Do These Things To Enhance Reliability
A Gentleman is always reliable, and that also goes for his node. If you're going to run a routing node, you need to be running 24/7/365. Ideally, your downtime should be measured in minutes per year, not hours per year!
Don't mess with your router
Don't start changing the settings on your router, like trying to open ports or doing anything complicated like that. Because of our super-powerful Wireguard setup, covered in A Clearnet IP For Your Node, you don't actually need to do anything complicated with your router.
There is a huge advantage to this... if your internet or power goes down, you can simply move your node to a different location, plug it into any router, and it will work fine!
Redundant Internet Connections
If your LND node is operating in a data center, don't worry about it, your networking will be screamingly fast, and super-reliable.
But, you're in an office, unless it's a really huge office where the internet never goes down, you should use two internet connections simultaneously.
You do this with something called a "multi-wan router" or a "balancing router".
A Balancing router
Setting one of these up is out of scope for this guide, but it essentially involves plugging two modems (for example, one Cable, and one DSL) into the WAN ports of one of these "balancing" routers, and then plugging your computer into that router, and that's about it.
For example, at a typical office in North America, you can often get "cable internet", or "dsl internet", or "fiber internet", or even "5G internet".
Get the TWO best that you can, and hook them BOTH up to a "balancing router".
Then hook your node up (with an Ethernet cable, never WiFi!) to your balancing router.
Remote Access
This is a potentially dangerous and controversial topic. There are at least two schools of thought:
- It's dangerous to set up remote access to your node, because you could be hacked.
- It's dangerous to NOT set up remote access to your node, because if something goes wrong, then you will be unable to fix it remotely.
Take your pick.
I'm not going to tell you what to do here. But something like Chrome Remote Desktop, tied to a Google account protected by two-factor authentication, should be pretty damn secure.
Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
You need one, but probably not for the reason you think.
Unless you get a giant UPS, if you have it running your router, modem(s) and computer, it might only last a few hours before it is out of batteries.
So if the power to your building goes off for a long period, like a day or two, you can't really rely on a UPS to keep it running that long.
That's why I believe it is important to used internet-based monitoring system to your UPS, so you get alerts when the power goes out and your UPS kicks on.
Luckily, most mainstream UPS options come with a built-in monitoring service. Use it.
After you get a "power down" alert, you may then only have a few hours to get onto your computer and shut down.
We've previously learned that starting and stopping your node should be done delicately -- ideally, we never just want to kill the power to our LND node without first shutting it down gracefully.
So the real purpose of UPS (unless you have a mega-big one), is just to give you a few hours to act on the notification, and then to get onto your computer to manually shut it down.
Which brings us to our next topic, about those alarms...