Renterd: The Next-Gen Sia Renter

Overview

renterd is an advanced Sia renter engineered by the Sia Foundation. Designed to cater to both casual users seeking straightforward data storage and developers requiring a robust API for building apps on Sia.

The high-level "autopilot" feature automates host scanning and ranking, contract management, and file migration. While most users will find this useful, those desiring full control can disable autopilot via a CLI flag. Importantly, autopilot is built atop the public renterd HTTP API, enabling easy customization or language porting.

renterd also ships with an embedded web UI, rather than yet another Electron app bundle. Developers and power users that don't want the UI can compile renterd without it, reducing bloat and simplifying the build process.

Current Status

renterd is in beta, featuring most functionalities from siad. It introduces a new and improved web UI, as well as the autopilot functionality, but lacks backwards compatibility with siad metadata. This means that, while renterd is already capable of serving as the backbone for new Sia applications, there is currently no way to migrate files uploaded through siad to renterd. Going forward, our immediate priority is continuously improving renterd to become more stable, scalable and performant.

Documentation

renterd and its API are documentend here.

Docker Support

renterd includes a Dockerfile which can be used for building and running renterd within a docker container. For the time being it is provided as-is without any compatibility guarantees as it will change over time and be extended with more configuration options.

Build Image

From within the root of the repo run the following command to build an image of renterd tagged renterd.

docker build -t renterd .

Run Container

Run renterd in the background as a container named renterd that exposes its API to the host system and the gateway to the world.

docker run -d --name renterd -e RENTERD_API_PASSWORD="<PASSWORD>" -e RENTERD_SEED="<SEED>" -p 127.0.0.1:9980:9980/tcp -p :9981:9981/tcp <IMAGE_ID>

Usage Guidelines

The Web UI streamlines the initial setup and configuration for newcomers. However, if manual configuration is necessary, the subsequent sections outline a step-by-step guide to achieving a functional renterd instance.

Wallet

Make sure the wallet is funded, it's a good rule of thumb to have at least twice the allowance in the wallet. Fetch the wallet's address and transfer some money. Verify the wallet's balance is not zero using the following endpoint:

GET /api/bus/wallet

The autopilot will automatically redistribute the wallet funds over a certain number of outputs that make sense with regards to the autopilot's configuration. Contract formation and renewals work best when the autopilot has a good amount of outputs at its disposal. It's definitely a good idea to verify whether this is the case because if not it means that it's likely the autopilot is misconfigured, in which case the logs should be of help.

GET /api/bus/wallet/outputs

Consensus

In order for the contracts to get formed, your node has to be synced with the blockchain. If you are not bootstrapping your node this can take a while. Verify your node's consensus state using the following endpoint:

GET /api/bus/consensus/state

Config

The configuration can be updated through the UI or by using the following endpoints:

GET /api/autopilot/config
PUT /api/autopilot/config

The autopilot will not perform any tasks until it is configured. An example configuration can be found below. Especially the contracts section is important, make sure the amount is set to the amount of hosts with which you want to form a contract. The allowance is the amount of money the autopilot can spend per period, make sure it is not set to zero or contracts won't get formed.

{
	"wallet": {
		"defragThreshold": 1000
	},
	"hosts": {
		"ignoreRedundantIPs": false,
		"scoreOverrides": {}
	},
	"contracts": {
		"set": "autopilot",
		"amount": 50,
		"allowance": "10000000000000000000000000000",
		"period": 6048,
		"renewWindow": 2016,
		"download": 1099511627776, // 1TiB
		"upload": 1099511627776, // 1TiB
		"storage": 1099511627776 // 1TiB
	}
}

Contract Set

The contract set settings on the bus allow specifying a default contract set. This contract set will be returned by the bus through the upload parameters, and decides what contracts data is upload or migrated to by default. This setting does not have a default value, it can be updated using the settings API:

GET /api/bus/setting/contractset
PUT /api/bus/setting/contractset

{
        "default": "autopilot"
}

In most cases the default set should match the set from your autopilot configuration in order for migrations to work properly. The contract set can be overriden by passing it as a query string parameter to the worker's upload and migrate endpoints.

PUT /api/worker/objects/foo?contractset=foo

Redundancy

The default redundancy on mainnet is 30-10, on testnet it is 6-2. The redunancy can be updated using the settings API:

GET /api/bus/setting/redundancy
PUT /api/bus/setting/redundancy

The redundancy can also be passed through query string parameters on the upload endpoint in the worker API:

PUT /api/worker/objects/foo?minshards=2&totalshards=5

Gouging

The default gouging settings are listed below. The gouging settings can be updated using the settings API:

GET /api/bus/setting/gouging
PUT /api/bus/setting/gouging

{
	"hostBlockHeightLeeway": 6,                                   // 6 blocks
	"maxContractPrice": "15000000000000000000000000",             // 15 SC per contract
	"maxDownloadPrice": "3000000000000000000000000000",           // 3000 SC per 1 TiB
	"maxRPCPrice": "1000000000000000000000",                      // 1mS per RPC
	"maxStoragePrice": "631593542824",                            // 3000 SC per TiB per month
	"maxUploadPrice": "3000000000000000000000000000",             // 3000 SC per 1 TiB
	"minAccountExpiry": 86400000000000,                           // 1 day
	"minMaxCollateral": "10000000000000000000000000",             // at least up to 10 SC per contract
	"minMaxEphemeralAccountBalance": "1000000000000000000000000", // 1 SC
	"minPriceTableValidity": 300000000000                         // 5 minutes
}

Blocklist

Unfortunately the Sia blockchain contains a large amount of hosts that announced themselves with faulty parameters and/or bad intentions, something which is unavoidable of course in a decentralized environment. To make sure the autopilot does not have to scan/loop through all ~80.000 hosts on every iteration of the loop, we added a blocklist.

GET /api/bus/hosts/blocklist
PUT /api/bus/hosts/blocklist

The Sia Foundation does not ship renterd with a default blocklist, the following entries exclude a decent amount of bad/old/malicious hosts:

45.148.30.56
51.158.108.244
siacentral.ddnsfree.com
siacentral.mooo.com

Debugging

Logging

renterd has both console and file logging, the logs are stored in renterd.log and contain logs from all of the components that are enabled, e.g. if only the bus and worker are enabled it will only contain the logs from those two components.

Ephemeral Account Drift

The Autopilot manages a collection of ephemeral accounts, each corresponding to a specific contract. These accounts facilitate quicker payments to hosts for various actions, offering advantages over contract payments in terms of speed and parallel execution. Account balances are periodically synchronized with hosts, and discrepancies, if any, are detected during this process. renterd incorporates built-in safeguards to deter host manipulation, discontinuing interactions with hosts that exhibit excessive account balance drift. In rare scenarios, issues may arise due to this drift; these can be rectified by resetting the drift via a specific endpoint:

POST /account/:id/resetdrift

Contract Set Contracts

The autopilot forms and manages contracts in the contract set with name configured in the autopilot's configuration object, by default this is called the autopilot contract set. This contract set should contain the amount of contracts configured in the contracts section of the configuration.

That means that, if everything is running smoothly, the following curl call should return that number

curl -u ":[YOUR_PASSWORD]"  [BASE_URL]/api/bus/contracts/set/autopilot | jq '.|length'

Autopilot Trigger

For debugging purposes, the autopilot allows triggering the main loop using the following endpoint:

POST /api/autopilot/debug/trigger

akmittal / renterd