How to add an additional drive?

We recommend to run a new node, if you want to add an additional hard drive.

You can, of course, use RAID instead, but this reduncancy not required for the network's operation - the network itself has a built-in redundancy due to the usage of erasure codes: the customer needs only a subset of pieces out of total to reconstruct the whole file.

If you would like to use RAID anyway, please note - your node will not receive more customer data only because you use RAID, this will not affect the node selection.

Using RAID0 (LVM, spanned drives, JBOD, etc.) is not recommended - with only one disk failure the whole node is lost.

Even using RAID5/6 with today's disks is too risky due to bit failure rate on disks with high capacity: High risk to lose a RAID5 volume during rebuild.

You can also read the discussion RAID vs No RAID on our forum.

General rules to run multiple nodes in the same network

If you have only one external address, then you need to have a unique port for each storagenode. The default port for storagenode is 28967, protocols TCP+UDP.

# the public address of the node, useful for nodes behind NAT
contact.external-address: "my.ddns.tld:28967"

# the public address of the node, useful for nodes behind NAT
contact.external-address: "my.ddns.tld:28967"

If you want to add an additional new node, you can use the next free port or simply increase the previous used port by 1, for example - 28968.

If you run multiple nodes on the same device, you will need a unique port for the dashboard too. The default port for the dashboard is 14002 TCP.

# server address of the api gateway and frontend app
# console.address: 127.0.0.1:14002

# server address of the api gateway and frontend app
# console.address: 127.0.0.1:14002

You can use the same rule as for the node's port to select any free port or simply increase the port number by 1, for example - 14003. Don't forget to uncomment the parameter in your config (remove # with space after, each option should be started without spaces)!

If you run a binary version of storagenode (GUI Install - Windows for example) or a docker version with --network host option, you also need to have unique internal ports.

For the node's CLI dashboard, the default internal address and port is 127.0.0.1:7778, it is specified in the server.private-address option.

# private address to listen on
server.private-address: 127.0.0.1:7778

# private address to listen on
server.private-address: 127.0.0.1:7778

For the second and any further nodes, you need to specify a unique port for each node there, too.

The next parameter to change the port is server.address, it contains an internal listen node's address and port, specified as :28967 (this is equivalent to 0.0.0.0:28967, i.e. it will bind to any local IP) by default.

# public address to listen on
server.address: :28967

# public address to listen on
server.address: :28967

You need to make these changes for the second and any further additional nodes as well.

Forwarding options

For example, you decided to configure your second node with port 28968. Then you can forward this port to the internal 28967 port, if the destination local IP is different from the first node. If both nodes are running on the same host, then you need to forward 28968 to 28968 and use this port in the contact.external-address: option of the config.yaml (in case of binary) or -e ADDRESS parameter of docker run in case of docker. If you use a binary version (or docker run with --network host), you also need to specify this port in the server.address: too.

In summary:

1. you need to change the contact.external-address: option in config.yaml in case of binary or -e ADDRESS parameter of docker run in case of docker to use the external address and port, i.e. my.ddns.tld:28968.

2. if the second node is running on another device, you can forward 28968 to 28967, nothing else is needed to change in the second node configuration except the external address above;

3. if the second node is running on the same device as the first one, you need to forward 28968 to 28968, change the server.address: option in the config.yaml (in case of binary or docker run with --network host) or -p 28968:28967 parameter in docker run command (in case of docker without --network host).

Docker version

We assume that the second node would be run on the same device as a first one.

1. Go to your router and forward port 28968 to 28968 and the IP of your device.

2. docker run will contain:

docker run .... -p 28968:28967/tcp -p 28968:28967/udp -p 172.0.0.1:14003:14002 -e ADDRESS=my.ddns.tld:28968 ....

docker run .... -p 28968:28967/tcp -p 28968:28967/udp -p 172.0.0.1:14003:14002 -e ADDRESS=my.ddns.tld:28968 ....

Please, use the full command from Storage Node, the above is an excerpt showing only the changed parts.

Binary version

We assume that the second node would be run on the same device as the first one.

1. Go to your router and forward port 28968 to 28968 and IP of your device.

Change parameters in your config.yaml (see Where can I find the config.yaml?):

# the public address of the node, useful for nodes behind NAT
contact.external-address: "my.ddns.tld:28968"

# the public address of the node, useful for nodes behind NAT
contact.external-address: "my.ddns.tld:28968"

# public address to listen on
server.address: :28968

# public address to listen on
server.address: :28968

# private address to listen on
server.private-address: 127.0.0.1:7779

# private address to listen on
server.private-address: 127.0.0.1:7779

# server address of the api gateway and frontend app
console.address: 127.0.0.1:14003

# server address of the api gateway and frontend app
console.address: 127.0.0.1:14003

3. Save the config.yaml and restart the storagenode service (see How do I shut down my node for system maintenance?).