Before the cohort starts, I am catching up on talks from the Study Group EPF wiki. I watched all advanced talks, took notes and asked questions about topics I wasn't sure about in the study group discord. I read some extra materials provided in the wiki and look for something exciting to work on. There are many projects proposed by client teams, these are going to be my priority after I research couple of things I am curious about. Areas of research I am planning to explore 2 areas I am interested in - consensus specs and gas scaling. CL specs Consensus layer is specified the ethereum/consensus-specs repository which serves as the canonical source for the technical details of Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake consensus. It's a collection of documents and executable Python code that defines the rules every Ethereum client must follow to participate in the consensus process.
7/21/2025Besu Any notable highlights from your team on Holešky incident? Please share if you kept any notes or postmortem https://hackmd.io/@siladu/H1qydmWhyx What client issues have you encountered during the period of long non-finality? We were running 5 CLs (except Grandine) along with Besu. All had issues at some point. We kept our besu-lighthouse node producing blocks when Holesky was suffering from its worst liveness issues. During recovery, our 5 nodes became VC-only nodes and we pointed them to various recovery beacon nodes which were hotfixed and synced separately. Sometimes we used other teams' beacons as well. Keeping the beacon nodes alive has been a struggle but things have been more stable in the couple of days. A lesson here is that it's handy to have the VC separated out (teku was combined). Another lesson is that maintaining 5 different configurations is time consuming when issues occur. For Holesky (and for Hoodi) we are going to move towards a beacon node setup of two larger nodes: one teku and lighthouse, which seem to have been the most stable clients for us. We also found and fixed an issue related to Besu snap sync in periods of non finality: https://github.com/hyperledger/besu/issues/8393 Any issues you have encountered after finalization on Holešky? We were running majority hotfixed lighthouse beacons at the time which suffered from an issue upon finality, but it was easy to resync, and that is now also fixed. Participation has been on the low side since finality which has made things more unstable than before the incident. We recently discovered an issue in our infra that was making things more unstable: our VMs were using ntp for time synchronization. Switching to chrony seems to be a notable improvement. Network conditions on Holesky brought this inaccuracy to light, we didn't notice significant issues before.
3/20/2025Ephemery testnet has been running since December 2022 and providing Ethereum developers, users and validators with the easiest environment for testing. The Ephemery infrastructure has been steadily improving and growing over time. There are more genesis validators, block explorers, faucets, client implementations, auto deployers, deposit tooling and more. To learn more about Ephemery and its usage, checkout the repository with all resources To improve the Ephemery ecosystem even further, we are announcing the incentive program for providing infrastracture for the testnet. The goal of Ephemery is to become a sustainable testing enviroment which doesn't have to be deprecated in the future. Thanks to a generous donation and support from EthStaker, we can decentralize our network services, making Ephemery more resilient and usable. EthStaker is dedicating 12000 USD a year to support our testnet efforts. We are incredibly thankful for their dedication to Ephemery and the Ethereum testnet ecosystem. All donations to Ephemery will be vested and divided between infrastracture providers and contributors.
12/2/2024I am currently syncing an Eth node on an old PlayStation 4 machine and since it was quite a journey, I am here to share details in the hope someone might replicate this effort one day. Everything started with a casual discussion about gaming with my peers. I am not much of a gamer, and recently I've only been playing some indie games from itch on my GNU/Linux laptop. There are some interesting big-name titles I'd like to try, but I lack the hardware to run them, and generally, I just don't like that games require a proprietary/DRM environment. Consoles seem like the cheapest option optimized for games but growing up I never owned one and I still cannot imagine owning hardware locked by the manufacturer for a single purpose. On the other hand, I know people have been hacking them for years, legends like geohot! Researching this, I fell down the PlayStation jailbreaking rabbit hole, and boy, it's quite huge. I believe PS4 is generally a great piece of hardware which still continues to please gamers, developers and hackers after many years. Hacking PS4 Older PS4 firmwares include vulnerabilities allowing us to take over the control. This enables you to tweak many things, pirate games and even run your own kernel on the machine! Clearly, this is the best and most fun thing to do with your PS(if you are into voiding warranties and bending rules :)). The only thing you need is a PS4 with old enough software and if you own one, the best advice is to NEVER UPDATE YOUR PLAYSTATION. An older or exploited firmware will block you from playing games online, using the PS Store, etc but I am not interested in that anyway, I want to run my Ethereum node. So here is what it takes:
9/14/2024