Whitelisting, Uptime Requirements, Tech Specs, and Node App Connections

It has been a tremendous week for Skycoin. Not only have we officially launched the Skywire testnet, the rapid growth of the network is a testament to the incredible enthusiasm and amazing support from all of our Skyfleet members.

In less than two short weeks, there are now 4361 nodes across the globe participating in building a new decentralized internet owned & operated by the people.

The number of nodes is continually climbing every day and we could not have done this without all of you. Meanwhile, we would like to answer some of the commonly asked questions you have so far regarding the nitty-gritty of the testnet and the whitelist.

The Whitelist:

All official Skyminers will be whitelisted

The whitelist is an ongoing process. If you are in the process of building a DIY miner, please do so ASAP for you to get the best spot in the queue.

Whitelist participants will be contacted via the email you submitted in your application. The emails will be sent next week with a small delay between official Skyminers and DIY miners.

All submitted applications will receive responses so please check your emails regularly.

Updating personal information in the application will be possible a week after you receive the emails.

If your public keys changed because you encountered issues, please submit another application with your updated keys. Your application is identified by your submitted email address in your earliest application. You will remain in your spot even if you submit another application with a new set of public keys.

Uptime Requirements:

Keep your nodes up and running if you want to be eligible for rewards. You will need a 75% uptime in June or your whitelist spot will be forfeited.

Currently, it is not possible for users to see their own uptime statistics. This feature might be introduced later on.

If your pub keys change, be sure to update the Whitelist document as soon as possible with the same email address you originally submitted. The uptime of all your submitted public keys will be added together and will result in your monthly uptime.

Make sure to check regularly if your nodes are live and restart them if necessary. Restarting the miner will not change your public keys!

Technical Specifics:

Please save your submitted public keys . In case of a reflash, you don’t have to submit a new set of public keys. You can simply update the file on the Pis’ with the public keys submitted in your first application. The file that stores your public key is called keys.json. It is located in .skywire/node/keys.json (in the official images the .skywire folder is in /usr/local/.skywire/go/bin/.skywire/node/keys.json, if it’s not in there please check your home directory ~/.skywire/node/keys.json)

. In case of a reflash, you don’t have to submit a new set of public keys. You can simply update the file on the Pis’ with the public keys submitted in your first application. The file that stores your public key is called keys.json. It is located in .skywire/node/keys.json (in the official images the .skywire folder is in /usr/local/.skywire/go/bin/.skywire/node/keys.json, if it’s not in there please check your home directory ~/.skywire/node/keys.json) A few members reported that their node app’s crashed and we are aware of this issue. Until there is a fix for this you are advised to restart the node with a cronjob every 12/24h to make sure you get the demanded uptime of 75%.

Example for the official images: adding this to crontab -e “0 0,12 * * * /etc/rebuild.sh restart” would restart the node process every 12 hours at midnight and noon.

Node App Connection:

As of now the only app in the Skywire network is the node app (you can see the app key for each node in your Skywire manager). The node app currently autostarts by default. If you turn off this app, your node will no longer be useful to the network and your uptime won’t be measured. The connection to the discovery is being established by this node app, no uptime will be measure without this connection. There is a cache that will mimic live connection in the discovery so you might see your node being connected on the discovery website even though your node app is off.

There is a cache that will mimic live connection in the discovery so you might see your node being connected on the discovery website even though your node app is off. An on/off switch for the node app is currently being developed and will be available as soon as possible. As part of the on/off switch comes the separation of the connection to the discovery server from the node app. This will give you the option to turn off the exit node.

Until that time, you have the option to:

Setup VPN tunneling for the traffic of the miner using a third-party VPN Restrict website access by changing the DNS service that’s used by the Skyminer to prevent people accessing illegal content Restrict website access by configuring the router with DNSMasq (OpenWRT required) Setup a proxy server on 1 of your Pi that whitelists website access and blacklists all other by default (ex: squid). You’d need to set this Pi as the only default gateway for the other nodes.

What’s Next:

Once again, we would like to give all our early adopters the most sincere appreciation for your patience and hard work. There is still a lot of work ahead of us. Stay tuned for updates on Skyminer rewards, where we go from here, and what’s next for Skywire! Together we will realize our vision of creating a decentralized internet owned and operated entirely by the people.

For more Skywire related technical support, please visit our Skywire Telegram channel and the Skywire section of our Skywug forum.

Onward and upward, Skyfleet!