We finished our transition to the Mainnet Candidate in the morning of 7/13/2020.
Our findings so far:
Our transition went smoothly, although we had to adopt the default mainnet_candidate-config.json file to our needs.
Updating the topology over all our nodes is still a cumbersome manual process. The automatic topology updater is not helping here for us.
Adoption of the public available scripts to the Mainnet Candidate. These scripts was suffering from the changes made by IOHK in cardano-cli 1.15.1. Currently there are a mixture of options –shelley-testnet 42 –mainnet –cardano-mode that should converge in only one option, before Shelley Mainnet goes live.
Some creators of the public available scripts are still adapting to these changes. In order to get their scripts working without errors.
Unfortunately we were encountering problems with the KES metrics which are not working in 1.15.1. Our dasboard stays blank for the current KES period and the KES expiry period. The cardano-node api calls give an empty result back on the following metrics: cardano_node_Forge_metrics_currentKESPeriod_int, cardano_node_Forge_metrics_operationalCertificateExpiryKESPeriod_int and cardano_node_Forge_metrics_remainingKESPeriods_int
Hopefully this will be fixed soon. Since, we don’t want our operational certificate to expire, without getting any notification about it. We need to know the remainingKESPeriods on basis of which we can alert.
Registration of our pools worked out well for us since Martin from ATADA did an update his pool operator scripts. He was very quick to adapt to the changes made in cardano-cli of 1.15.1.
The lastest Mainnet Candidate scripts can be found here.
After this work we played ATM in the Cardano Shelley & Stakepool best practice telegram group, by giving out tokens. With these tokens pool operators can register their stake pool on the Mainnet Candidate chain.
In a few hours, we managed to help over a hundred pools. Just by transferring the initial funding to their payment addresses. In order to register a stake pool on the Mainnet Candidate chain.
Why did we gave these tokens out manually?
• No faucet is yet available for the Mainnet Candidate. The purpose of this chain is to use your own ITN tokens. From the snapshot taken at the end of 2019.
• To avoid abuse of the faucet like we encountered in Shelley Testnet Phase 2.
• Give everyone equal rights to register their stake pool on the Mainnet Candidate.
Tomorrow we’ll have more. Goodnight!