Olivier Balais

A couple of weeks ago, I put online three Storj farming nodes. Two of them are hosted on my OVH dedicated servers and I even built my own node with Meccano, a Raspberry PI and four old used hard drives.

After putting them online, I found myself connecting every day on those three different machines to run storjshare status, htop, iotop and even ifconfig to gather metrics and understand how my nodes were behaving. While this could be OK at first, this doesn’t seem to be a good solution in the long run.

Monitoring your nodes and their host is really important to help you understand how they perform, how to improve their efficiency over time and of course, being alerted if something goes wrong. As you know, the more your node is online, the more data it will collect.

To simplify the monitoring process, I setup a very classic combination of Grafana, influxdb and collectd. Feel free to replace each one of these components by one of their many alternatives, according to your likings. Have a look at Telegraf for example to replace Collectd.

Setup your Storj monitoring stack

First thing to do is to setup collectd which will be responsible to collect metrics from your host and from storj-daemon RPC port. Assuming your using debian, run the following command:

sudo apt install collectd

Then setup the Storj collectd plugin by running:

npm install -g storj-collectd-plugin

Now, edit config file /etc/collectd/collectd.conf to enable the plugins your interested in. At least, configure the network plugin with the IP address or domain name of the webserver on which you will setup InfluxDB (127.0.0.1 if influxdb is on same host) and add a plugin exec entry for the collectd-storj-exec-plugin:

LoadPlugin ...
LoadPlugin exec
LoadPlugin network

<Plugin network>
  Server "IP_SERVER_INFLUXDB" "25826"
</Plugin>

<Plugin exec>
        Interval 120
        Exec "youruser" "collectd-storj-exec-plugin"
</Plugin>

Finally, add the following lines in /usr/share/collectd/types.db:

peers                   value:GAUGE:0:U
shared                  value:GAUGE:0:U
restarts                value:GAUGE:0:U

Don’t forget to restart collectd service:

systemctl restart collectd

Repeat the operation on every node’s host.

It’s now time to setup influxdb. Assuming your still using debian, run the following commands:

curl -sL https://repos.influxdata.com/influxdb.key | sudo apt-key add -
source /etc/os-release
test $VERSION_ID = "7" && echo "deb https://repos.influxdata.com/debian wheezy stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list
test $VERSION_ID = "8" && echo "deb https://repos.influxdata.com/debian jessie stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt install influxdb

See documentation for more informations on the setup process.

Then, enable influxdb collectd listener by adding the following lines in /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf:

[collectd]
  enabled = true
  bind-address = ":25826"
  database = "collectd_db"
  typesdb = "/usr/share/collectd/types.db"

Restart influxdb:

sudo systemctl restart influxdb

Finally, install Grafana wherever you want by executing:

wget https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/grafana-releases/release/grafana_4.2.0_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -y adduser libfontconfig
sudo dpkg -i grafana_4.2.0_amd64.deb

See documentation for more informations on the setup process.

Build a cool handy dashboard in Grafana

Now that everything is setup, collectd should already be sending metrics to your influx datastore and you should be ready to create your very own dashboard on Grafana.

Here is what mine is currently looking:

And below a few queries I used to build it.

Downloaded vs Uploaded data per host:

Storj peers per node:

Storj shared data per node:

Don’t forget to add alerts on Grafana according to your needs:

After a few days of monitoring, I’m sure you should see interesting patterns emerge from your graphs! Be careful though, it’s quite hypnotic at the beginning 🙂

A few reads that might be interesting

• https://gagor.pl/2016/01/collectd-installation-and-configuration-with-influxdb-on-debianubuntu/
• https://sonnguyen.ws/monitor-server-with-collectd-influxdb-and-grafana/
• https://collectd.org/download.shtml

EDIT 04-30-2017

After a chat with the community, it seems that running 4 nodes at the same time on a RPI5 is not efficient on uploads peaks. That’s why I updated my setup to use a union filesystem and make storj-daemon see my 4 hard drives as only one. See the setup below…

What is Storj?

Since a couple of months, a project grabs all of my attention. That’s Storj.io.

If you never heard about it yet, Storj presents itself as a decentralized and encrypted cloud storage system based on blockchain technologies. The press, always optimistic, even names it the Airbnb of cloud storage.

What is it, really? Storj is a network built on top of the equally named protocol, which aims to share extra disk space of individuals all around the world in order to provide a cloud storage system, cheaper and more resilient than Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.

Of course, in exchange of its extra disk space shared accross the Storj network, the user (farmer) earns a couple of bucks each month, depending on the amount of megabytes stored on its disks and the amount of data downloaded and uploaded during the same period.

The vision of Storj is fascinating to me. The developers chose and implemented blockchain technologies at the very heart of the solution, which ease the de-centralization, allow faster data distribution, more resilient network, prevent security issues by encrypting everything and therefore, bring a lot of new features and opportunities to the end users.

Make use of extra disk space of individual could seem a bit surprising first but did you know that most of the personal computers hard drives are just partly used, leaving as much as one trillion gigabytes of space when the entirety of Google is estimated to be 10 to 15 billion gigabytes?! Did you know that a gigantic part of the data a French individual owns is actually stored and retrieved from Ireland (Amazon) or even from US? To store that amount of data, big companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook or Microsoft build massive datacenters absorbing gigawatts of power. And of course, when one of those fail, Internet goes down.

I think what Storj is building is quite similar to what is happening in power production and distribution. With the smart grid concept, we will progressively migrate from a centralized model, which cause around 10 percent of power production loss in transport in France, to a more efficient distributed model.

If you want to learn more about Storj vision, please read the Storj Master Plan. It’s a bit old but still seems quite accurate.

Build your own Storj node

Well, it’s now time to build your own Storj node to share your hard drive and earn a bit of money! In fact, it may be just the right time because StorjLabs company is bout to reveal a partership which should cause a big increase in storage demand!

So, what do you need to build your own Storj.io farming node? In fact, not much, just a computer with unused disk space. But if you want to build a cost efficient solution, always up and running, using something like a Raspberry PI may be a better idea than leaving your Macbook always turned on!

I built my own with the following parts:

• A Raspberry PI > 4, ideally, a RPI 5!
• Four unused 2.5 inch 750 GB internal hard drives
• Four USB to Sata connector bought on Amazon
• An USB power hub
• Meccano parts from my Dad’s childhood!

As you can see on the pictures below, the USB hub powers the four hard drives. I used another power supply connected to the Raspberry PI because all USB ports are currently used. But, I think that, with a larger USB hub, I could have powered the RPI directly from it.

The software part is quite simple to setup. First you need to format your hard drives:

parted -a opt /dev/sda mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
mkfs.ext4 -L storj1 /dev/sda1

parted -a opt /dev/sdb mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
mkfs.ext4 -L storj2 /dev/sdb1

I chose to mount the four disks in /mnt/storjX. Here is what my fstab is looking:
#/etc/fstab
LABEL=storj1                                      /mnt/storj1      ext4          defaults          0       1
LABEL=storj2                                      /mnt/storj2      ext4          defaults          0       1
LABEL=storj3                                      /mnt/storj3      ext4          defaults          0       1
LABEL=storj4                                      /mnt/storj4      ext4          defaults          0       1
/mnt/storj1:/mnt/storj2:/mnt/storj3/:/mnt/storj4  /mnt/storjmerge  fuse.mergerfs defaults,allow_other,use_ino,fsname=storjmerge  0       0

As you can see on the last line of my fstab, I make use of mergerfs to merge all of my hard drives in a single volume, mounted in /mnt/storjmerge. It’s mostly because Raspberry PI 5 has not enough RAM to run efficiently more than 1 node at once (1GB of RAM seems barely enough while receiving big uploads from peers).
To setup mergerfs on your Raspberry PI 5, run the following:
apt install fuse
wget https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs/releases/download/2.20.0/mergerfs_2.20.0.debian-wheezy_armhf.deb
dpkg -i mergerfs_2.20.0.debian-wheezy_armhf.deb
rm mergerfs_2.20.0.debian-wheezy_armhf.deb

When the hard drives are setup, you need to install storjdaemon:
npm install --global storjshare-daemon

Then, create the storj node using the following command:
storjshare create --sjcx=YOURSJCXTOKEN --storage=/mnt/storjmerge/storj.io/
...

Then, make a script to start everything at once:
$ cat start-farming.sh
storjshare daemon
storjshare start --config /path/to/storjconfig/xxxx.json

That’s it!
Going further – Interesting reads about Storj

https://storj.io
https://vimeo.com/102119715
http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/how-to-earn-free-money-online-seriously/76407
https://medium.com/stories-from-iterative-instinct/the-new-icloud-hack-and-why-storj-io-matters-b436208f2aae