Fleming Testnet v1 Release - *NOW OFFLINE IN PREPARATION FOR TESTNET V2*

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Update from MaidSafe HQ

First of all thank you to everyone who has helped contribute to the success of Fleming Testnet v1. Your testing and feedback is absolutely invaluable in highlighting areas for improvement, all of which we are reading through and taking into consideration, and many of which we are already in the process of resolving.

To prove that we are able to achieve this testnet’s goal of having a secure and stable network running with all the milestone Fleming features in place is a huge shot in the arm for all of the staff at MaidSafe, and I hope for our community as well.

We have community nodes as Adults and Elders, splits occurring and rewards being paid.

What’s Next?

At the time of writing, testnet v1 is still up & running, approaching 4 days since it was opened to the public.

With your help, we have identified several improvements and so our intention is to quickly release a testnet v2 with some of the early fixes we are working on.

We anticipate having a testnet v2 ready to deploy within the next day or so.

At the moment, the scope of the fixes for v2 are:

  1. To make the node joining process a lot smoother, we are implementing a queue of infants so that you would no longer need to keep trying to add your node to the network. So in v2 when you try to add your node you join the infant queue, and when a space becomes available in a section, whichever infant in the queue is closest to that section’s XorName space will be selected to be promoted to join that section as an adult. Using the XorName here helps maintain balance in the testnet.

  2. We are also removing some limits we had on new nodes joining the testnet - in v1 we would wait until a certain percentage of space was filled before allowing a new node to join, but now we will also allow a new node to join as soon as any current node becomes full. This should allow more nodes onto the testnet

  3. In testnet v1 we have observed a particular section (prefix 10) become stuck in a DKG loop - it seems this was due to 2 community nodes in that section being promoted to be Elders, but it turned out that other nodes could not establish a direct connection to them to perform Elder duties. This led to a (successful) DKG vote to demote those Elders to Adults, then a further DKG vote to promote the 2 oldest Adults to be Elders…which, you guessed it, were the same 2 nodes that couldn’t be connected to previously. This loop continues endlessly and the section does not perform any other actions in the meantime, causing some of the issues reported in this thread and others. The simple fix for this is to only allow a node to be promoted to Elder if we can establish a connection to it, otherwise it will remain as an Adult regardless of its node age.

    Note that remaining as an Adult is not a disadvantage to this node, it can continue earning rewards in that role. This way we are not excluding anybody from the network just because they are behind problematic NATs, etc.

Can I keep Using Testnet v1?

Please feel free to continue testing with testnet v1, if you wish to do so. We have lots of data and logs so don’t anticipate needing any more on the issues that have already been flagged, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for anything else coming in, and requesting logs wherever we need them.

You can also of course hold off for v2 to be released, at which point we will be asking for you to try it out for us and see whether the fixes we make have had the desired impact. As stated above, we anticipate that a testnet v2 will be released within the next day or so.

What Will Happen to Testnet v1 and its Data?

When testnet v2 is ready to be released we will announce on the forum that we are taking testnet v1 offline. All of the bootstrap nodes that we have on Digital Ocean will then be destroyed and the testnet will go offline.

We will then deploy new, clean D.O. nodes for testnet v2, and once they are confirmed up and running, we will share the node_connection_info.config with you. We will be asking that everyone who attempts to use testnet v2 then removes their .safe folder before trying to interact with testnet v2, i.e. $ rm -rf $HOME/.safe/. This will help prevent any confusion and false issues due to pollution from testnet v1.

Therefore, all testnet v1 data will be deleted.

Are We Working on Other Fixes?

Yes. Multiple other fixes and improvements are already in progress, some even from before we released testnet v1. One of the main priorities we have at the moment is completing the implementation of Anti Entropy across the board - we believe that this will resolve many of the errors that people see in their logs, and make the testnets even more reliable and scalable. This, along with others, are in progress for future testnet iterations.

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