Author: Marco González

Editor: Randall Roland

Meetings begin with a reminder of EOS declaring independence on September 21 with the Leap 3.1 consensus upgrade. Before scheduled topics, the group quickly goes through status updates. The rest of the focus is on technical discussion about how best to move forward and solve issues.

Meetings themselves are dynamic. They’ve taken the form of presentations and calls to action like the blocks.log file survey distributed by EOS Support.

The EOS Network Foundation created a new YT playlist entitled “EOS Node Operator Round Table”. The list starts with the November 30, 2022 meeting. It represents a change in agenda from the “EOS Leap Upgrade Group” playlist. Note that the first time the group renamed itself in alignment with node operators occurred at the November 16 meeting.

The focus of this first bi-monthly Node Operator summary is to introduce the purpose and layout of future meetings. To help gauge the climate that led to the transition, here are highlights from meetings under the old format:

Notice that the first meeting (September 28) marks the first week of EOS Independence and a live Antelope Leap. The stated goal of the September 28 meeting is to begin planning for the next consensus upgrade. At the time, Leap 3.2 was thought to be several months away.

Around the 5-minute mark of the meeting on November 30, there was a discussion over other chains upgrading to Leap. Telos seems the closest. Ted Cahall mentioned that the private chain Voice upgrades to Leap 3.1.

The Voice upgrade is both encouraging and reassuring for Antelope Leap. Many probably wonder how B1, the long-time lead developer of EOSIO, would respond to Antelope technology as a whole. By adopting Leap, B1 demonstrates that large companies can benefit from the EOS Network.

It’s also worth noting that around this same time (on December 7), Binance added support for USDT/EOS. Also, recall the ENF’s successful VCABB partnership at the end of October.

The December 7 meeting opened with a recap of last week. There were only a couple of updates to report. Below is a list of key topics:

Prometheus is an even monitoring and alert system. It’s desirable for its capacity to illuminate hidden statistics. EOS Nation shared a dashboard example that leverages prometheus.

EOS Nation GitHub (week 11) has a full list of categorized metric items. “By producer” items were initially skipped and shelved for next week. They were deemed out of scope as needing monitoring at the chain level.

Note that the items on the list of metrics (below) are in a very early stage. Identifying nodeos metrics began around the 08:50 mark and carried through most of the meeting. Having an initial metrics list just for the node category is considered a step forward.

The easiest items to find agreement were:

Requiring further discussion before being deemed satisfactory for this week’s list were:

Illustrating one of the challenges was Matthew Darwin 33:50 saying:

“... the problem is --- that some of the block times are negative…”

Negative block times were thought to take too much time while returning little fruit for the current meeting. Other issues related to the P2P plugin were also touched upon [41:40].

EOS Nation encouraged participants to bring their wish list for prometheus inclusion. The Node Operator group expects to take a break for the holiday season following next week’s meeting.

At the time of this writing, Mandel (Leap) 3.2.0 is considered 95% complete with 4 open and 77 closed items.