The larger our fleet gets, the more errors we are able to identify that cause instability to Helium’s miner software – this makes our miners more optimized and reliable over time.
Some users were still experiencing sync problems or hanging miner software due to a misconfigured configuration file that should be there to increase sync speed. The issues were identified over the weekend and every miner is currently getting a fix update. Please give each miner roughly 6-8 hours to show you some status in Helium Explorer or Hotspotty Explorer and ideally don’t disconnect it over that period.
Here’s a technical explaination on what happened:
There is a configuration file called docker.config that can override several settings in the sys.config file of the miner docker container. This configuration file gets altered mainly by the instasync script and on first device flash, as well as some other scripts sometimes.
If this configuration file gets corrupted, the miner software sometimes (not always, but sometimes) has problems to correctly boot up. We have done the following now:
- We replaced the configuration file with a working one and blocked scripts to alter the file. That’s why instasync is currently disabled (and will be re-enabled in the next few days).
- We are grabbing a snapshot from the blockchain that is at max 240 blocks behind and adding it to the miner data folder.
- We load the snapshot with a miner docker command and resume the syncing.
- We double-check if syncing is resumed with another command.
If you want more detailed information, please let us know, we’re glad to be as transparent as possible here.
We want to especially thank our early customers for the early trust you are giving to us. We understand that things in the Helium space can sometimes be frustrating, and you can imagine how we as developers feel when something doesn’t work out as well as planned even after rigorous testing. Sometimes, something just shows up if the fleet gets larger that wasn’t caught in the testing before. That’s typical life as a software developer.
Thank you all! More updates about dashboard functionalities and fixes coming soon!