Solana Validator Identity Transition

During a software upgrade, or for any other reason warranting a failover to a secondary node, you can use these Ansible playbooks to move your voting identity from a Primary Node to a Backup Node, and vice versa. These scripts are modeled after mvine's original guide on Validator Identity Transition Demo

Disclaimers

• SINGLE IP ADDRESS
  As of now, we have only tested this on two nodes running behind the same public facing IP. If your public node IPs are different, that may cause unexpected behavior.

• RELIABLE CONNECTION
  These scripts will work assuming you have a reliable and fast connection (10 mbps or better) from your Ansible host to both Primary and Secondary validator hosts. Slower/unreliable connection might cause corruption in the moved tower file resulting in unexpected validator behavior and possibly accidental slashing if network doesn't agree with the tower file content.

Variables (change per env)

Make sure below variables are set according to your setup.

In the hosts file, replace below:

• solana-host-primary is a placeholder for your primary node IP/Host Name
• solana-host-secondary is a placeholder for your secondary node IP/Host Name
• solana_user is a placeholder for the user on both primary/secondary nodes where Ansible host has access to (via ssh keys)

In both *.yml files, for both hosts, replace below:

• solana_cli_path is the path to solana installation. If you installed following the official doc, it would be located at:

  /home/solana/.local/share/solana/install/active_release/bin

• solana_keys_path is the path to where these keys are stored:
  • staked-identity.json (On Primary Node)
  • primary-unstaked-identity.json (On Primary Node)
  • secondary-unstaked-identity.json (On Secondary Node)
• ledger_path is the path to the ledger dir (where tower is stored on the voting node)
• solana-host-primary match what is defined in the hosts file
• solana-host-secondary match what is defined in the hosts file