A KLEVERCHAIN TESTNET REFLECTION – PHASE 1
On February 15, 2022, Klever officially announced the #WarOfNodes and less than a week later on February 21 at 2pm UTC, Klever_IO launched the Klever Blockchain Validators Program. This program contains a total of 4 phases where each phase has specific tasks that validators must perform to show how well they are prepared before entering the Klever Mainnet. Each task is worth points and depending on how far the validators gets determines how many points they receive. In fact, me writing this article up is one of those tasks. 🙂 So as you read this experience, I hope that you learn the ins and outs are of being a Klever Blockchain Validator and maybe someday start a pool up of your own. If you would rather just skip reading this and see how I setup my validator node I don’t blame you 🙂 Click here to view the KleverChain Validator node setup page.
Day 1 kicked off with a bang! The Klever documentation for node setup was very well organized and easy to follow. There were a few commands in the setup doc that didn’t work as arguments were out of order. That wasn’t a big deal as the correct format needed was below the example. That goes to show that copy/paste doesn’t always work as you need to pay attention and read all directions. One command has us freeze our KLV that would later on be delegated to our own node as the self-stake requirement. Remember how I just said paying attention to all directions? Yeah I didn’t on this page! We needed to keep the Tx ID of that Freeze command to be able to get the Bucket_ID that was required for the next command. Now this would not have been a problem had I been able to see the TX on the Klever Testnet Explorer. The Testnet Explorer wasn’t showing my Txs and later found out that it was due to my home network. On my network, transactions didn’t show. Off my network, they showed fine. Next day or so that eventually fixed itself. Maik and fbsobreia (Klever management Discord handle… no idea who it really is) from the Klever team were very active with all of us going through the steps and were very quick to respond with useful information to clear up some questions. So by the end of day 1 I had my node up and running but no self-stake yet.
Day 2 I was able to get my correct Bucket_ID from the Klever team through Discord. Huge shoutout to all those who have been involved in the process. Many other Testnet participants had started receiving their delegation for 10M tKLV from the team to allow their validator nodes to become active on the network to start producing blocks. That was a good sign to see. Due to my missing Bucket_ID on Day 1 I did not receive that deletion yet but will in due time.
Day 3 my Klever node received the 10m tKLV delegation which activated the node to be eligible for block production. We were selected later in the day and successfully proposed and minted 123 blocks. Overnight we were selected again. At the time of this writing we are currently elected again and sitting at 1136 blocks produced and counting.
Day 4 was a huge success. In the Discord, Maik provided the API to pull the node metrics. I went ahead and setup monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana and was able to setup a reliable dashboard to monitor the node itself and the overall health of the server. I will keep building on it with new dashboards as needed and also cleaning up what I have. The next step for me will be to setup alerts to stay aware of potential issues that may arise..
Conclusion: Phase 1 of #Klever #WarOfNodes has been great. We have 1 more month to go with the Testnet and so I expect to learn a LOT more from the team, community, and hands-on projects. I hope all others participating are having great success as well. If you made it through to the end, CONGRATS! Sorry if it was dull haha!