Should Relay Nodes be present in their topology file?

Staking & Delegation Operate a Stake Pool
1

Hello everyone. I’ve been following Cardano since in 2017 and just recently I’ve decided to setup my own pool. I was part of the ITN as a node operator, but I didn’t have much time to dedicate myself to the node :frowning:
I’m trying to setup a BP node and 2 relay nodes. Reading the documentation, no one seem to state how the topology should be setup. Should your relays be present in both relay’s topology.json file?

image
Source: https://docs.cardano.org/projects/cardano-node/en/latest/stake-pool-operations/node_keys.html?highlight=firewall#generate-your-stake-pool-keys

Looking at the image above, the relays are connected to the BP node but not to each other. Almost every tutorial/documentation online states that you should have the relays connected to each other.

Image: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*-h41UjjpvatujJNHn5X96A.png

When I connect my relays together (like the image from medium[.]com) they start to sync, but after a few minutes, one of the relays will freeze and not sync. If I disconnect them (like the image from cardano’s documentation), the same thing happens after a few hours. I’ve even deleted the DB and this issue still persists.

This is my setup.

BP:

  • Version: 1.23.0 [eed25054]
  • Port: 6000
  • Topology: relay1:6001, relay2:6002

Relay1:

  • Version: 1.23.0 [eed25054]
  • Port: 6001
  • Topology: bp:6000, <15 other relays>

Relay2:

  • Version: 1.23.0 [eed25054]
  • Port: 6002
  • Topology: bp:6000, <15 other relays>

Have you guys experienced something similar? Should my relays connect to each other and the BP node? Any help would be appreciated :slight_smile:

PS: I’m using digital ocean and I have 3 servers under the same VPC.

1 Like
2

I keep relays connected without no issues

3

It will work having them connected, but you should not have your relays connected to each other. You should not have your relays connected to the same peers as each other either. You want your BP node to be able to receive new information and propagate it’s blocks as fast as possible to as many nodes as possible. Your BP already talks to both relays, so having the talk to each other is redundant and a waste of a peer.

2 Likes
6

You are right!

7

Thanks for the clarification :slight_smile: