Network Monitoring, Mining Improvements and Node Setup

Тhe æternity network is going strong! The dev team is monitoring it continuously and is working on improving the mining and developer tools.

In the last two weeks since Roma was announced, the power of the æternity network has been increasing continuously. A number of pools were announced and more are expected to appear. Windows mining is becoming supported by all of them and AMD cards will soon be able to join the AE mining effort. Monitoring the network health, the æternity development team focused heavily on improving the mining experience and network propagation times. A native æternity Windows node is coming. Work on upgrading its functionalities even further has already started.

The main goal is to enable any æternity node to become a mining pool.

The Roma Release is a significant milestone in the history of the project and allows developers from the team and community to monitor, test and improve a first-of-its-kind public blockchain network, based on Bitcoin-NG consensus, Cuckoo Cycle mining and a powerful off-chain solution — State Channels. Expect more tutorials and guides, as well as, hands-on demos of the powerful æternity technology in the coming weeks.

For now, learn more about what the dev team focused on during the last week:

Versioning & Naming Conventions

The core team will be using the following conventions on versioning and naming while working on the next releases:

All non consensus-breaking enhancements and fixes targeted at the currently active Roma release will be versioned as 1.X.X and merged into master branch of ætenity’s node git repository

All consensus-breaking changes will be merged into Minerva branch that corresponds to the next major æternity release versioned as 2.X.X

Last Week’s Focus

Last week the team was working on:

Monitoring the health of the network

Updating release infrastructure and processes for parallel handling of Roma and Minerva releases

Improving the mining module

Implementing native Windows support for the æternity node

Implementing a mining pool interface (blog post on this soon!)

Our next release 1.1.0 is planned for next week and will include:

Basic Node Setup — Open The 3015 Port

One thing we would also like to bring to the attention of node operators is the necessity of having a port open for incoming p2p connections. While monitoring the network, we have noticed that there is a number of nodes that do not expose any ports for incoming connections. When using basic setup, please check that:

epoch.yaml config does not include ‘external_port’ parameter under ‘sync’ section Port, defined in ‘port’ parameter under ‘sync’ section, is set to 3015 Your firewall or router is configured to have port 3015 open for incoming connections

We’ve updated our documentation! Click below for a detailed explanation:

aeternity/epoch

æternity: solving scalability problems by making sense of state-channels — aeternity/epochgithub.com

Making the deployment of an æternity node is a top priority for us. As one of the steps, we are planning to introduce support for UPNP and NAT-PMP in one of the next releases, which should eliminate the necessity for manually opening the port in most of the cases.

The work continues!