Wanted to log some notes on how things are progressing on Phase 4 and future plans
As listed in Phase 4 I have fully launched a 2 public relay Testnet pool. During the recent 1.31.0 cardano-node upgrade I was able to roll out the code compiled on one of the testnet public relays confirm everything for a day then compile it on the second relay. From there I swapped out the Block Producing (BP) node on testnet and then once blocks were successfully minted, rolled 1.31.0 into production on the mainnet relays and then BP. I also run Ubuntu patching the same way with Testnet relays being my QA before doing anything on mainnet.
I still have one more working trip up to the datacenter to finish the configuration and testing on High Availability (HA). Although I have two firewalls setup in HA so the environment will continue to run if one firewall fails, The internet connection is still single threaded. I have two LACP blended ISP lines coming in and plan on configuring that on each of the firewalls so I can have a line failure redundancy. I will go through some DR testing as well, simulating hardware failures and ensuring uptime and redundancy.
Phase 5 progress is slowly moving. I am building up my Twitter following and past 100 followers a week ago and getting close to 150. 250 is my next target, but long term I would want to be over 1k. I have launched an interview campaign called “Under the hood: interviews with SPO’s” and created a Medium publication called Cardano SPOs (https://medium.com/cardano-spos).
I didn’t get into this space thinking it was going to be a quick dollar, but rather a long-term play as I feel there is value in the crypto space in the next 5-10 years and want some position in there. This is just as much about learning crypto and Cardano as it is having a Stake Pool. So far the 8 months I have spent in the space has been informative and enjoyable.