How to get Ethereum Full Node with PoS on GCP(Google Cloud Platform)

This section describes how to launch and connect to Ethereum Full Node with PoS in a Google Compute environment using the available Cloud Launcher offering.

1. Open Ethereum Full Node with PoS listing on GCP Marketplace
2. Click Get Started.

• It will take you to the agreement page. On this page, you can change the project from the project selector on top navigator bar as shown in the below screenshot.

• Accept the Terms and agreements by ticking the checkbox and clicking on the AGREE button.

• It will show you the successfully agreed popup page. Click on Deploy.

• On deployment page, give a name to your deployment.

• In Deployment Service Account section, click on Existing radio button and Choose a service account from the Select a Service Account dropdown.

• If you don't see any service account in dropdown, then change the radio button to New Account and create the new service account here.
• If after selecting New Account option, you get below permission error message then please reach out to your GCP admin to create service account by following Step by step guide to create GCP Service Account and then refresh this deployment page once the service account is created, it should be available in the dropdown.

You are missing resourcemanager.projects.setIamPolicy permission, which is needed to set the required roles on the created Service Account

• For zone, you must select us-central1-a . The VM can be deployed only in us-central1-a
• Optionally change the number of cores and amount of memory. ( This defaults to 2 vCPUs and 7.5 GB ram)
• Optionally change the boot disk type and size. (This defaults to ‘Standard Persistent Disk’ and size 500 GB respectively.)

• Optionally change the network name and subnetwork names. Be sure that whichever network you specify has ports 22 (for ssh) and 3389 (for RDP) exposed.

• Make sure to enable Google API access by checking the “Allow full access to all of Google Cloud Platforms APIs on the VM” checkbox to work the VM properly as shown in below screenshot.

• Click Deploy when you are done.
• Ethereum Full Node with PoS will begin deploying.

3. A summary page displays when the compute engine is successfully deployed. Click on the Instance link to go to the instance page .

4. On the instance page, click on the “SSH” button, select “Open in browser window”.

5. This will open SSH window in a browser.
6. Run below command to set the password for “ubuntu” user

sudo passwd ubuntu

7. Now the password for ubuntu user is set, you can connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local windows machine using RDP or linux machine using Remmina.

8. To connect using RDP via Windows machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page as highlighted below

9. Then From your local windows machine, goto “start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote desktop connection”

10. In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, paste the external ip and click connect

11. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in step 6 to authenticate. Click OK

12. Now you are connected to out of box Ethereum Full Node with PoS environment via Windows machines.

13. To connect using RDP via Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page,then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.

Note: If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, firstInstall Remmina as per your linux distribution.

14. In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from dropdown and paste the external ip and click enter.

15. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in step 6 to authenticate. Click OK

16. Now you are connected to out of box Ethereum Full Node with PoS environment via Linux machine.

17. Ethereum Full Node directories:

Ethereum home directory location is /home/ubuntu/ethereum

Data directory location is /home/ubuntu/ethereum/datadir

18. Monitoring and managing node sync process :

The VM automatically starts the sync process on startup. To verify if the sync is in progress, run below commands

ps -ef|grep geth

If sync is in progress, you will see the below highlighted process running

You can also verify the sync process by monitoring the sync log as shown below

tail -f /var/log/cloud-init-output.log

You can monitor the lighthouse logs by running -

Note: If you encounter JWT authorization error or connection refused error while running the below command, please follow Lighthouse Troubleshooting Guide. to fix them.

sudo journalctl -f -u lighthousebeacon.service -o cat | ccze -A

To stop the sync process, simply run below command :

sudo killall -HUP geth

To restart the sync process, run below command .

Note: Make sure below command is executed from terminal inside Remote desktop GUI to avoid process termination

sudo nohup geth --http --http.addr "0.0.0.0" --http.port "8545" --http.corsdomain "*" --config /home/ubuntu/ethereum/eth_config.toml >> /var/log/cloud-init-output.log 2>&1 &

19. Tracking sync progress

You can track the sync progress by attaching to the running geth console and running the monitoring script as shown below . Note that if the progress is shown 99% then the node is mostly synced:

sudo geth attach --datadir /home/ubuntu/ethereum/datadir/

this will connect to the console, then run

loadScript("/home/ubuntu/ethereum/sync_status.js")

20. Accessing Metamask Ethereum wallet

The VM comes with Metamask the most popular Ethereum wallet, preinstalled in Firefox browser.
Connect to the VM via Remote desktop, open the Firefox Browser and you will see metamask plugin in the browser

21. Click on the Metamask icon, complete the configuration by following the instructions.
    Once the Metamask is configured, you wil see Metamask is running on Ethereum Mainnet Network.
22. If you want to connect Metamask on localhost, select localhost 8545 from Metamask Network dropdown. You should be able to connect to localhost as shown:

23. If you don’t see localhost and other testnetwork options under network dropdown, please click on show/hide link as shown below-

24. It will take you to setting menu. Here you enable show test network option and save the changes.

25. Close the setting page and reopen network dropdown. Now you should be able to see all the test networks.

26. This offer now comes with Checkpoint Sync enabled by default. Checkpoint sync prioritises syncing to the head of the chain quickly so that the node can perform its duties. If you need genesis sync then please add –allow-insecure-genesis-sync in lighthousebeacon service file located at /etc/systemd/system/lighthousebeacon.service.

27. The Checkpoint sync doesn’t come with archival node. If you want to run archival node for analysis purpose then follow below steps:

• Open the lighthousebeacon.service file in the vi editor using below commands

sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/lighthousebeacon.service

• Inside the editor click “i” to enable insert mode and add –reconstruct-historic-states flag in the file as shown in below screenshot. Save the file by pressing ESC then :wq keys.

• Once done run below daemon-reload command to reload the changes.

• Make a note of following important points while opting for historic data:
• Reconstructed states will consume several gigabytes or hundreds of gigabytes of disk space
• Reconstruction will only begin once backfill sync has completed and oldest_block_slot is equal to 0.
• While reconstruction is running the node will temporarily pause migrating new data to the freezer database. This will lead to the database increasing in size temporarily

For more information on Checkpoint Sync and Accessing historical blocks please refer to Official Checkpoint Sync documentation