How to Stake on FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a very powerful operating system, it has a great history of reliability, security and stability. Here we show how it can be used to stake Hydra in a secure way.
Isolating Hydrad in a FreeBSD jail
FreeBSD jails are a very powerful feature, in summary, your jail instance is more protected as it's like having a separate OS just for Hydra with reduced privileges.
Here's a good read on Jails: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/jails.html
FreeBSD version used for this tutorial is 11.2, download it from the official FreeBSD mirrors:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/eresources-web.html
Installing FreeBSD
Important: Make sure to install and enable NTP, it's necesary to stay synchronized to network clocks.
Install FreeBSD as normal, however, the following hardening settings are recommended during install:
Create user
Create a user with permissions "operator wheel"
Please remember to do all these commands as root
Host:
/etc/sysctl.conf
Allow sockets and upgrades in jail
security.jail.allow_raw_sockets=1
security.jail.chflags_allowed=1
/etc/rc.conf
firewall_enable="YES"
firewall_quiet="YES"
firewall_type="workstation"
firewall_myservices="22 3888"
firewall_allowservices="any"
firewall_logdeny="YES"
jail_enable="YES"
Notice that we've added some settings for firewall, these will enable IPFW and basic settings to secure our Jail, allowing only ports 22(ssh) and 3888(Hydra) to be accessed.
Resource limits for Jails
/boot/loader.conf
kern.racct.enable=1
jail_enable="YES"
Creating our Jail for staking
zfs create -o mountpoint=/jail zroot/jail
(Change zroot for whatever name you chose for your zfs pool)
zfs create -o mountpoint=/jail/hydra zroot/jail/hydra
Now we've created our jail for staking Hydra, let's fetch and install FreeBSD on it!
cd /jail/hydra/ && fetch -o - http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/11.2-RELEASE/base.txz | tar --unlink -xpJf - -C /jail/hydra
We've now installed FreeBSD into /jail/hydra
Typing ls /jail/hydra/ should show the filesystem of our Hydra FreeBSD Jail
Now, let's create the jail configuration file:
/etc/jail.conf
hydra {
host.hostname = hydra.local;
ip4.addr = 192.168.0.99;
interface = em0;
path = /jail/hydra;
exec.start = "/bin/sh /etc/rc";
exec.stop = "/bin/sh /etc/rc.shutdown";
exec.clean;
mount.devfs;
allow.raw_sockets;
allow.sysvipc;
}
Ok now it's time to launch our jail!
service jail start hydra
We've just started our Hydra jail, We can now get into our Hydra jail to finish configuration, install Hydra and launch the wallet.
jexec hydra /bin/csh
cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/YOURTIMEZONE/ /etc/localtime This is very important, if the time info is incorrect, we'll produce orphan blocks or will be unable to sync
Create our basic /etc/rc.conf for our Hydra Jail
Hydra Jail:
/etc/rc.conf
syslogd_flags="-s -s"
sshd_enable=YES
clear_tmp_enable=YES
clear_tmp_X=YES
extra_netfs_types=NFS
dumpdev=NO
update_motd=NO
keyrate=fast sendmail_enable=NONE
sendmail_submit_enable=NO
sendmail_outbound_enable=NO
sendmail_msp_queue_enable=NO
Add dns nameservers to /etc/resolv.conf
echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" >> /etc/resolv.conf
echo "nameserver 8.8.4.4" >> /etc/resolv.conf
Installing Hydra
Now that we've got our jail up and running, we need to install Hydra. There's 2 options on doing this, we can use the pkg repository or the powerful FreeBSD ports which are usually updated faster:
pkg repository
pkg update -f pkg install -y hydra
FreeBSD ports
portsnap fetch extract cd /usr/ports/net-p2p/hydra && make install clean
The above will ask for a lot of configuration options, it might be better to use make config-recursive to set all options before compiling. If you want to use default settings just type cd /usr/ports/net-p2p/hydra && make install clean BATCH="YES"
Running Hydra
Launching Hydra is just like in any other *NIX operating system, however there's a minor difference here due to how FreeBSD jails work. First, we need to create a hydra.conf file with the following contents:
This config is necessary, otherwise calling the daemon will return errors.
Then we can launch withhydrad -daemon
Security tips
Set up firewall on host (you cannot setup a firewall inside a jail) and enable only the ports you need (22 and 3338) This is done in the host rc.conf at the top of this tutorial
Disable history, this will completely disable console history and it's a way to help secure your staking box, type the following on your FreeBSD console:
unset history; unset savehistSecure SSH:
Disable password authentication
If using the FreeBSD box on your home network, force it to listen on local network only.
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