Here lies information and solutions regarding Drosera testnet questions and errors…

Networking

InsufficientPeers

To address one common question from testnet operators: if you encounter InsufficientPeers WARN level messages in your logs, this is ok. Likely your operator is the only operator monitoring a trap and so there are no other operators (peers) on that trap to share results with.

In the future and on mainnet, traps will want to have multiple operators monitoring them for decentralization and uptime. Then this message wouldn't happen as there are peers in a traps own operator network.

Red Liveness

Operators! GR and welcome. Great to see so many getting involved in our testnet!

VPS Operators

For those of you seeing lots of red and are running on a cloud VPS, there are 3 possible problems occurring.

• It is possible that you have not opened the RPC port on your VPS. This means that the seed-node is unable to query liveness data from the operator on that port, and therefor cannot confirm that the operator is operational. This results in red bars in the frontend. Make sure you open the RPC port which is the same as the server port
• It is possible that you have not configured the p2p public ip address of your VPS in the drosera.toml file or with command line flags. You need to make sure that --network-external-p2p-address is followed by your public IPv4 address in the service file, or (if you are using a toml file for your operator config) that you are setting the public IP like this

[network]
external_p2p_address = "VPS_PUBLIC_IP" # Required, provide your own

• It is possible that your cloud provider has applied a network firewall to the VPS you are using and is blocking ports. You will need to adjust the network firewall (this is not ufw or firewalld) in your cloud provider or apply a new network firewall to your VPS in order to allow traffic to flow to the listening ports on the drosera-operator service.

Local Operators

For those of you seeing lots of red bars in the frontend liveness data and are running LOCALLY, remember, you are running the operator behind your router. You will need to do some other network troubleshooting in order to get liveness data to show up in the frontend. This process is different for every router and home setup, but I will attempt to give instructions that will get you most of the way there.

Option #1: Persistent VPN and Cloud Proxy (More secure but requires networking knowledge and configuration) These instructions will be high level because there are many ways to skin this cat

• Setup a cloud VPS with a persistent VPN connection to your operator in your local infrastructure (tailscale, wireguard, etc.)
• On the VPS configure a layer 4 proxy to forward incoming traffic on a defined port to the VPN IP of your operator. Do this for both p2p and server ports
• Server Port and P2P Port on the operator will need to match the proxy ports to avoid confusion and misconfiguration.
• You will then need to change your --network-external-p2p-address value to the public ip address of your proxy VPS