Common self-managed node setup

This page contains best practices for running RPC nodes across multiple blockchain networks.

Specifically, this tutorial will walk you through:

Creating a new VPC for your node.
Spinning up a VM for your node.
Setting up a new profile for your node manager.
Mounting an external disk to the VM for the chain data.

This guide assumes you already have a Google Cloud project with billing enabled. For instructions on how to do this, see Creating and managing projects.

Create a new VPC

For detailed instructions on VPC creation, see Create and manage VPC networks.

Create a VPC for your node following these recommendations:
- Create a custom VPC
- Regional routing mode
- MTU 1460
- Enable the default BLOCKCHAIN_VPC_NETWORK-allow-ssh firewall rule for your network. See Use VPC firewall rules for more.
Replace BLOCKCHAIN_VPC_NETWORK with the name of the VPC that will hold your node resources, for example ethereum-vpc.
Add an IPv4 subnet for your network. Make sure the region chosen for your subnet is the same region where you want to deploy your node.

To learn how to create firewall rules VMs in a VPC, see Create VPC firewall rules.

Spin up a VM with an external SSD

For detailed instructions on VM creation and external disk attachment, see the Compute Engine documentation.

Specific instructions for the VM shape that matches the specific requirements for the blockchain network can be found under the Hardware Requirements and Recommended Machine Type section in the blockchain-specific node page. Refer to the blockchain-specific documentation to see the CPU and memory requirements, recommended VM shape for your node, and creation commands for your node.

Connect to the VM using SSH and create a new user

Connect to the VM using SSH

When the VM is provisioned, connect to the VM using SSH by either navigating to the compute engine page, or by running the following command in Cloud Shell:
```
gcloud compute ssh NODE_NAME
```
Replace NODE_NAME with the name of your node. Use lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. For example: my-node.
If connecting from your own machine, install the Google Cloud CLI as described in Install the gcloud CLI.
When the Google Cloud CLI installation is complete, login to your project and connect to the VM:
```
gcloud init
gcloud compute ssh USER@NODE_NAME
```
Replace USER with your Google Cloud user login name.

Create a new user

Once you have connected to the VM via SSH, create a non-SSH sudo user to own and administrate all the resources for the node. Since this user does not have SSH keys in the VM metadata, it can only be accessed by connecting to the machine first via one of the authenticated Google Cloud users.

Create a new sudo user, run:
```
sudo useradd -m NODE_ADMIN
```
Replace NODE_ADMIN with the user ID of the new user. For example, node-admin.
Add the user to the sudo group:
```
sudo usermod -aG sudo NODE_ADMIN
```
Switch to this user to finish mounting the external disk:
```
sudo su - NODE_ADMIN
```

Mount the external disks

The external disk you created in step 2 will house all the chain data for your node. This is a best practice since it allows you to port the data across nodes once the VM is shutdown, as well as easily configure snapshot schedules for your chain data.

Mount your disk, first list all the available disks in the VM:
```
sudo lsblk
```
Most likely, the external disk will be found under /dev/sdb. You can tell the external disk by the size of the disk you create in step 2.

Format the disk:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0,discard /dev/sdb

Create a directory for the disk and mount it:
```
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disks/CHAIN_DATA_NAME
sudo mount -o discard,defaults /dev/sdb /mnt/disks/CHAIN_DATA_NAME
```
Replace the following:
- CHAIN_DATA_NAME: the name of the data directory for your chain. For example, my-eth-data.
- /dev/sdb: the location of the disk if different than /dev/sdb.

Assign write privileges to NODE_ADMIN:

sudo chmod a+w /mnt/disks/CHAIN_DATA_NAME

Get the UUID of the disk and add it to fstab for automatic remounting on restart:

sudo blkid /dev/sdb
export DISK_UUID=$(findmnt -n -o UUID /dev/sdb)
echo "UUID=$DISK_UUID /mnt/disks/CHAIN_DATA_NAME ext4 discard,defaults,nofail 0 2" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Your disk is now mounted and ready. To check your mounted disk, run:
```
df -h
```

What's next?

The skeleton of your node is ready to go. By this point, you should have:

A VPC for your node with SSH access enabled.
A VM fitted to the requirements of your node.
A new node admin user to own and manage node resources.
A mounted external SSD disk fitted to the storage requirements of your node.

Make sure to go back to the blockchain-specific documentation to finish running the deployment commands for your node.