Time synchronization using chrony

Time synchronization is a very important topic running a cardano staking pool. Ubuntu comes with NTPD by default which can cause a time drift from 500ms to 1s. It is a best practise to use Chrony instead of NTPD. Let's install Chrony: sudo apt-get install chrony You need to edit the file /etc/chrony/chrony.conf after the Chrony installation is finished. sudo nano /etc/chrony/chr...

Update Cardano Node from 1.25.1 to 1.26.1

A new and improved cardano-node version 1.26.1 has been released today. You will find here a step by step guide how to upgrade the cardano node from version 1.25.1 to 1.26.1. As first step you should update GHC and CABAL as GHC 8.10.4 and CABAL 3.4.0 are required to compile the cardano node version 1.26.1 It is recommanded to use GHCUP to manage your GHC and CABAL versions. Let's inst...

How to rotate pool keys

You have to rotate your pool keys every 90 days on the cardano mainnet. Following steps have to be done at your offline environment: Create a new pair of kes keys (kes.skey, kes.vkey): cardano-cli node key-gen-KES --verification-key-file kes.vkey --signing-key-file kes.skey Find the current value of startKesPeriod: slotsPerKESPeriod=$(cat $NODE_HOME/mainnet-shelley-genesis.jso...