Best Practice

Keep Track of Syncing Speed

t=2021-05-13T17:17:17+0800 lvl=info msg="Imported new chain segment"             blocks=11  txs=3701  mgas=482.461  elapsed=8.075s    mgasps=59.744  number=7,355,800 hash=0x84e085b1cd5b1ad4f9a954e2f660704c8375a80f04326395536eedf83363942f age=12h38m32s dirty="583.73 MiB"
t=2021-05-13T17:17:20+0800 lvl=info msg="Deep froze chain segment"               blocks=117 elapsed=263.497ms number=7,265,806 hash=0x7602f6b960b4092d39ff49781c64404a047e2c78bc166f071ee8714020c39b2e
t=2021-05-13T17:17:25+0800 lvl=info msg="Imported new chain segment"             blocks=17  txs=5025  mgas=740.885  elapsed=8.125s    mgasps=91.177  number=7,355,817 hash=0xde7a2a76ff7b38414acf3b360bb427d2d0b7dd1f8fe2afe2ffd59d64b237a81b age=12h37m49s dirty="594.65 MiB"
t=2021-05-13T17:17:33+0800 lvl=info msg="Imported new chain segment"             blocks=18  txs=5108  mgas=748.016  elapsed=8.354s    mgasps=89.535  number=7,355,835 hash=0x757c476f9fe30fc6ef001fb4a03fa991843cf3ed271f21cfc01a9bba5e5eff98 age=12h37m3s  dirty="604.39 MiB"
t=2021-05-13T17:17:42+0800 lvl=info msg="Imported new chain segment"             blocks=18  txs=5612  mgas=799.778  elapsed=8.260s    mgasps=96.815  number=7,355,853 hash=0x73e87742ef4405ffefec987fc4b8b19e69c54b8f914c27ea69a502fae4d735e0 age=12h36m18s dirty="613.03 MiB"

Your syncing speed is mgasps. The value should be around 100. If you are syncing slowly, please check the speed of your disk.

Use Chaindata Snapshot

Please download the chain data snapshot and extract to your home folder to speed up

Store your BNB with a hardware wallet

The most valuable assets of a validator are two keys: one for signing transactions and another for signing blocks

Securing your fullnode RPC from hackers

Please do not expose your RPC endpoints to public network.

Account Private keys

To protect your BNB, do not share your 24 words with anyone. The only person who should ever need to know them is you. In short, HSMs are affordable, performant and portable pieces of hardware that help to securely generate, store and manage your private keys. Malware attacks and remote extraction of private keys are much more difficult when an HSM is configured properly.

Software Vulnerabilities

To protect your BNB, you should only download software directly from official sources, and make sure that you're always using the latest, most secure version

Running Server as a Daemon

It is important to keep geth running at all times. There are several ways to achieve this, and the simplest solution we recommend is to register geth as a systemd service so that it will automatically get started upon system reboots and other events.

Set up a backup node

  • Run validator node in archive mode
  • Shut down nodes gracefully
  • Active monitoring with tools

Steps to run a backup node

  1. Install the latest version of geth
  2. Sync to the latest height using fast sync mode. You can either download the latest snapshot or start fast sync once your node is fully synced
  3. Shut down your node gracefully kill -HUP $(pgrep geth)
  4. Restart your node with --gcmode archive

Why node will be offline for a while after restart? or What will happen if client been force killed

After running (synchronized) for a long period of time and being abruptly terminated, only archived nodes are expected to quickly re-synchronize upon restart.

Steps to reproduce:

  • Run the node synchronized for a period of time.
  • Abruptly kill the node (kill -9 or system crash).
  • Restart the node, observe where it resynchronizes from block height 1 hour ago.

Reasons

If Geth crashes (or is not shut down gracefully), the recent state held in memory is lost and needs to be regenerated. It takes Geth a long time to restore the states.

The root reason is that geth does flush the state trie periodically. The period is defined as trieTimeout in config.toml.

How to upgrade a backup node to become a validator node?

You can stop mining new blocks by sending commands in geth console

Connect to your validator node with geth attach ipc:path/to/geth.ipc

miner.stop()

Then, let backup node resume validating , 

miner.start()