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Running a Betanet Node

While the Lamina1 Betanet is no longer supported by the Lamina1 Core Team, there are a number of reasons why developers might want to run a node for the Lamina1 Betanet:

  • To learn more about the Lamina1 and Avalanche networks and how their back-end infrastructure works
  • The more nodes in the network, generally the more decentralized the platform becomes. By operating a node, you’re contributing to this decentralization and helping secure the Lamina1 platform.
  • If you’re developing applications on Lamina1, you generally need to get or submit data to one of the blockchains. While you can decide to trust a public node’s API, most developers would prefer to run and trust their own node while avoiding potential public node congestion.

To run and monitor your node, you will have to use the Betanet Staking Wallet, a fork of the same wallet used by Avalanche when we launched our initial fork of the network at Testnet in January 2023. Please note that this wallet is currently unsupported by the LAMINA1 Core Team and has a number of known bugs.

One of our goals for the launch of the Lamina1 Mainnet was to streamline the user experience of tools like this — but with a little effort, the Betanet Staking Wallet is pretty easy to understand.

  1. Start by visiting https://staking.lamina1.com in your browser.
  2. Once you’re at the landing page select WALLET. When the wallet opens, select CREATE NEW WALLET and then GENERATE KEY PHRASE.
  3. You should now be looking at a grid of 24 words that make up your recovery key phrase. This is essentially the master password for your wallet, and anyone who gets a hold of it has full access to anything in it. While it’s a pain, one of the safest ways to record this information is with a paper and pen and store it in a safe or other secure location. Electronic devices are popular targets for people to attack looking for crypto keys so taking a photo or copy & pasting the information may be risky. Also note that if you lose this information, it may be impossible to get back into your wallet. 
  4. Once you’ve written down the words and their corresponding numbers, click the checkbox and ACCESS WALLET.
  5. The app will test that you recorded the recovery phrase by asking for a few of the words. Select them to proceed. If successful you’ll see a green check mark, click ACCESS WALLET.
  6. Congratulations, you’ve created your Betanet Staking Wallet! From here you’ll be able to see your Betanet balance and assets (if you have any) on the X, P, and C chains. At this stage, we recommend you save your private key so that you don’t have to use your recovery phrase every time you want to access it.

For more information about how to secure, backup and export your Betanet Staking Wallet to an external wallet like Metamask, see the Staking Wallet Tips, Tricks & Safety section below.

Next, you will need to install and run a Lamina1 read-only node and connect it to the Lamina1 Betanet.

Requirements​

Computer Hardware & OS:

LAMINA1 is based on Avalanche, which is an incredibly lightweight protocol, so nodes can run on commodity hardware. Note that as network usage increases, hardware requirements may change.

  • CPU: Equivalent of 4 AWS vCPU
  • RAM: 8 GiB
  • Storage: 100 GiB
  • OS: Ubuntu 22.04

Networking​

To run successfully, LAMINA1 needs to accept connections from the Internet on the network port 9671. Before you proceed with the installation, you need to determine the networking environment your node will run in.

Running on a Home Connection

You will need to set up inbound port forwarding of port 9671 from the internet to the computer the node is installed on.

As there are too many models and router configurations, we cannot provide instructions on what exactly to do, but there are online guides to be found (like this, or this), and your service provider support might help too.

DANGER: Please note that a fully connected LAMINA1 node maintains and communicates over a couple of thousand live TCP connections. For some low-powered and older home routers that might be too much to handle. If that is the case, you may experience lagging on other computers connected to the same router, nodes getting benched, failing to sync and similar issues.

Set Up Your Node​

Let’s install the GoLang implementation of a LAMINA1 node and connect to the LAMINA1 primary network.

Download & Install

The node binary for Ubuntu is now delivered via the apt package manager. To install the node, run the following as root:

echo "deb [trusted=yes arch=amd64] https://snapshotter.lamina1.global/ubuntu jammy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/lamina1.list && 
apt update && apt install lamina1-betanet

Start Node and Connect to LAMINA1​

The Linux node binary is automatically registered as a system service during the installation process above, named lamina1-node.betanet.service. The service is also automatically started, and the systemctl utility can be used. The highlighted lines below indicate the node is running properly:

$ sudo systemctl status lamina1-node.betanet
● lamina1-node.betanet.service - Lamina1
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/lamina1-node.betanet.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Tue 2023-04-18 17:38:36 UTC; 21s ago
   Main PID: 2355 (lamina1.node)
      Tasks: 8 (limit: 1141)
     Memory: 335.8M
        CPU: 11.275s
     CGroup: /system.slice/lamina1-node.betanet.service
Apr 18 17:38:36 ip-172-31-83-52 systemd[1]: Started Lamina1.

Bootstrapping Process​

When the node starts, it has to bootstrap (catch up with the rest of the network). You will see logs about bootstrapping. Until the bootstrapping process completes, the node is in an unusable state. You can check the status of the bootstrapping process by running the check-bootstrap.sh script included with the node binary. The desired output is shown below, with isBootstrapped showing true:

$ lamina1.check-bootstrap.sh 
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"isBootstrapped":true},"id":1}
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"isBootstrapped":true},"id":1}
{"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"isBootstrapped":true},"id":1}

**NOTE: **If you make other API calls to a chain that is not done bootstrapping, it will return “API call rejected” because chain is not done bootstrapping. If you are still experiencing issues please contact us on Discord.

What Next?​​

Your Lamina1 node will perform consensus on its own, but it is not yet a validator on the network. This means that the rest of the network will not query your node when sampling the network during consensus and you are not earning any L1b. For more information on this, see the Validating for the Lamina1 Betanet section below.