Prepare Farmer SSDs

warning

This guide was created for Gemeni 3h testnet and will be updated to mainnet once released.

Introduction

This guide will help you prepare your drives for farming on the Autonomys network. Specifically, this guide is meant for users who are planning to use dedicated drives.

warning

Use extra caution when preparing your drives. These actions will wipe the data on your drives and could result in data loss if you wipe the incorrect drive!

Debian/Ubuntu - Manual Method

To prepare your drives in Debain/Ubuntu, we need to perform the following actions:

1. Identify the drives we want to prepare
2. Wipe the drives
3. Format the drives
4. Create a mount point
5. Create an FSTAB entry
6. Mount the drive
7. Verify drives
8. Set Permissions

We will go through each step one at a time.

Identify the Drives to Prepare

We need to be absolutely certain that we are preparing the correct drives. I use the following command to print out my block devices

lsblk

In my case, I get the following output

I am using an ARM device, so my drives look a bit different (mmcblk2 is an eMMC storage drive). However, I know that I have four M.2 NVME drives, and those are the drives I want to prepare. If your OS is installed onto an NVME drive, it will look similar to this

As you can see the nvme0n1 drive has 3 partitions (p1, p2, p3). The partition nvme0n1p2 is mounted to /boot which is a clear indicator it is a boot drive. I would make sure to skip this drive. Make note of the drives you wish to prepare, as the next step we will wipe them, deleting all partitions and data. You may see sda instead of nvme0n1 if you have SATA SSDs instead of NVME drives.

Wipe the Drives

Now that you know what drives you want to prepare, we can wipe them with a single command

wipefs --all /dev/<DEVICE LOCATION>

Replace <DEVICE LOCATION> with your device. For instance, nvme0n1 (NVME) or sda (SATA SSD) for me, but make sure to use what is applicable for your setup. Do this for each drive you want to prepare.

Format the Drives

Next, we will format the drive in the most optimal way for Autonomys. Again, this can be done with a single command for each drive

mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -T largefile4 -F /dev/<DEVICE LOCATION>

• mkfs.ext4 the recommended file system for Linux is ext4
• -m 0 sets the reserved space to 0. Reserve space is not needed for SSDs used only for Autonomys
• -T largefile4 optimizes the inode and blocksize for large files like Autonomys uses. This gives you more space to work with.
• -F bypasses the "Are you sure?" prompt, you can leave this off if you want to be prompted

Create a Mount Point

The drive is prepped, but we need to create a mount point for the drives. I like to mount all my drives on /media/autonomys. You can choose a different location, but make note of it, as you will need to specify the mount location when running the Farmer. This guide will use my method but can be adapted as needed.

Create the parent directory for our mount points

sudo mkdir /media/autonomys

Then create a folder for each drive. I like to use the pattern of farm-<LAST 5 of UUID>. You can get the UUID of each drive by running

lsblk -f

Which gives you an output like this

The UUIDs are the long strings that look like this 89e4c011-302a-41ef-9f55-b9d2cd0ff54d. I take the last five characters and use it to create a unique folder to mount the drive. This is personal preferance. You can name your folder something like farm-1, farm-2, etc.. if you wish. Using this example, the mount point for the drive with the UUID in this example would be /media/autonomys/farm-ff54d.

For each drive, create a unique sub-folder to mount it. Using my example above

sudo mkdir /media/autonomys/farm-ff54d

I will do this for all four of my drives until I have something like this

Create an FSTAB entry

In order for the drives to be mounted automatically when you reboot, you will need to add an entry into your FSTAB for each drive. Grab the UUIDs for all of your drives, we will need these to specify the drive in the FSTAB file. Open up the FSTAB file

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Move to the bottom and create a new section called # Autonomys and add entry for each drive following this format:

# Autonomys
UUID=<YOUR UUID> /media/autonomys/<YOUR MOUTN POINT> ext4 defaults,noatime,nofail  0 0

Here is mine completed

Mount the Drive

Now that we have the mount points, and the FSTAB file created, we can mount all the drives with a single command (this only has to be done once, after this the system will use the FSTAB to automatically mount them)

sudo mount -av

Then update systemd to load the latest FSTAB changes

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Verify

Everything should be mounted, we can confirm this by checking

df -h

You should see each of your drives mounted to the folders you specified in the FSTAB

Set Permissions

Lastly, we need to set the permissions so that Autonomys can access the drives for farming. To do this we will set the ownership to nobody:nogroup for all sub-folders of our main autonomys directory

sudo chown -R nobody:nogroup /media/autonomys/*

Now that the drives are prepared, they are ready to be added to the Farmer. You will need to make note of the mount points for each drive, as you will need to specify it in the Autonomys Farmer command.

Debian/Ubuntu - Script

The script performs essentially the same actions as the Manual method. There will be a few prompts which you must respond to, but it is otherwise automated. The script will check for a boot partition in order to prevent wiping the OS drive, but always be sure to skip the drives you do not want to wipe. The script will automatically unmount mounted drives if necessary.

Currently the script is only setup to detect NVME drives, I will eventually adapt it for SATA drives too.

Identify the Drives to Prepare

We need to be absolutely certain that we are preparing the correct drives. I use the following command to print out my block devices

lsblk

In my case, I get the following output

I am using an ARM device, so my drives look a bit different (mmcblk2 is an eMMC storage drive). However, I know that I have four M.2 NVME drives, and those are the drives I want to prepare. If your OS is installed onto an NVME drive, it will look similar to this

As you can see the nvme0n1 drive has 3 partitions (p1, p2, p3). The partition nvme0n1p2 is mounted to /boot which is a clear indicator it is a boot drive. I would make sure to skip this drive. Make note of the drives you wish to prepare, as the next step we will wipe them, deleting all partitions and data. You may see sda instead of nvme0n1 if you have SATA SSDs instead of NVME drives.

The script will prompt you before wiping each drive, so make sure you confirm at each prompt if you really want to wipe the drive.

Clone the github repo

clone the scripts repo

git clone https://github.com/hakehardware/scripts.git

Then change to the scripts directory

cd scripts

Make Script Executable

Now make the nvme_prep.sh script executable

chmod +x nvme_prep.sh

Run the Script

And then run the script as root (required)

sudo ./nvme_prep.sh

The script will automatically wipe the drives, create mount points, and mount the drives with the correct permissions.

Verify

When the script finishes, you can verify everything was completed successfully. We can confirm this by checking

df -h

You should see each of your drives mounted to the folders based on the UUID of the drives in the FSTAB

Windows

To prepare your drives on Windows, we need to perform the following actions:

1. Identify the drives we want to prepare
2. Wipe the drives
3. Partition, Format and Label the drive

We will go through each step one at a time. This guide will use diskpart to prepare the drives. To get started, press WIN + x. Then select "Terminal (Admin)". Then type in

diskpart

When ready it should look something like this

Identify the Drives to Prepare

Start by listing the disks with

list disk

Typically the best way to infer which disks are which is by size. Here I know my OS is on a 2TB drive so the one with 18XX GB is my OS drive.

If you still are not sure what drive is what, you can try to list the volumes.

I know volumes 0-2 are my OS drive, and I know volume 3 is a spare disk I use for storing my Code. Using these two commands I can identify the two disks I do not want to wipe (Disk 0 and Disk 3). Note that the volume numbers do not correspond to the drive numbers. I know Disk 3 is the "Code" volume because the size is 447GB which I can see is the size of Disk 3.

You can also use Disk Management, which can be found by pressing WIN + x again and selecting "Disk Management". Here it is a bit more clear (the Disk numbers should corresond to what we saw in diskpart)

So again, we can see Disk 0 and Disk 3 I do not want to wipe. It is important to take the time to identify the correct disk, as you will lose data in the next step if you select the wrong one.

Wipe the Drives

You will want to fully complete the following process before moving to another disk. Select the first drive in diskpart with

select disk <DISK NUMBER>

Change the <DISK NUMBER> to the number identified in the previous step. Then clean the drive

clean

The drive should now be wiped and ready for formatting.

Partition, Format, and Label the drive

Create the primary partition

create partition primary

Format the drive with NTFS and give it a Label

format fs=ntfs label=<YOUR LABEL> quick

Replace <YOUR LABEL> with a label of your choosing. It's best to choose something that makes the disk easily identifiable.

Assign a drive letter

assign letter=X

Now repeat all the above steps again for each drive, setting a unique LABEL. Here is the full process for one of my disks

Verify

You can verify the disk is ready by opening up "This PC" and looking at the mounted drives

Your drive is now ready to be attached to a Farmer!