Raiden Service Bundle

What is this repository

This repository contains the documentation and configuration necessary to run a Raiden Service Bundle.

Current release: 2019.11.1

Overview
Requirements
- Hardware
- Software
Installation
Upgrades
Known issues
Changelog

Overview

The Raiden Network uses a federation of Matrix servers as its transport layer and a set of services for improved usability. This set of services is called the Raiden Service Bundle. To ensure reliability, availability and neutrality it is desirable that those services are being operated by multiple independent entities.

Therefore we provide this repository which allows easy setup of such a service bundle. It uses docker and docker-compose for easy installation and upgrades.

Currently only this single-server configuration is supported; in the future we may also provide configurations with services split among multiple servers.

Used software

docker
docker-compose
Synapse
Postgres
Traefik
Raiden Services (Pathfinding, Monitoring)

Structure

+-------------------+
|                   |
|   Raiden clients  |
|                   |
+---+-----------+---+
    |matrix://  |pfs://
====|===========|====
    |           |
+---v-----------v---+                       Federation to
|                 +-+-------------------->  other Raiden
|      Traefik    | |                       Matrix servers
|                 | |
+---------+-------+-+---------+
          |       |           |
+---------v-------v-+   +-----v----------------+ +---------------------+
|                   |   |                      | |                     |
|      Synapse      |   |  Raiden Pathfinding  | |  Raiden Monitoring  |
|                   |   |                      | |                     |
+---------+---------+   +-------------------+--+ +-+-------------------+
          |                                 |      |
+---------v---------+                     +-v- - - v -+
|                   |                     |
|     Postgres      |                        ETH_RPC  |
|                   |                     |
+-------------------+                     + - - - - - +

We use Traefik as a reverse proxy and also utilize its capability of automatically provisioning Let's Encrypt TLS certificates.

The Synapse server is being run in the so-called split worker configuration which increases throughput.

The database stores the message data. Since the transport layer is considered ephemeral in Raiden it is not necessary to arrange for backups of the database data.

Network

After a successful deployment the following ports will be in use:

80 - HTTP
- Redirects to HTTPS
- Let's Encrypt HTTP challenge for certificate provisioning
443 - HTTPS
- Synapse web and API client access
- Synapse Server-to-Server federation
- Raiden Pathfinding Server (on subdomain pfs.$SERVER_NAME)
- Metrics export (IP restricted, see below)

Requirements

Hardware

Minimum recommended for a production setup:

16 GiB RAM
8 Cores
50 GiB SSD

Note: The default Postgres configuration assumes 16GiB of system RAM

Software

Docker >= 17.12
docker-compose >= 1.21.0

Other

A domain (or subdomain) for exclusive use by this server

Installation

Preparation

Provision a server that meets the hardware and software requirements listed above.
Ensure a domain (or subdomain) is available

Examples:
- raidentransport.somecompany.tld
- raidentransport-somecompany.tld
- somecompany-raidentransport.tld
Configure A (and optionally AAAA) DNS records for the domain pointing to the servers IP address(es)
Configure a CNAME DNS record for *.<domain> pointing back to <domain>

Installing

Clone the current release version of this repository to a suitable location on the server:
```
git clone -b 2019.11.1 https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden-service-bundle.git
```
Copy .env.template to .env and modify the values to fit your setup (see inline comments for details)
- We would appreciate it if you allow us access to the monitoring interfaces (to do that uncomment the default values of the CIDR_ALLOW_METRICS and CIDR_ALLOW_PROXY settings).
- We also recommend that you provide your own monitoring. The setup of which is currently out of scope of this document.
Make sure, that the account, configured in KEYSTORE_FILE, has enough funding to register as a service operator.
If you haven't done so before, run ./register-service-provider.sh (it uses configuration values from .env).
Run docker-compose up -d to start all services
- The services are configured to automatically restart in case of a crash or reboot
Verify the service is up by opening the domain in a browser. You should see a page with the Matrix logo.

Troubleshooting

After starting, you can run docker-compose ps -- if any services are not in Up, Up (healthy) or Exit 0 state, you should check the respective logs for configuration errors. Note: some services might need a few minutes to become healthy.

Submit a Transport Server to the federation

Create an issue and submit the domain / URL of the newly deployed server for inclusion in the list of known servers.

Upgrades

To upgrade to a new release please check the changelog for any necessary configuration changes and then run the following commands:

git fetch origin --tags
git reset --hard <new-release-tag>
docker-compose pull
docker-compose up -d

Notes:

A 'purge' script/service will run once a day, pruning old state from rooms to save disk space, and restarting the synapse service to fetch an up-to-date whitelist of servers.

Known issues

Protection against Spam / (D)DoS attacks

There is currently only some protection against Spam and / or DDoS attacks. This will be addressed in future updates.

Known servers

The known servers the Raiden clients try to connect to are currently tracked in the *.yml files in this repository. These lists are used by Raiden clients when the --matrix-server=auto (default) option is used, for automatically selecting a transport server, based on response times. We intend to change this in the future to use a decentralized scheme (for example an on-chain registry).

Contact / Troubleshooting

To report issues or request help with the setup please open an issue or contact us via email at contact@raiden.nework.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

Licenses

The code and documentation in this repository are released under the MIT license.

This repository contains instructions to install third party software. Those are licensed as follows:

LefterisJP/raiden-service-bundle