Getting Started

This guide will be using a 4GB Raspberry Pi Model 4 with a MicroSD card and a POE (Power Over Ethernet) hat. You will do all "Getting Started" steps on both your Relay and Block Producing node.

Note: A POE hat is not necessary for this guide. We use it for convenience as we can run many nodes attached to a POE switch. Also, MicroSD cards are not ideal on some servers that require a lot of reading or writing as they will be slower and fail much earlier and more often than something like an NVME/M.2 SSD (you can use those if you have them, but we aren't covering it here). Since this is on a testnet and we are doing this for educational purposes we will accept the risk. Lastly, this guide is applicable to other ARM SBC's such as an Orange Pi or Rock Pi. You may notice that on the cardano-node repository, the minimum RAM requirement is 24GB. Fortunately we can get by with lower RAM on testnets due to utilization, chain-size, node count, etc.

Configure Your MicroSD Card

We will be using Balena Etcher to write the appropriate Debian image to our MicroSD card.

• Download and install Balena Etcher onto your machine.

• Etch Debian Bookworm onto your Raspberry Pi.

Initial Steps

Power on your Raspberry Pi and login with "root" and no password.

Create a new user. I will be using "preview", but feel free to use something different.

adduser preprod

You will be asked to create a password and fill out user information. You may leave the user info blank.

Next, add your new user to the sudoers group.

usermod -aG sudo preprod

Before we switch to our new user, we need to update and upgrade our device.

apt update -y && apt upgrade -y

Then let's install a couple prerequisites.

apt install -y sudo curl wget ufw chrony fail2ban unzip htop

Login to your new user.

su - preprod

Before moving on, lets change our hostname.

sudo nano /etc/hostname

Replace the current hostname with the hostname of your choosing. We will name our relay "preprodrelay1" and our blockproducer will be "preprodbp"

Save the file in nano with ctrl+o then press enter to confirm. Exit nano with ctrl+x and reboot.

sudo reboot