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Run a Validator on the Gitopia

What is a Validator?​

Validators are responsible for committing new blocks to the blockchain through voting. A validator's stake is slashed if they become unavailable or sign blocks at the same height. Please read about Sentry Node Architecture to protect your node from DDOS attacks and to ensure high-availability.

You may want to skip the next section if you have already set up a full-node.

Hardware Requirements​

Minimum recommended hardware requirements for running the gitopia validator is:

  • 4 CPU Cores
  • 32GB RAM
  • 1TB of storage

Create Your Validator​

If you haven't installed the gitopiad binary, follow the instructions here.

First, generate a gitopia wallet and fund it with some TLORE.

gitopiad keys add <validator_key_name>

- name: validator_key_name
  type: local
  address: gitopia1avp3j2etqyp75shvffd96360nql2jjyj30s84a
  pubkey: '{"@type":"/cosmos.crypto.secp256k1.PubKey","key":"AiDYcHzGU1LsgMbG8ZDCnWZVyuuzF7pz9nKvRdJ+puwO"}'
  mnemonic: ""


**Important** write this mnemonic phrase in a safe place.
It is the only way to recover your account if you ever forget your password.

<mnemonic>

Share this address to receive some TLORE tokens.

danger

Do not share your mnemonic with anyone and keep it safe.

We recommend that you use a KMS (Key Management System) for securing your keys. You can read more about it here.

You can find your validator pubkey by running:

gitopiad tendermint show-validator

To create your validator, just use the following command:

caution

Don't use more ulore than you have!

gitopiad tx staking create-validator \
  --amount=1000000ulore \
  --pubkey=$(gitopiad tendermint show-validator) \
  --moniker="choose a moniker" \
  --chain-id=<chain_id> \
  --commission-rate="0.10" \
  --commission-max-rate="0.20" \
  --commission-max-change-rate="0.01" \
  --min-self-delegation="1000000" \
  --gas="auto" \
  --gas-prices="0.001ulore" \
  --from=<validator_key_name>
tip

When specifying commission parameters, the commission-max-change-rate is used to measure % point change over the commission-rate. E.g. 1% to 2% is a 100% rate increase, but only 1 percentage point.

tip

Min-self-delegation is a stritly positive integer that represents the minimum amount of self-delegated voting power your validator must always have. A min-self-delegation of 1000000 means your validator will never have a self-delegation lower than 1tlore

info

The current chain id is "gitopia".

You can confirm that you are in the validator set by using a third party explorer.

Edit Validator Description​

You can edit your validator's public description. This info is to identify your validator, and will be relied on by delegators to decide which validators to stake to. Make sure to provide input for every flag below. If a flag is not included in the command the field will default to empty (--moniker defaults to the machine name) if the field has never been set or remain the same if it has been set in the past.

The <key_name> specifies which validator you are editing. If you choose to not include certain flags, remember that the --from flag must be included to identify the validator to update.

The --identity can be used as to verify identity with systems like Keybase or UPort. When using with Keybase --identity should be populated with a 16-digit string that is generated with a keybase.io account. It's a cryptographically secure method of verifying your identity across multiple online networks. The Keybase API allows us to retrieve your Keybase avatar. This is how you can add a logo to your validator profile.

gitopiad tx staking edit-validator
  --moniker="choose a moniker" \
  --website="https://gitopia.com" \
  --identity=6A0D65E29A4CBC8B \
  --details="Code Collaboration for Web3" \
  --chain-id=<chain_id> \
  --gas="auto" \
  --gas-prices="0.001ulore" \
  --from=<key_name> \
  --commission-rate="0.10"

Note: The commission-rate value must adhere to the following invariants:

  • Must be between 0 and the validator's commission-max-rate
  • Must not exceed the validator's commission-max-change-rate which is maximum % point change rate per day. In other words, a validator can only change its commission once per day and within commission-max-change-rate bounds.

View Validator Description​

View the validator's information with this command:

gitopiad query staking validator <account_gitopia>

Track Validator Signing Information​

In order to keep track of a validator's signatures in the past you can do so by using the signing-info command:

gitopiad query slashing signing-info <validator-pubkey>\
  --chain-id=<chain_id>

Unjail Validator​

When a validator is "jailed" for downtime, you must submit an Unjail transaction from the operator account in order to be able to get block proposer rewards again (depends on the zone fee distribution).

gitopiad tx slashing unjail \
    --from=<key_name> \
    --chain-id=<chain_id>

Confirm Your Validator is Running​

Your validator is active if the following command returns anything:

gitopiad query tendermint-validator-set | grep "$(gitopiad tendermint show-address)"

You should now see your validator in one of the gitopia Hub explorers. You are looking for the bech32 encoded address in the ~/.gitopia/config/priv_validator.json file.

note

To be in the validator set, you need to have more total voting power than the 100th validator.

Halting Your Validator​

When attempting to perform routine maintenance or planning for an upcoming coordinated upgrade, it can be useful to have your validator systematically and gracefully halt. You can achieve this by either setting the halt-height to the height at which you want your node to shutdown or by passing the --halt-height flag to gitopiad. The node will shutdown with a zero exit code at that given height after committing the block.

Common Problems​

Problem #1: My validator has voting_power: 0​

Your validator has become jailed. Validators get jailed, i.e. get removed from the active validator set, if they do not vote on 500 of the last 10000 blocks, or if they double sign.

If you got jailed for downtime, you can get your voting power back to your validator. First, if gitopiad is not running, start it up again:

gitopiad start

Wait for your full node to catch up to the latest block. Then, you can unjail your validator

Lastly, check your validator again to see if your voting power is back.

gitopiad status

You may notice that your voting power is less than it used to be. That's because you got slashed for downtime!

Problem #2: My gitopiad crashes because of too many open files​

The default number of files Linux can open (per-process) is 1024. gitopiad is known to open more than 1024 files. This causes the process to crash. A quick fix is to run ulimit -n 4096 (increase the number of open files allowed) and then restart the process with gitopiad start. If you are using systemd or another process manager to launch gitopiad this may require some configuration at that level. A sample systemd file to fix this issue is below:

# /etc/systemd/system/gitopiad.service
[Unit]
Description=gitopia Node
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=ubuntu
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu
ExecStart=/home/ubuntu/go/bin/gitopiad start
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=3
LimitNOFILE=4096

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target