Node Maintenance

Backup
Maintaining a backup node always sync for a collator is vital to make sure you always produce blocks and avoid being slashed. We highly recommend to have it on a different location and hosted on a different provider.
The collator session keys are stored into /var/lib/astar/chains/${NETWORK}/keystore.
You may need to install rsync package depending on your distro
sudo apt-get install rsync
Make sure you save the content of this directory in  a backup directory on your local machine:
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rsync --rsync-path="sudo rsync" -r ${MAIN_SERVER_IP}:/var/lib/astar/chains/${NETWORK}/keystore .
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In case of an incident on the main collator
On the main collator server, stop and disable the collator service, and delete session keys:
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sudo systemctl stop ${NETWORK}.service
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sudo systemctl disable ${NETWORK}.service
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sudo rm -R /var/lib/astar/chains/${NETWORK}/keystore/*
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On your local machine, from your backup directory, copy the keys into the keystore folder of the backup server:
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rsync --rsync-path="sudo rsync" -r ./keystore ${BACKUP_SERVER_IP}:/var/lib/astar/chains/${NETWORK}
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On the backup collator server, update permission of the keystore folder and restart the collator service:
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sudo chown -R astar:astar /var/lib/astar/
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sudo systemctl restart ${NETWORK}.service
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Get node logs
To get the last 100 lines from the node logs, use the following command:
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journalctl -fu astar-collator -n100
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Upgrade node
When an upgrade is necessary, node operators are be notified in our Discord and Element group.
Download the latest release from Github:
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wget $(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/AstarNetwork/Astar/releases/latest | grep "tag_name" | awk '{print "https://github.com/PlasmNetwork/Plasm/releases/download/" substr($2, 2, length($2)-3) "/astar-collator-" substr($2, 3, length($2)-4) "-ubuntu-x86_64.tar.gz"}')
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tar -xvf astar-collator*.tar.gz
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Move the new release binary and restart the service:
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sudo mv ./astar-collator /usr/local/bin
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sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/astar-collator
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sudo systemctl restart ${NETWORK}.service
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Purge node
Do never purge chain data of an active collator, it not produce blocks anymore during all the sync process and harm the chain block production rate.
Instead, switch to your backup node and purge only once the backup is actively collating.
To start a node from scratch without any chain data, just wipe the chain data directory:
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sudo systemctl stop ${NETWORK}.service
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sudo rm -R /var/lib/astar/chains/${NETWORK}/db/*
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sudo systemctl start ${NETWORK}.service
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Relay Chain snapshot
If you run your collator it not only needs to sync the mainnet chain but also the complete relay chain from Kusama / Polkadot. This can take up to 3-4 days. You can also use a snapshot of Kusama/Polkadot. You can download this here and will save a lot of time.
NOTE: know what you are doing when using snapshots!

Launch and Active Services

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Archive Node

Last modified 1mo ago

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