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Running an Archive Node

Overview​

An Archive Node is a type of Full Node that stores extended historical data of a blockchain. If you are creating a blockchain explorer or a similar application that requires access to historical data, using an Archive Node as an indexer is recommended.

Hardware requirements​

  • at least 8 cores CPU
  • at least 64 GB RAM
  • at least 4TB SSD on your server
  • 1 Gbit/s network connectivity
  • a public IP address (fixed IP address)

Installation​

In general, you need the following steps to run an Archive Node:

  1. Install ZFS
  2. Install MyTonCtrl
  3. Run a Full Node on your server and stop validator process
  4. Download and restore dump data from https://archival-dump.ton.org
  5. Run Full Node with Configuring DB specs for Archive Node

Install ZFS​

Dumps come in form of ZFS Snapshots compressed using plzip, you need to install zfs on your host and restore the dump, see Oracle Documentation for more details. Before restoring we highly recommend to enable compression on parent ZFS filesystem, this will save you a lot of space.

  1. Install zfs, create new pool (data).
  2. Enable compression: zfs set compression=lz4 data
  3. Create volume: zfs create data/ton-work

Install mytonctrl​

Download the installation script. We recommend to install the tool under your local user account, not as Root. In our example a local user account is used:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ton-blockchain/mytonctrl/master/scripts/install.sh

Run a Full Node​

Run the installation script as administrator:

sudo bash install.sh -m full

See more detailed guide in Running Full Node section.

Run an Archive Node​

  1. Before performing a restore, you must stop the validator by running the command:
systemctl stop validator.service
  1. Make a backup of config files /var/ton-work/db/config.json and /var/ton-work/db/keyring (they will be erased after the recovery process).
mv /var/ton-work /var/ton-work.bak
  1. Request user and password credentials to gain access for downloading dumps in the @TONBaseChatEn Telegram chat.
  2. Tell plzip to use as many cores as your machine allows to speed up extraction process (-n parameter). Another handy tool to use is pipe viewer utility. Here is example command to restore the dump directly from this server via curl:
wget --user <usr> --password <pwd> -c https://archival-dump.ton.org/dumps/latest.zfs.lz | pv | plzip -d | zfs recv ton-pool/db
  1. Mount zfs: zfs set mountpoint=/var/ton-work data/ton-work && zfs mount data/ton-work
  2. Restore config.json, keys and db/keyring from backup to /var/ton-work
  3. Fix permissions: chown -R validator:validator /var/ton-work
  4. Add storage settings for the node to the file /etc/systemd/system/validator.service in the ExecStart line: 
--state-ttl 315360000 --archive-ttl 315360000 --block-ttl 315360000
info

Please be patient once you start the node and observe the logs. Dumps come without DHT caches, so it will take your node some time to find other nodes and then sync with them. Depending on the age of the snapshot, your node might take from a few hours to several days to catch up with the network. This is normal.

  1. Start the validator by running the command: 
systemctl start validator.service
  1. Open mytonctrl and check the node status using the status command.

Node maintenance​

Node database requires cleansing from time to time (we advise once a week), to do so please perform following steps as root:

  1. Stop validator process (Never skip this!)
  2. Run
find /var/ton-work -name 'LOG.old*' -exec rm {} +
  1. Run
rm -r /var/ton-work/db/files/packages/temp.archive.*
  1. Start validator process

Troubleshooting and backups​

If for some reason something does not work / breaks you can always roll back to @archstate snapshot on your ZFS filesystem, this is the original state from dump.

If your Node works well then you can remove this snapshot to save storage space, but we do recommend to regularly snapshot your filesystem for rollback purposes because validator node has been known to corrupt data as well as config.json in some cases. zfsnap is a nice tool to automate snapshot rotation.

caution

Have question or problem? Ask in the TON dev chat.

See Also​