📝Node Operator Guide

This document provides an overview of how to deploy an BLAST node. To learn more about how Bedrock itself works and its motivations, please see the specs on GitHub (opens new window). If you want to skip ahead to building and running a node from source, please see Building a Node from Source

#Deployment Overview

A Bedrock deployment consists of two core components:

  1. The Rollup Node, which is responsible for deriving blocks from L1 and passing them to the Execution engine. It also participates in a peer-to-peer network that synchronizes unsubmitted blocks as the sequencer creates them. We refer to this component as bl-node.

  2. The Execution Engine, which is responsible for executing the blocks it receives from the rollup node and storing state. It also exposes standard JSON-RPC methods to query blockchain data and submit transactions to the network. We refer to this component as op-geth, since our Execution Engine is a minimal fork (opens new window)of go-ethereum.

The Rollup Node and Execution Engine communicate with each other over JSON-RPC via the Engine API. This is similar to how regular Ethereum networks are deployed. The Rollup Node functions as Optimism's consensus client, and the Execution Engine as its execution client.

For BLAST Mainnet and BLAST Goerli, you may also need to run a third component called Legacy Geth. Legacy Geth is used to serve execution traces for transactions prior to the Bedrock upgrade, which we refer to as "historical transactions". When the Rollup Node encounters an RPC call that requires historical execution traces, it will forward the request to Legacy Geth. Note, however, that unlike our previous networks requests for historical data will be served by the Execution Engine directly. This distinction will be clarified later on in this document.

The architecture of a typical Bedrock deployment looks like this:

#System Requirements

We recommend the following minimum system requirements to run Bedrock:

  • bl-node: Minimum 2CPUs, 4GB RAM. No storage is necessary.

  • op-geth: Minimum 4 CPUs, 8GB RAM. At least 40GB of storage is required for BLAST Goerli or BLAST Sepolia. At least 500GB of storage is required for mainnet. Storage must be SSD. Requirements are significantly higher for archive nodes.

#Getting the Software

op-geth and bl-node are available as Docker images. Consult the documentation for the network you are participating in to get the correct image tag.

You can also compile op-geth and op-node from source.

#Node Configuration

Note

Always run bl-node and op-geth in a one-to-one configuration. Don't run multiple op-geth instances behind one bl-node, or vice versa.

To configure your node, you will need to do the following:

  1. Configure bl-node to point to the correct L1, op-geth, and L2 network.

  2. Initialize op-geth with the correct network parameters.

  3. Configure op-geth to properly communicate with the Rollup Node.

  4. Optionally, configure Legacy Geth.

#Configuring op-geth

Tips

Even though the Docker image for the Execution Engine is called op-geth, the actually binary is still called geth in order to minimize differences between op-geth and go-ethereum.

We'll start with op-geth's configuration because it is more complex. As mentioned before, op-geth is a minimal fork of go-ethereum. As a result, it stores its state in a database that requires initialization. Initialization is done one of two ways, depending on which network you're deploying:

  1. With a Genesis File: This is for BLAST Goerli, and other testnets or deployments that are not migrated from a legacy network. In this case, you'll download the genesis file (opens new window)and initialize the data directory via geth init.

  2. With a Data Directory: This is used for networks that are migrated from a legacy network. This would include BL Mainnet and BL Goerli. In this case, you'll download a preconfigured data directory and extract it. No further initialization is necessary in this case, because the data directory contains the network's genesis information.

Regardless of how op-geth is initialized, you'll need to ensure that you have sufficient disk space available to store the network's data. As of this writing, the mainnet data directory is ~100GB for a full node and ~1TB for an archival node. The BL Goerli data directory is ~40GB for a full node.

Instructions for each initialization method are below. If you're spinning up an BL Mainnet or BL Goerli node, use the Initialization via Data Directory path

#Initialization via Genesis File

op-geth uses JSON files to encode a network's genesis information. For networks that are initialized in this way, you'll receive a URL to the genesis JSON. You'll need to download the genesis JSON, then run the following command to initialize the data directory:

#!/bin/sh
FILE=/$DATADIR/genesis.json
OP_GETH_GENESIS_URL=https://networks.optimism.io/op-sepolia/genesis.json

if [ ! -s $FILE ]; then
  apk add curl
  curl $OP_GETH_GENESIS_URL -o $FILE
  geth init --datadir /db $FILE
else
  echo "Genesis file already exists. Skipping initialization."
fi

#Initialization via Data Directory

To initialize op-geth with a preconfigured data directory, simply download and extract the data directory to a place of your choosing. The data directory is exported as a tar file. An example command to do this is below:

curl -o <path to data directory> -sL <URL to data directory>
tar -xvf <path to data directory>

#Configuration

Once op-geth is initialized, it can be configured via CLI flags. op-geth accepts all the standard go-ethereum flags (opens new window)as well as a few extra flags that are specific to Optimism. These flags are:

  • --rollup.historicalrpc: Enables the historical RPC endpoint. This endpoint is used to fetch historical execution data from Legacy Geth. This flag is only necessary for upgraded networks.

  • --rollup.sequencerhttp: HTTP endpoint of the sequencer. op-geth will route eth_sendRawTransaction calls to this URL. Bedrock does not currently have a public mempool, so this is required if you want your node to support transaction submission. Consult the documentation for the network you are participating in to get the correct URL.

  • --rollup.disabletxpoolgossip: Disables transaction pool gossiping. While not required, it's useful to set this to true since transaction pool gossip is currently unsupported.

To communicate with bl-node and enable the Engine API, you'll also need to generate a JWT secret file and enable Geth's authenticated RPC endpoint.

To generate the JWT secret, run the following:

openssl rand -hex 32 > jwt.txt

Then, specify the following flags:

  • --authrpc.addr: Sets the address op-geth's authenticated RPC should listen on.

  • --authrpc.port: Sets the port op-geth's authenticated RPC should listen on. The default value is 8551.

  • --authrpc.jwtsecret: Sets the path to a JWT secret file you generated above.

  • --syncmode=full: This prevents Geth from attempting to snap sync. Snap sync is currently unsupported, but will be enabled shortly after the mainnet upgrade.

  • --maxpeers=0: This prevents Geth from peering with other Geth nodes. Execution-layer peering is currently unsupported, but will be added as part of enabling snap sync.

  • --nodiscover: This disables Geth's peer discovery mechanism. Execution-layer discovery is currently unsupported, but will be added as part of enabling snap sync.

#Optional op-geth Configuration

You may also want to specify the following flags based on your configuration:

  • --authrpc.vhosts: Whitelists which hosts (as defined in the Host header) are allowed to access the authenticated RPC endpoint. This is useful if you're running op-geth on containerized infrastructure. The default value is localhost.

  • --http.vhosts: Whitelists which hosts (as defined in the Host header) are allowed to access the unauthenticated RPC endpoint. This is useful if you're running op-geth on containerized infrastructure. The default value is localhost.

  • --http, --http.addr, and --http.port: Enables the unauthenticated RPC endpoint, configures its address, and configures its port. You'll almost certainly want to specify these, since they will enable Geth's JSON-RPC endpoint.

  • --ws, --ws.addr, and --ws.port: Enables the WebSocket API.

  • --verbosity: Configures Geth's log level. This is a number between 0 and 5, with 5 being the most verbose. Defaults to 3.

#Working Base Configuration

A valid command that runs op-geth and enables RPC over HTTP and WebSockets looks like:

geth \
  --ws \
  --ws.port=8546 \
  --ws.addr=localhost \
  --ws.origins="*" \
  --http \
  --http.port=8545 \
  --http.addr=localhost \
  --http.vhosts="*" \
  --http.corsdomain="*" \
  --authrpc.addr=localhost \
  --authrpc.jwtsecret=/var/secrets/jwt.txt \
  --authrpc.port=8551 \
  --authrpc.vhosts="*" \
  --datadir=/data \
  --verbosity=3 \
  --rollup.disabletxpoolgossip=true \
  --rollup.sequencerhttp=https://mainnet-sequencer.blastblockchain.com/ \
  --nodiscover \
  --syncmode=full \
  --maxpeers=0

Consult Geth's documentation (opens new window)for more information on customizing op-geth's behavior.

#Configuring bl-node

bl-node is a standalone, statically linked binary. It stores no state, and requires no initialization. It consumes configuration parameters either via the command line or environment variables. For some networks, the Rollup Node also requires a configuration file (called rollup.json or the "rollup config") that configures network-specific genesis parameters. For official networks like OP Goerli, OP Sepolia, and OP Mainnet, the genesis config is hardcoded in the bl-node software and can be specified via a --network flag.

A minimal valid configuration for a rollup node on our op goerlitestnet looks like this:

bl-node --l1=<goerli RPC url> \
        --l2=<op-geth authenticated RPC url> \
        --rollup.config=./rollup.json \
        --rpc.addr=127.0.0.1 \
        --rpc.port=9545 \
        --l2.jwt-secret=<path to JWT secret>

Each of the above flags can also be defined via an environment variable. Run bl-node --help to see a list of all available flags and environment variables.

#Configuring Peer-to-Peer Networking

Unlike the previous system, the bl-node participates in a peer-to-peer network. This network is used to distribute blocks that have not been submitted to L1 yet. The bl-node will automatically discover and connect to peers using a hardcoded set of bootnodes. You can also manually specify peers to connect to via the --p2p.static flag.

For best results, run op-node with a static IP address that is accessible from the public Internet. For Kubernetes deployments, this can be achieved by configuring a dedicated Ingress with an external IP, and using the --p2p.advertise.ip flag to specify the IP address of the load balancer when advertising IP addresses to peers.

The default port for the peer-to-peer network is 9003. You will need to open this port on your firewall to receive unsubmitted blocks. For your node to be discoverable, this port must be accessible via both TCP and UDP protocols.

#Legacy Geth

If you are running a node for an upgraded network like BL Mainnet or BL Goerli, you will also need to run Legacy Geth in order to serve historical execution traces. Fundamentally, Legacy Geth is our old l2geth binary running against a preconfigured data directory. To configure Legacy Geth, follow the instructions above for using a preconfigured data directory, then execute the following command:

Warning

It is imperative that you specify the USING_OVM=true environment variable in the command below. Failing to specify this will cause l2geth to return invalid execution traces, or panic at startup.

USING_OVM=true \
  ETH1_SYNC_SERVICE_ENABLE=false \
  RPC_API=eth,rollup,net,web3,debug \
  RPC_ADDR=0.0.0.0 \
  RPC_CORS_DOMAIN=* \
  RPC_ENABLE=true \
  RPC_PORT=8545 \
  RPC_VHOSTS=* \
  geth --datadir <path to data directory>

This command is the minimum required to run Legacy Geth and expose a functioning RPC endpoint. As before, l2geth takes all standard go-ethereum flags so you can customize the configuration as needed.

As mentioned above, don't forget to specify --rollup.historicalrpc on op-geth to properly route requests for historical execution to Legacy Geth.

Since Legacy Geth is read-only, it is safe to run multiple Legacy Geth nodes behind a load balancer.

#Historical Execution vs. Historical Data Routing

Only requests for historical execution will be routed to Legacy Geth. Everything else will be served by op-geth directly. The term historical execution refers to RPC methods that need to execute transactions prior to bedrock (not just read data from the database):

  • eth_call

  • eth_estimateGas

  • debug_traceBlockByNumber

  • debug_traceBlockByHash

  • debug_traceCall

  • debug_traceTransaction

If you do not need these RPC methods for historical data, then you do not need to run Legacy Geth at all.

#Troubleshooting

#401 Unauthorized: Signature Invalid

If you see a log that looks like this in op-node:

WARN [12-13|15:53:20.263] Derivation process temporary error       attempts=80 err="stage 0 failed resetting: temp: failed to find the L2 Heads to start from: failed to fetch current L2 forkchoice state: failed to find the finalized L2 block: failed to determine L2BlockRef of finalized, could not get payload: 401 Unauthorized: signature is invalid

1

It means that the bl-node is unable to authenticate with op-geth's authenticated RPC using the JWT secret. To fix:

  1. Check that the JWT secret is correct in both services.

  2. Check that op-geth's authenticated RPC is enabled, and that the URL is correct.

#403 Forbidden: Invalid Host Specified

If you see a log that looks like this in bl-node:

{"err":"403 Forbidden: invalid host specified\n","lvl":"error","msg":"error getting latest header","t":"2022-12-13T22:29:18.932833159Z"}

It means that you have not whitelisted op-node's host with op-geth. To fix:

  1. Make sure that the --authrpc.vhosts parameter in op-geth is either set to the correct host, or *.

  2. Check that op-geth's authenticated RPC is enabled, and that the URL is correct.

#Failed to Load P2P Config

If you see a log that looks like this in bl-node:

CRIT [12-13|13:46:21.386] Application failed                       message="failed to load p2p config: failed to load p2p discovery options: failed to open discovery db: mkdir /p2p: permission denied"

It means that the op-node does not have write access to the P2P discovery or peerstore directories. To fix:

  1. Make sure that the op-node has write access to the P2P directory. By default, this is /p2p.

  2. Set the P2P directory to somewhere the op-node can access via the --p2p.discovery.path and --p2p.peerstore.path parameters.

  3. Set the discovery path to memory to disable persistence via the --p2p.discovery.path and --p2p.peerstore.path parameters.

#Wrong Chain

If you see a log that looks like this in op-node:

{"attempts":183,"err":"stage 0 failed resetting: temp: failed to find the L2 Heads to start from: wrong chain L1: genesis: 0x4104895a540d87127ff11eef0d51d8f63ce00a6fc211db751a45a4b3a61a9c83:8106656, got 0x12e2c18a3ac50f74d3dd3c0ed7cb751cc924c2985de3dfed44080e683954f1dd:8106656","lvl":"warn","msg":"Derivation process temporary error","t":"2022-12-13T23:31:37.855253213Z"}

It means that the bl-node is pointing to the wrong chain. To fix:

  1. Verify that the bl-node's L1 URL is pointing to the correct L1 for the given network.

  2. Verify that the bl-node's rollup config/--network parameter is set to the correct network.

  3. Verify that the bl-node's L2 URL is pointing to the correct instance of op-geth, and that op-geth is properly initialized for the given network.

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