Managing
The Makefile provide different commands to help you operate your THORNode. There are two types of make commands, READ and WRITE.
Read commands simply read your node state and doesn't commit any transactions.
To get information about your node on how to connect to services or its IP, run the command below. You will also get your node address and the vault address where you will need to send your bond.
make status
Opens a shell into your thor-daemon deployment: From within that shell you have access to the thorcli command.
make shell
Display stream of logs of thor-daemon deployment:
make logs
This will print your node mnemonic (phrase). Use this to ever rescue your node funds if something goes wrong. Note: This phrase should only be used "in anger". This is your node "hot vault", also referred to as its yggdrasil vault, which allows the network to delegate swaps for faster execution. You will be slashed significantly if any funds are moved from this vault, since it is monitored by the THORChain network. Your bond is held at ransom in order to prevent you from stealing funds from this vault. Your bond will always be more valuable than funds on this vault, so you have no economic reason to touch these funds.
make mnemonic
A keystore file that secures your private keys is also stored on the THORNode. The password that is used to decrypt it can be printed by the following command
make password
Write commands actually build and write transactions into the underlying statechain. They cost RUNE from your bond, currently 1 RUNE, but you can check this on the /constants endpoint "CLICOSTINRUNE". This will post state in the chain which will be now updated globally. The RUNE fee is to prevent DOS attacks.
Send a set-node-keys to your node, which will set your node keys automatically for you by retrieving them directly from the thor-daemon deployment.
make set-node-keys
Send a set-ip-address to your node, which will set your node ip address automatically for you by retrieving the load balancer deployed directly.
make set-ip-address
In order to update your THORNode to a new version, you will need to update the docker tag image used in your deployments. Depending on your choice of deployment this can be done differently.
For Kubernetes deployments, you can edit the deployments of the different services you want to update using the commands below.
To update your thor-daemon, thor-api and bifrost deployment images to version 0.2.0:
kubectl set image deployment/thor-daemon thor-daemon=registry.gitlab.com/thorchain/thornode:mainnet-0.2.0kubectl set image deployment/thor-api thor-api=registry.gitlab.com/thorchain/thornode:mainnet-0.2.0kubectl set image deployment/bifrost bifrost=registry.gitlab.com/thorchain/thornode:mainnet-0.2.0
To update your `midgard` deployment image to version 0.2.0
kubectl set image deployment/midgard midgard=registry.gitlab.com/thorchain/midgard:mainnet-0.2.0
You can then follow the deployments restarting status either by checking your Kubernetes dashboard or using the CLI command below:
kubectl get deployment/thor-daemon
Once the deployments are all in the ready state again, you need to broadcast to the network that you are running a new version using the command below:
make set-version
Note, all of these should already be installed from make tools. However you can install them separately useing the DEPLOY tabs below.
To access the tools, navigate to the ACCESS tabs below.
All of these commands are to be run from node-launcher
It is recommended to deploy an Elastic Search / Logstash / Filebeat / Kibana to redirect all logs within an elasticsearch database and available through the UI Kibana.
For a reminder on Kubernetes commands, please visit this page.
You can deploy the log management automatically using the command below:
make install-logs
This command will deploy the elastic-operator chart. It can take a while to deploy all the services, usually up to 5 minutes depending on resources running your kubernetes cluster.
You can check the services being deployed in your kubernetes namespace elastic-system.
You can automate this task to access Kibana from your local workstation:
make kibana
Open https://localhost:5601 in your browser. Your browser will show a warning because the self-signed certificate configured by default is not verified by a third party certificate authority and not trusted by your browser. You can temporarily acknowledge the warning for the purposes of this quick start but it is highly recommended that you configure valid certificates for any production deployments.
Login as the elastic user. The password should have been displayed in the previous command (make kibana).
To manually access Kibana follow these instructions: A ClusterIP Service is automatically created for Kibana:
kubectl -n elastic-system get service elasticsearch-kb-http
Use kubectl port-forward to access Kibana from your local workstation:
kubectl -n elastic-system port-forward service/elasticsearch-kb-http 5601
Login as the elastic user. The password can be obtained with the following command:
kubectl -n elastic-system get secret elasticsearch-es-elastic-user -o=jsonpath='{.data.elastic}' | base64 --decode; echo
To access the logs of the THORNode services running, you can either use directly Kubernetes commands to get logs from different deployments, for example, to get the logs of the service thor-daemon:
kubectl logs -f deploy/thor-daemon -n thornode
From there, you will need to create a new index to get the logs coming from Filebeat. You can search using the regular “Discover” app in Kibana to go through your logs using a filter to get only specific services or keywords, etc.
You can follow a more in-depth introduction to Kibana here.
It is also recommended to deploy a Prometheus stack to monitor your cluster and your running services.
You can deploy the metrics management automatically using the command below:
make install-metrics
This command will deploy the prometheus chart. It can take a while to deploy all the services, usually up to 5 minutes depending on resources running your kubernetes cluster.
You can check the services being deployed in your kubernetes namespace prometheus-system.
We have created a make command to automate this task to access Grafana from your local workstation:
make grafana
Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser.
Login as the admin user. The default password should have been displayed in the previous command (make grafana).
We have created a make command to automate this task to access Prometheus from your local workstation:
make prometheus
Open http://localhost:9090 in your browser.
As part of the tools command deployment, you also have deployed a Prometheus stack in addition to the Elasticsearch in your Kubernetes cluster. All CPU, memory, disk space, and THORNode / THORChain custom metrics are automatically being sent to the Prometheus database backend deployed in your cluster.
You should have available different dashboards to see the metrics across your cluster by nodes, deployments, etc, and also a specific THORNode / THORChain dashboard to see the THORChain status, with current block height, how many validators are currently active and other chain related information.
Click the 🔍 SEARCH ICON to find the list of dashboards
For a more in-depth introduction of Grafana, please follow the documentation here.
You can also deploy the Kubernetes dashboard to monitor your cluster resources.
make install-dashboard
This command will deploy the Kubernetes dashboard chart. It can take a while to deploy all the services, usually up to 5 minutes depending on resources running your kubernetes cluster.
We have created a make command to automate this task to access the Dashboard from your local workstation:
make dashboard
Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser.
View your kubernetes dashboard by running the following:
make dashboard
You should backup your THORNode in case of failures. By default, if you are using the Kubernetes deployments solution, all the the deployments are automatically backed up by persistent volume disks. Depending on your provider, the volumes are usually available in the provider administration UI, for example in AWS, you can find those volumes in your regular console, in the region you chose to deploy your Kubernetes cluster.
Again by default, with Kubernetes, by using persistent volumes used in the default configuration, you are already protected again restart failures at container level, or node failures. As long as you don’t specifically use the destroy commands from the Makefile or manually delete your Kubernetes deployments, your volumes will NOT be deleted at any time.
It is still recommended, as any project, to have different backups on top of those volumes to make sure you can recover in admin error deleting those volumes or other Kubernetes resources that would imply deleting those volumes.
For AWS, you can easily setup in your console to have snapshots of your cluster volumes be taken every day. For other provider there can be different ways to achieve this as well either manually or automatically.
It is up to the node operator to setup those extra backups of the core volumes to be able to recover in any kind of failures or human errors.
Some volumes would be more critical than others, for example Midgard deployment are also by default backed up by persistent volumes, so it can recover in case of container restarts, failures or node failures and the deployment being automatically scheduled to a different node, but if you were to delete the Midgard volume, it would reconstruct its data from your THORNode API and events from scratch. For that specific service having extra backups might not be critical, at the time of the writing of that document, Midgard implementation might change in the future.
The following are attack vectors:
If anyone accesses your AWS credentials, they can log in and steal your funds
If anyone accesses the device you used to log into kubernetes, they can log in and steal your funds
If anyone accesses your hardware device used to bond, they can sign a LEAVE transaction and steal your bond once it is returned
RUNNING A NODE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS
DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK, YOU CAN LOSE A SIGNIFICANT QUANTITY OF FUNDS IF AN ERROR IS MADE
THORNODE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS - YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR USING IT
