Weekly Dev Update #54

25 June 2019 —Admin

Hey Y’all,

We’re all busy getting ready for the testnet release this week, which means we’re busy combing through lokid, Loki Messenger and the Loki Storage Server looking for bugs and testing our edge cases.

This week we also did a new release for the Loki Electron GUI wallet which adds a number of quality-of-life upgrades for users, including being able to see all of the nodes you’ve contributed to, having the ability to unstake from nodes with a single click, and transaction proofs and checking.

Loki Core

Relaxed deregistration rules:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/659
Rebase Service Node Checkpointing on top of new relaxed deregistration rules:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/662
Service Node Checkpointing: Phase out tx extra deregister, add infrastructure for deregistration:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/648
lmdb size/endian fix:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/660
Restrict RPC commands related to local machine:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/658
Error message formatting:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/656
,
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/653
.
Increase transaction fees to reasonable levels (in line with Monero):

https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/663
Fix SSL autodetect reconnection:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/651
Enable dummy payment IDs:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/665
Remove Ncurses and disable readline for Docker:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki/pull/652

Loki Launcher

The Loki Launcher is a node js package that will allow for the independent management of all the components required to run a full Service Node. This includes managing Lokinet, lokid and the Loki Storage Server. When Loki Service Nodes begin to route data and store messages for Lokinet and Loki Messenger, the Loki Launcher will need to be run on every single Service Node.

Right now the Launcher is in a testing phase, so you should only use it on testnet and stagenet – though feedback/issues and pull requests would be greatly appreciated!

What’s going on this week with Loki Launcher:

We released the first version of the Launcher! and with everyone’s feedback have continued to roll out updates and bug fixes. We’ve learned a lot from this release, and we hope this will help everyone make the upgrade to version 4.0.0 of Loki seamlessly.

Changelog:

Fix missing parameters in check-systemd and start
Fix parameter deduplication in daemon.js
Include running configuration in config-view
Add better error handler to serveTCP
Handle port in use more gracefully in prequal
Work around setuid NodeJS issue for home directories. It would always return root’s home directory
Make “don’t run as root” recommendation not appear when we tell you to use root
Fix MacOS home directory detection
Support spaces instead of equal signs for lokid command line options
getLauncherStatus refactor to unify “waiting for start up” and “status” output
Include a “ctrl-c to exit” message in client mode
Precreate blockchain default config if INI is found but blockchain is not specified
Make sure blockchain data directory exists in fix-perms
Adjust download-binaries retries and timeout to play with Github’s API nicer
Support –config-file to allow absolute paths as well (as relative)
On –config-file failures output both paths searched
Node 8.x support for getLauncherStatus reports (Only Node 10.x+ support console.table)
Make getLauncherStatus reports a bit more configurable, so status/start up messaging make sense
Allow quotes in launcher.ini configuration files
Take existing downloaded blockchain size when running prequal disk space checks.
Disable restricted RPC
Change storage server parameter from db-location to data_dir to better match
Started up a multiple copy deploy on same host guide:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-launcher/issues/23

Github Pulse: Excluding merges, 2 authors have pushed 38commits to master and 38 commits to all branches. On master, 15 files have changed and there have been 588 additions and 205 deletions.

Lokinet

If you’re on our Discord you might catch Jeff or Ryan, the developers of LLARP, live streaming as they code: https://www.twitch.tv/uguu25519, https://www.twitch.tv/neuroscr.

What’s going on this week with Lokinet:

Work continues on improving our metrics for internal testing and adjustments due to libuv refactor. We continue to improve the quality of the code and seek to remove any possibilities of bugs creeping in. path build status messages have been added as a pull-request, and we have high hopes this will lead to finding more stability bugs which we can squash.

Changelog:

Move metric publishers to their own files:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/648
Remove libuv from makefile:

https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/651
Windows fixes:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/654
Libuv callback hell:

https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/655
Refactor path build code:

https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/652
Fix unit-tests:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/658
Send netid to metrictank:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/659
Move message code to subdirectory:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/650
Tidy up pathbuilder code:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/660
Fix up libuv close logic:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/662

Pull Requests:

Clang-tidy llarp/ files:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/661
Fix macos build system for libuv:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/657
Path build status messages:
https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/pull/653

Loki Wallets

Loki Electron GUI Wallet

We published a new release for the Loki Electron GUI wallet which can be found here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-electron-gui-wallet/releases/tag/v1.2. This new release includes features such as: