Our mission is to enable everyone to deploy and run resilient, secure and performant protocol infrastructure.

In the world of software, you usually need to decide between using a managed SaaS or running everything yourself in a self-hosted environment, which means handling all the operations to keep things running smoothly. At kuutamo we believe that there is a better way. A hybrid cloud first way. A next generation cloud. Our packaged services can be deployed anywhere, to any cloud, bare metal, and to our users own infrastructure. We aim to provide all the updates, monitoring and ops tooling needed, along with world-class SRE for protocol and infrastructure support services.

NEAR Staking Node using kneard from kuutamo

Prerequisites

Server/node: Any Linux OS
Workstation/development machine: Any Linux OS

These are two different machines. The kneard manager, kneard-mgr will run on your workstation. It will talk over SSH to your server/node. During install the server/node will be wiped and a fresh kuutamo near distribution will be installed onto it.

Server Setup

You will need a server with any Linux OS installed. You will need SSH root access with a key.

We have validated:

OVH - Advance 1 Gen 2, 64GB RAM, 2 x 960GB NVMe, with Ubuntu

Before installing Ubuntu on the server, add your workstation SSH key.

Latitude - c3.medium.x86, with Ubuntu

Before installing Ubuntu on the server, add your workstation SSH key.

Workstation Setup

Install the Nix package manager, if you don't already have it. https://zero-to-nix.com/start/install is an excellent resource.
Enable nix command and flakes features:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/nix/ && printf 'experimental-features = nix-command flakes' >> ~/.config/nix/nix.conf

Trust pre-built binaries (optional):

$ printf 'trusted-substituters = https://cache.garnix.io https://cache.nixos.org/\ntrusted-public-keys = cache.garnix.io:CTFPyKSLcx5RMJKfLo5EEPUObbA78b0YQ2DTCJXqr9g= cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY=' | sudo tee -a /etc/nix/nix.conf && sudo systemctl restart nix-daemon

Alias kneard-mgr and use nix run command:

$ printf 'alias kneard-mgr="nix run --refresh github:kuutamolabs/near-staking-knd --"' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc

Test the kneard-mgr command:

$ kneard-mgr --help

Answer ‘y’ to the four questions asked. After some downloading you should see the help output.

Subcommand to run

Usage: kneard-mgr [OPTIONS] <COMMAND>

Commands:
  generate-config  Generate NixOS configuration
  install          Install Validator on a given machine. This will remove all data of the current system!
  dry-update       Upload update to host and show which actions would be performed on an update
  update           Update validator
  rollback         Rollback validator
  proxy            Proxy remote rpc to local
  restart          Schedule a restart in a window where no blocks or chunks are expected to be produced by the validator
  ssh              SSH into a host
  system-info           Get system info from a host
  help             Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
      --config <CONFIG>  configuration file to load [env: KUUTAMO_CONFIG=] [default: kneard.toml]
      --yes              skip interactive dialogs by assuming the answer is yes
  -h, --help             Print help
  -V, --version          Print version

New Solo node install

New pool deployments can be done via the webapp UI Get Started flow at near.kuutamo.app - (GitHub)
Download encrypted kuutamo app key file, config file (kneard.toml) and an optional monitoring access token (kuutamo-monitoring.token) via Manage button in UI: (here are example). The example file is generated by kneard-mgr generate-example.
Create a new directory and put these files in it.

[you@workstation:~/my-near-validator-1/]$ ls
my-pool.pool.devnet.zip  kneard.toml

In this directory run:

$ kneard-mgr install

After this install finishes you can connect to the node.

$ kneard-mgr ssh

Follow the logs

[root@validator-00:~]$ journalctl -u kuutamod.service

Node upgrades

In the folder:

$ kneard-mgr update

Monitoring Settings

Although monitoring is not mandatory for deploying a node, it is highly recommended. By setting up monitoring, you can easily track metrics and identify potential issues.

To set up monitoring for your node, you can use the Kuutamo monitoring token. The process is simple - just obtain the token and configure your node to send metrics to the Kuutamo monitor. By default, the token file name is kuutamo-monitoring.token, and the default monitoring server is https://mimir.monitoring-00-cluster.kuutamo.computer.

If you have multiple hosts in kneard.toml and want to use different tokens for each host, you can set the kuutamo_monitoring_token_file field for each host to point to the desired token file.

Alternatively, if you prefer to self-monitor the node, you can customize your monitor server by setting the self_monitoring_url, self_monitoring_username, and self_monitoring_password fields of the host. The self_monitoring_url should implement Prometheus's Remote Write API.

Further Information

Install guide Google slides

Do0k13 / near-staking-knd