Tezos Bakers Get Ready: Athens to Babylon

We are about to see a number of significant changes coming down the pipe-line with the new Babylon protocol for Tezos, and Bakers need to be ready.

If you have any other issues please let us now and we will try and replicate the problem and hopefully find a solution.

Update: You need to pull down the latest version of Babylon as new bug fixes have been appiled.

Testing Phase

We are currently in the testing phase of Babylon which is due to go live at block height 655260 assuming testing goes well and is then successfully promoted. Current timeline still looks good and we expect it to switch over on the 17th October 2019. Bakers must prepare so that this upgrade can be as smooth as possible. We have noticed a few possible gotchas, so we have decided to document the upgrade process. We have successfully run this on macOS Mojave 10.14.6 and Ubuntu 18.4.

Node Upgrade

The first step is getting the node upgraded and we recommend this is done immediately. We upgraded our test nodes to this version and then after 5 successful days running, we switched over our production node and so far we have not seen any issues.

First step is to check your current build:

$ git rev-parse HEAD

If the hash is a67ca32c6d5adec422f24715aa91c2eca071a276 you are good and running on the latest build. If not then you need to upgrade and the sooner the better. Stop your node, baker, endorser and accuser but make sure you have no up and coming baking or endorsement rights. We don’t have many long gaps between endorsements, so we switch it to a backup machine, so we give ourselves plenty of time to upgrade our production box. Of course, close down all your baking processes before you start up on the backup box as you don’t want to risk double baking which would be very costly.

To recompile do the following steps and make sure each step is successful. This took no more than a few minutes on our machines.

$ git checkout mainnet
$ git pull
$ make build-deps
$ eval $(opam env)
$ make

We prefer to run each command one at a time can but you can run it as concatenation of commands but you need to make sure each step runs successfully.

Alternative

$ git checkout mainnet && git pull && make build-deps &&  eval $(opam env) && make