Node Maintenance
Backup
Maintaining a backup node that is in sync with a collator is vital to ensuring continuous and uninterrupted block production, and avoiding the possibility of being slashed. We highly recommend locating a backup node in a different physical location, with a different provider.
Note: The collator session keys are stored in /var/lib/astar/chains/{NETWORK}/keystore.
You may need to install the rsync package depending on your distro (using sudo apt-get install rsync or similar)
Ensure you create a backup of the keystore folder on your local machine using the following command:
rsync --rsync-path="sudo rsync" -r {MAIN_SERVER_IP}:/var/lib/astar/chains/{NETWORK}/keystore .
In case of an incident on the main collator
On the backup collator server, stop the collator service and remove keys:
sudo systemctl stop {NETWORK}.service
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/astar/chains/{NETWORK}/keystore/*
On your local machine, from your backup directory, copy the keys into the keystore folder of the backup server:
rsync --rsync-path="sudo rsync" -r ./keystore {BACKUP_SERVER_IP}:/var/lib/astar/chains/{NETWORK}
On the backup collator server, update permission of the astar directory and restart the collator service:
sudo chown -R astar:astar /var/lib/astar/
sudo systemctl start {NETWORK}.service
Get node logs
To get the last 100 lines from the node logs, use the following command:
journalctl -fu astar-collator -n100
Upgrade node
When a node upgrade is necessary, node operators are notified with instructions in the Astar Dev Announcement Telegram and Astar Discord. Join and follow these channels to receive news about node updates and node upgrades.
Download the latest release from Github:
wget $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/AstarNetwork/Astar/releases/latest | grep "tag_name" | awk '{print "https://github.com/AstarNetwork/Astar/releases/download/" substr($2, 2, length($2)-3) "/astar-collator-v" substr($2, 3, length($2)-4) "-ubuntu-x86_64.tar.gz"}')
tar -xvf astar-collator*.tar.gz
Move the new release binary and restart the service:
sudo mv ./astar-collator /usr/local/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/astar-collator
sudo systemctl restart {NETWORK}.service
Purge node
Never purge the chain data on an active collator or it will not produce blocks during the sync process, and therefore reduce the block production rate of the chain. Instead, switch to your backup node and only purge the chain data after it is actively collating.
To start a node from scratch without any existing chain data, simply wipe the chain data directory:
sudo systemctl stop {NETWORK}.service
sudo rm -R /var/lib/astar/chains/{NETWORK}/db/*
sudo systemctl start {NETWORK}.service
Snapshot
Please refer to snapshot page(/docs/build/nodes/snapshots).