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Koii Validator Operations Best Practices

After successfully setting up and starting a validator on the Koii network, it's essential to familiarize yourself with daily operations to ensure your validator runs efficiently. Day-to-day tasks include monitoring your server, updating software (both the Koii validator software and operating system packages), and managing your validator identity and associated accounts.

Consistently practicing these skills is vital. Maximizing your validator's uptime is crucial for being a reliable operator and contributing to the health of the network.

Educational Resources​

The Koii validator community regularly shares educational content to help operators improve their skills. Stay tuned to the official Koii community Discord for updates on workshops, webinars, and guides tailored for validator operators.

Using the Validator Command Line​

For a comprehensive understanding of available commands and their flags, use the koii-validator command with the --help flag:

koii-validator --help

Restarting Your Validator​

Occasionally, you may need to restart your validator for maintenance or updates. As a best practice, avoid restarting during a leader slot, as this is when your validator is responsible for producing blocks. Restarting during this time can impact the network's health and your validator's ability to earn rewards.

To determine when your validator is scheduled to produce blocks, you can view the leader schedule for the current epoch:

koii leader-schedule

Once you identify a suitable idle time, use the following command to exit your validator process cleanly:

koii-validator exit

If you have set up systemd for managing your validator process, the process should restart automatically.

Upgrading Your Validator​

Keeping your validator software up-to-date is critical. Validators do not need to go offline to download the latest version of the Koii software. You can either build the software from source or use precompiled binaries.

Building from Source​

Building from source ensures the integrity of the code and allows optimization for your specific hardware. Use the -march flag during compilation to target your CPU architecture.

Using koii-install​

For a quicker method, use the koii-install tool to fetch and install specific versions of the Koii validator software. For example:

koii-install init 1.14.17

Once installed, restart the validator process to apply the new version:

koii-validator exit

Verify the version in use by checking the logs:

grep -B1 'Starting validator with' <path/to/logfile>

Snapshots and Ledger Maintenance​

To maintain the health of the network, it is generally advised to avoid downloading snapshots unless absolutely necessary, such as during prolonged downtime or the initial setup of a validator. Instead, maintain the local ledger and catch up using:

koii catchup <validator-public-key>

If you must download a snapshot, omit the --no-snapshot-fetch flag, and your validator will fetch one from known validators. To manually download a snapshot, use the koii gossip command to identify a validator and retrieve the necessary files.

Monitoring Account Balances​

Your validator identity account requires sufficient funds to continue voting. Regularly check the balance to ensure uninterrupted operations:

koii balance validator-keypair.json

Withdrawing From the Vote Account​

For security reasons, the withdrawer's keypair should never be stored on your validator server. Instead, use a hardware wallet, paper wallet, or a multisig wallet.

To withdraw funds, run the following command from a trusted environment:

koii withdraw-from-vote-account \
   vote-account-keypair.json \
   recipient-keypair.json ALL \
   --authorized-withdrawer authorized-withdrawer-keypair.json

Refer to the Koii documentation for detailed guidance on vote account management.

By adhering to these best practices, you can maintain a secure, efficient, and high-performing Koii validator, ensuring both the health of the network and your operational success.

This documentation incorporates substantial portions of the Solana documentation, adapted for Koii (K2). Solana’s architecture and underlying principles form the foundation of K2’s implementation. Content adapted under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 License. See Solana Documentation for more details.