Weekly Update: W/C 02nd September, 2019

Hello everyone 👋

What a busy week.

The first full week of self onboarding for the network has run pretty smoothly. We now have 262 nodes in the network overall, 22 of them self on-boarded, with an additional 23 in the process of being setup.

45 new nodes in 6 days!

In the coming few weeks we will be moving from a manual activation switch in the network (which we’re using for testing and feedback at the moment), to a fully automated process.

We’ll also be lifting the restrictions around the number of nodes that a single individual can run.

Within Edge Host the dApps themselves - Agent, Host and CDN - are all automatically updated. Edge CLI ( edge-cli ) however needs to be updated manually by those running a self on-boarded node.

We’re improving it all the time, with daily builds being pushed to the APT repository at archive.edge.network. Version 1.2 was released yesterday containing minor fixes and introducing the stop command.

We also removed the risk of starting Agent more than once, and have improved the flexibility in the auth component, adding the ability to use env variables.

We are working towards opening up the Github repository for edge-cli to allow access to release notes and the like, and are looking at methods for letting users know that there’s an update.

In the meantime, here’s how you update it:

1.

$ sudo apt update

2.

$ sudo apt install edge-cli

Easy.

As expected, the new nodes coming in to the network unearthed a few items that needed attention, and this has been our primary focus this week. For example, we found a case whereby Host was failing to properly resolve DNS for origin domains for the Content Distribution service in certain cases, which was as a result of issues with local resolvers. The fix for this was to build in a call to an internal resolver in the network.

To assist with this sort of thing in future the team added nslookup to the remote commands available to Agent, which makes DNS debugging much easier for us in light of some failing lookups we were seeing earlier in the week.

Outside of testing on the back of self onboarding moving to live the team have also been progressing the updated interfaces for the next milestone release of Publish. It has a new name as well.

The interfaces for Edge DNS have also progressed significantly, and we expect them to be moving in to integration with mainnet next week. This will be our first fully public service – a major milestone for the network.

There are a few updates for my.edge.network, specifically tidying up the node interface now that multiple nodes can be added to a single account. This will be a point release, as the service will ultimately be merged with the interfaces being developed for service use.

We also extended my.edge.network account update hooks to handle password changes to create new ACL tokens.

The anonymous account functionality mentioned last week has progressed significantly. We have progressed the build to enable enhanced account functionality, including 2fa, and has also been further the security approach through the use of per field authentication for account records.

Collision testing for the hashing mechanism behind the anonymous account system is underway. We’re running hundreds of millions of account creation events this weekend to understand the collision rate for the chosen mechanism.

We’re working a method that makes the crypto key as user friendly as possible. So while it would easy to just use an extremely long code, we think it’s overkill in this sort of setup.

Work to update the network explorer continued, specifically plugging it in to the Host telemetry layer, which involves reading individual node session data, enabling the correct rendering of Host status.

On which, the team improved the detail of network session storage by adding Datacenter, which significantly improves our ability to track devices through the network explorer.

This work goes in to code review on Monday, and we expect to have the node status back to providing real time telemetry very soon.

We progressed discussions to migrate one of our largest customers to the latest releases of our web services. We also discussed the process of moving them on to our DNS service, and migrating form a VPC of CDN to the mainnet. Watch this space.

We began work on API integration for another mobile application for an existing customer.

We moved forward with work on the Golang build of the Content Distribution layer for the network. This is a stripped down and lightweight evolution of the existing NodeJS web service, but specifically tailored to the network where a smaller app footprint has a significant performance benefit.

And we completed initial Gateway DAG consensus tests in the testnet (test.network). The DAG is used to distribute shared and hashed storage data across the network, a key component ahead of the beta release of storage on testnet at the end of the month.

Finally, we added new Gateway to mainnet (non-earning), right here in London.

And that’s it for this week! Thank you for your ongoing support.