more downloads of Jormungandr from the repo, more people getting their own self node running, and some great community-generated content this week.
Hat tip as ever to our Cardano Ambassadors and to everyone offering support over on the stake pool Best Practice Telegram. With over 2,000 members and loads of engaged users, this is a great resource for anyone interested in contributing to the program. Thanks to you all.
Each week, this is where we’ll provide a high-level summary of key achievements and what’s been going on. Remember, for the very latest technical updates you can follow all the commits and pull requests in the community GitHub. Meanwhile, here’s a rollup of what’s been happening.
- On Thursday, we released a new Jormungandr build, v 0.2.4
- Homebrew tap updated with latest v 0.2.4 release
- Jormungandr-nix updated with latest v 0.2.4 release
- Snappy package update on snap store to v 0.2.4 release
- Default faucets/stake pools in jormungandr-nix switched from 1 to 3
- This release has fixed a few of the bugs the community had identified as well as making further planned improvements
Support updates
We’ve had 1 further issue raised this week. So to date, we’ve had 17 issues raised. 9 have been closed already. Of those remaining, 2 are bugs currently under investigation by the dev team. 6 issues are documentation related and are being worked on.
- There were at least 4 tickets coming from the community (E.g. https://github.com/input-output-hk/shelley-testnet/issues/25) related to some delegation issues in Genesis-Praos mode. As a result, we updated the bootstrap and create-account-and-delegate scripts in order to wait for transactions to be included into blocks before checking the delegation results (both for BFT and Genesis-Praos modes). https://github.com/input-output-hk/jormungandr/pull/595
- The content team has also made updates to the testnet website for the Windows Chocolatey package installer which we’ll be dropping after the weekend.
Community content
This week, we’ve continued to see lots of great activity in the community. There has been a host of videos created to help other people set up their self-nodes across a variety of platforms. Here are a few we’ve spotted. 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 and on the testnet website.
-
Here’s eVoPDX on Reddit with his video guide on how to set up a self node on Linux
-
Last week we featured EllieFromTheLastOfUs and his Windows set up video. He’s also created this guide for all you MacOS and Linux users out there
-
David Arayan has set up a project running on Docker using an Alpine Linux image. He has open sourced the code under the MIT license for anyone to have a play around with Check out his post to find out more
-
Last but not least, have we found our youngest tester yet? ScofflawPirate challenged his 13-year-old to build a self node on his Windows 10 desktop using an Oracle Virtual Box VM, Ubuntu 18.04 and our snappy package. Check it out here
Of course, if you know of anyone younger than 13 who has got their own self node setup running, let us know!
Next week (July 8th-12th)
- More bug fixes
- The content team will continue working on updates for staking scenarios and explanations about block creation, as well as more formal support documentation
- Chocolatey package available for Windows
Thanks
The Stakepool Testing team