This topic is for anyone who has mobile broadband and is willing to use it to test out different functions and report your experiences good or bad (maybe it’s just my setup, or OS or something broken in my system, or maybe this is a wider issue).
In the very distant past I didn’t have any problems using Safe Network or running nodes over mobile broadband, but for a while (including pre-libp2p and pre-QUIC) I’ve experienced unreliability and some things which do not work, either at all or at different times. This might be my setup - this topic aims to help us find out, and to characterise any wider issues.
nodes and safeup
The worst has been running nodes (which I cannot do except on a VPS) and using safeup (which did work in its early days but tends to fail 19/20 times or not succeed at all).
safe client
Running the safe client tends to work but not very well, only effective for relatively short operations like transfers or uploads a few MB. I can do larger downloads but it tends not to work for large files. I’m not giving figures because it has varied over different tests and I haven’t kept notes in that much detail.
My App
Most recently I found that an app I’m working on cannot connect unless I’m using a VPN, which could be quite serious if this isn’t just my problem. However, other things don’t work so well with the current test so I don’t know if this is just with BasicEconomyTweaks testnet or will apply in subsequent tests too.
My Setup and Broadband
System: Ubuntu 22.04 (sometimes via VPN) and have installed and uninstalled lots of stuff so not pristine! Broadband: UK 4G giffgaff (O2) over a mobile hotspot.
Do you have mobile broadband?
If you have mobile broadband and try using it with any of the testnets, please post your setup (OS and Broadband as above) and whether things worked like they do over your normal home broadband, or was less reliable and what if any things failed.
I use mobile broadband and a hotspot to connect my computer to the network all the time, including for testnets. I don’t have any systemic problems installing client and node binaries, uploading and downloading large files, or any other noticeable problems that broadband or hotspot might cause (apart from the occasional disconnection between my computer and the hotspot). I don’t have any problems running nodes either, however I’m not as advanced a tester as giANT ants
I am using Win 10 Pro and an Orange 4G network connection.
Can you elaborate some of the error you’re seeing here?
Some of the issues reported by yourself and @shu are hopefully addressed in the upcoming alpha (and so future beta upgrade), so it will be good to see what’s up there. We were definitely being too harsh on timeouts during iniial bootstrapping, which I suspect would only be worse on mobile.
Aye, thats your problem…
The PTB have ordained that the population of Cheltenham and area, including the acquatic residents. are too middle-class to be adequately served by riff-raff like giffgaff with their AI assistants distressingly working class accents. Its not even a Home Counties accent FFS!! What a pretty pass things have come to…
Quietly your service has been degraded. Wouldn’t do to have too many GCHQ employees exposed to nasty working-class WrongThink, however obliquely…
Get another SIM.
Then we can properly diagnose your problem.
PS Don’t care if it worked before <— Dangerous assumption tat has fooled many a support droid. It doesnt work now, thats what matters.
I have a limited broadband account, but it’s via the local mobile tower (I can usually down/up at around 1MB/s).
So I would expect that there wouldn’t be QoS preferential sorting of communication over web traffic, but unsure where in the stack that might be occurring, so can’t rule it out. I don’t have any trouble with video’s on youtube and such, but that’s download, not upload.
With the testnets, I do have quite a bit of trouble that I’ve been able to overcome by changing batch-size to 1 or 2. Of course that makes it much slower, but still functional.
A friend has just loaned me his Starlink which is sat on the boat roof and works like a dream. So more info on the probs I have will have to wait until he prises it out of my cold dead hands which he says won’t be for a few days.
For the first time in a year or two or ?, I can run nodes from my laptop, safeup works like a dream and I expect uploads and downloads will be fine too but I’ll check those in a bit.
So the issues are most likely to do with the connection to mobile b/b rather than anything in my system. Some of this may be how they do NAT (eg not being able to run nodes) and some like uploads and downloads may be due to connectivity or speed.
For safeup I think it might be some issue related to using AWS because when safeup was first introduced it worked fine. That’s just a suspicion though. I can download some things from AWS, such as the network-connections for the testnets: I have an app which uses the safe_network client code for getting those peers from AWS, and it has never failed to get the peers when using the safe client. I can also download very large files elsewhere (e.g. a 1.1GB zip a couple of days ago downloaded from the Google developer site with no problems).
Still to check with Starlink:
upload/download
faucet
token transfers
To re-check with mobile b/b:
upload/download
Known issues with mobile b/b:
nodes don’t work (NAT?)
uploads flaky, getting worse as file size increases
downloads better but also get worse as file size increases
safeup sometimes ok, mostly 19/20 runs work, lately doesn’t work at all - but always appears to download the whole file and then errors at the end.
UPDATE: safeup working over 4G
Having turned Starlink off for the evening (as it uses 45W) I am back on 4G mobile broadband and for the first time in a long time, and without VPN enabled safeup worked perfectly and much faster than normal the second AlphaToleranceTest.
This was a big surprise, very likely because earlier I updated to the latest version of safeup. cc @chriso
Thanks. Although, safeup just makes simple HTTP requests for these files. I don’t think anything would have changed between versions with respect to that.
