Skip to content

Machine setup

Resources

You can use any machine from any cloud hosting provider or your very own physical computer, as long as the option you choose is able to satisfy the resource requirements.

The following are the host requirements for running one Forta scan node.

  • 64-bit Linux distribution
  • CPU with 4+ cores
  • 16GB RAM
  • Connection to internet
  • Docker v20.10+
  • 100GB SSD

Running multiple nodes

If you would like to use a big machine to run multiple scan nodes, please isolate each node by using virtual machines and dedicate the resources listed above to each node.

Trying to run multiple scan nodes in one machine without isolation can cause loss of rewards.

Security

Forta scan node software uses isolation techniques to prevent detection bot code from executing malicious actions. Please make sure you take extra measures and strengthen your host machines:

  • Implement iptables rules to disallow access to sensitive subnetworks.
  • Do not equip your machines with strong cloud privileges.

Synchronize system time

To produce correct timestamps on the alerts and avoid authorization problems at the time of publishing alerts, you must ensure at all times that the system time is correct. If the system time is not correct, your node will fail to publish alerts and may generate no rewards as a result.

We suggest using systemd-timesyncd which is widely available and sufficient as a time synchronization daemon. After started, it will periodically synchronize the system time in background.

To enable, systemd-timesyncd and check the result, you can do: 

$ sudo systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd
$ sudo systemctl start systemd-timesyncd
$ timedatectl status
               Local time: Tue 2022-01-01 17:00:00 -03
           Universal time: Tue 2022-01-01 20:00:00 UTC
                 RTC time: Tue 2022-01-01 20:00:00
                Time zone: America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires (-03, -0300)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active  <------------------- (it worked)
          RTC in local TZ: no

Install and Configure Docker

Install Docker (at least v20.10)

Add a file called daemon.json to your /etc/docker directory with the following contents:

{
   "default-address-pools": [
        {
            "base":"172.17.0.0/12",
            "size":16
        },
        {
            "base":"192.168.0.0/16",
            "size":20
        },
        {
            "base":"10.99.0.0/16",
            "size":24
        }
    ]
}

Avoid networking conflicts

Please confirm these network ranges don't conflict with your node's network, especially if you use VPC peering, VPNs, or other non-trivial networking settings.

Restart docker with systemctl restart docker

Ensure docker is running. You can run docker ps and you should not get any errors and see a list of header columns.

Run Docker as a non-root user

To run docker as a non-root user, do the following:

Add the docker group (it may already exist)

sudo groupadd docker

Add your user to that group.

sudo usermod -aG docker your-user

You must exit and login again to take effect

Make sure Docker is running

Once docker ps gives you a list of headers, continue to the next section.