As part of improving network behavior and testing it in a real environment we use a number of opt-in beta hotspots.
There are some ground rules for beta deployments that we strictly follow:
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The change can not affect blockchain consensus behavior. Any behavior change that affects chain consensus rules must be gated on a chain variable
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The change can improve peripheral elements of the software which may indirectly affect the behavior of the blockchain. Changes are usually related to performance or stability improvements that make it more likely that a hotspot can talk to more hotspots or recover from error conditions better than before the update.
Content
The beta group was updated with firmware 2019.10.18.1 which includes:
- Improving some error resilience in the network relay service
- Only blacklisting relays that are explicitly known to not be connected by the intermediate host
- Speed improvements in NAT detection
- Using more available peer targets when syncing the blockchain
- Fix ledger disagreement over ordering of each hotspot's geographic neighbor list
Deployment Plan
Given the small set of patches this beta includes and the expected stabilizing effect on block sync and PoC receipt delivery issues, we plan to let this beta run for 24 hours and then deploy it to the network at large.