ansol

machine setting

this process works best on latitude machines
- because the initial state of the machine is cleaner
- disks are named consistently (nvme01, nvme0n2)
- ubuntu installed (preferably ubuntu 20.04, 22.04) - this won't work with centos etc since they don't use aptitude by default
- the login user being ubuntu helps (all the solana operations are done using the solana user that the ansible playbook creates)
- ubuntu should be in the sudoers list
- clean unmounted disks. if your root is on one of partitions and you pass it as an argument, this could potentially be disastrous.
all the above are satisfied by a fresh latitude launch
you can launch latitude machines here https://www.latitude.sh/pricing
recommend the s3.large.x86 - it is one of the most performant nodes for staying at tip
Specs
- 24 cores or more
- 512 GB ram if you want to use ramdisk/tmpfs and store the accounts db in RAM (we use 300 GB for ram disk). without tmpfs, the ram requirement can be significantly lower. ~256 GB
- 3-4 TB (multiple disks is ok i.e. 2x 1.9TB because the ansible playbook stripes them together)

step 1: ssh into your machine

step 2: start a screen session

screen -S sol

step 3: install ansible

sudo apt-get install ansible -y

step 4: clone the anssol repository

git clone https://github.com/dubbelosix/ansol.git

step 5: cd into the ansol folder

cd ansol

step 6: run the ansible command

this command can take between 10-20 minutes based on the specs of the machine
it takes long because it does everything necessary to start the validator (format disks, checkout the solana repo and build, download the latest snapshot etc)

time ansible-playbook runner.yaml --extra-vars='{"solana_version": "v1.13.5", "swap_mb":100000,"raw_disk_list":["/dev/nvme2n1","/dev/nvme1n1"],"setup_disks":true,"download_snapshot":true,"ramdisk_size":300}'

params explained

solana_version: which version of solana do we want to run
swap_mb: megabytes of swap. can set this to 50% of RAM or even lower. 100 GB is fine on a 512 GB RAM machine (variable value is in MB so 100000)
raw_disk_list: the list of currently unmounted disks that will be wiped, raided, formatted with ext4 and then mounted to /mnt
ramdisk_size: this is optional and only necessary if you want to use ramdisk for the validator - carves out a large portion of the RAM to store the accountsdb. On a 512 GB RAM instance, this can be set to 300 GB (variable value is in GB so 300)

step 7: after ansible finishes

switch to the solana user with

sudo su - solana

step 8: and check the validator status with

/mnt/solana/target/release/solana-validator --ledger /mnt/solana-ledger monitor
ledger monitor
Ledger location: /mnt/solana-ledger
⠉ Validator startup: SearchingForRpcService...

Initially the monitor should just show. this will last for a few minutes and is normal

⠉ Validator startup: SearchingForRpcService...

after a while, the message at the terminal should change to

⠐ 00:08:26 | Processed Slot: 156831951 | Confirmed Slot: 156831951 | Finalized Slot: 156831917 | Full Snapshot Slot: 156813730 |

If you see the message above, then everything is working fine! Gratz. you have a new RPC server and you can visit the URL at http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8899/