I’ve been staking with someone else for the last year and decided to deploy my own node.
April '21
I started with a combined Transcoder/Orchestrator in round 2120, initially just to see how it all worked
May '21
I split the roles and put the Orchestrator on a VPS in the Cloud to ensure it is highly reliable with a good network connection and more readily available to others in the EU zone.
Fees:
Reward Cut: 10%
Fee Cut: 50%
Once I have covered the initial costs of buying GPU’s and setting up the environment, I plan to reduce the fee percentages to share more with anyone who chooses to delegate to my node.
Node Configuration:
I built the combined node on my Windows PC which is running a GTX 1080 and an RTX 2080 Ti. Now the Orchestrator has been separated out and moved to the cloud, the PC is running as a standalone transcoder.
I have since added a discrete mining rig running a single RTX 3090 with a second card on the way.
I’m also running a Virtual Ubuntu machine where I have deployed Grafana and Prometheus to monitor the Orchestrator and Transcoders. I used this guide from @vires-in-numeris to get it up and running:
Do you have any updates since May '20? Perhaps you could tell us what kind of GPUs you run, and how many? Are you getting any traffic coming through the node? Did you install Prometheus / Grafana monitoring?
I am running two Transcoders, my Windows PC with the GTX 1080 and RTX 2080 Ti and a Linux rig with the two RTX 3090 cards and this is where I am running the Dual Mining script.
I have received my first winning ticket payment. Now I know how this works, I am changing the Cut amounts as follows:
Reward Cut: 0% - Sharing the full amount with any delegators, including myself)
Fee Cut: 100% - Retaining the full amount in the short term to cover the costs of claiming the daily reward. I am aiming to claim on a daily basis but this will depend on the ongoing price of Gas.
Hopefully, the combination of Dual Mining and winning ticket rewards will cover the ETH costs of running the node and I can grow the LPT balance over time.
Taking a lead from NYC PHILANTHROPY I have decided to donate a portion of the income (10% of Orchestrator rewards and ETH fees) to a local charity here in the Channel Islands, Holidays for Heroes. They provide free holidays in Jersey for past and present members of H.M. Armed Forces with injuries in mind or body attributable to their service.
Donations will be made quarterly, starting on 1st July 2021, and receipts can be made available on request
I have set the Reward Cut to 10% to accommodate this. Cut and donation percentages will be reviewed on a quarterly basis depending on Node income.
Unfortunately not, I will donate my own FIAT funds to them to the equivalent value of LPT/ETH earned so I don’t lose out on the tx fees. I plan to reinvest the remainder of the LPT/ETH earned to grow my holding so very little point in converting some to FIAT only to have to go the other way with additional funds!
I have reverted to a combined node running as both an Orchestrator and Transcoder using just the GTX 1080 and the RTX 2080 Ti.
As the current rate of incoming work does not justify having all the cards on the Livepeer node, I have repurposed and expanded the rig to 4x RTX 3090 cards. The income from the rig is covering the cost of claiming the daily reward calls whilst the gas price is so low.
Using a dedicated mining application instead of dual mining with Livepeer, I have increased the OC setting on the cards to maximise the hashrate.
I am currently maintaining 30/30 calls in the hope of attracting others to stake with my Orchestrator.
The first donation to my local charity has been completed.
I’ve switched things around a bit; I bought two GTX 1070 cards, second hand. An original NVIDIA Founders Edition and an EVGA SC.
I’ve put together an LPT rig with these two cards and my original GTX 1080. They all benchmark with 18 sessions on Linux so I now have a single, standalone Transcoder running with the 3 cards.
I have stopped the Transcoder on my Window PC and will start this up again if I need to perform maintenance on the LPT rig to maintain connectivity.
I have deployed a local Geth Full Node and will reconfigure my Orchestrator once it has completed syncing.
Up to the L2 migration in February, I had spent $25,000 in ETH fees. I was lucky enough to attract stakes from two delegators late last year which allowed me to cover these and increase the level of transcoding capability I could provide to the Livepeer network.
I expanded from the single node I had at home to 4 VPS nodes near to the ingest locations LAX, NYC, PRG/FRA and SIN to increase the node performance and attract more transcoding work.
I also deployed 2 Arbitrum nodes on Contabo, one in the US and one in EU, but these have not been performant enough so migrated to a single VPS with Hetzner.
I also withdrew 2000 LPT and made it available to Titan Node’s startup grant and have helped 2 Orchestrators in the last 5 months.
Unfortunately, I recently lost the second of the two major delegators which means I have to reduce my footprint as I can no longer cover the costs involved. I will be shutting down at least two of my VPS nodes to reduce the monthly fees.
As the start up grant has been returned to me, this has now been delegated to my own node as I am no longer in a position to provide assistance to other Orchestrators.
I have also updated my Reward and Fee amounts as follows in the hope that I will attract new delegators in the coming months.