I’ve been running into the 5 retries error when starting up launchpad for several months now. I’ve discussed the issue with Rusty, and the team should be aware. However, I’m not getting much other than the guide on the autonomi website to resolve the issue. see: Maximum amount of retries (5) | Autonomi
The solution as mentioned however is a) expecting windows, but b) is expecting the issue to be caused by something already running. But I’m running into this issue even when I have a clean install. This is happening from home. but It’s also happening from 1 of the cloud operators I’m using (where running through antctl is working just fine). It seems to be a launchpad issue, one I think we should address. Launchpad is still the first touch point for new users and this is just a horrible experience.
Anyone know how to resolve this issue? Or perhaps anything I can look at to try and locate the source of the issue that can help the team?
You’re right, I am using Linux and I was running as root. I’m running as a regular user now and that is working. I had no idea that was an issue. Why does that make a difference? For all I know running as sudo has more rights.
It’s a permissions issue with the way Launchpad creates nodes.
When run as root/sudo, Launchpad correctly creates a non-root user to run the nodes ant, but then, by default, it creates the node structure under ~/.local, which in root’s case means /root/.local, which the ant user does not have permissions to view.
The other option that was working for me, add a second storage drive and give it a mount point that the ant user can read from. Then in launchpad, choose the alternate drive for your nodes and then launch your nodes.
I have reported this bug on Discord months ago, but it’s probably a much lower priority issue since there are those two workarounds. It’s complicated because on Windows you HAVE to run as Administrator.
I suppose the actual fix in this case would be to create the node structure under ~ant/.local when creating nodes for the ant user on the default drive.
Its a bit more complex than that…
It not only has more rights, it has many many more responsibilities that can easily lead to dangers if you are not careful.
You should always know the consequences of running anything as root.
tl:dr dont run shit as root unless you know what you are doing
I’ve now managed to start launchpad on all 3 of my servers successfully. I noticed however that launchpad needs both UDP & TCP traffic to be port forwarded, not just UDP which is what I initially thought. Is TCP also needed for starting nodes directly / through the antctl client?
Also, would starting antnodes as root cause issues as well, or is that just a launchpad thing?
For many routers like MikroTik and run of the mill ISP routers, etc the default rules in the router will handle the TCP side and not require port forwarding of TCP. AFAIK TCP is only used to grab the latest version of the node.
Starting anything as root carries its own issues. Always best to not do that if you can.