Is it my fault or Storj Labs fault?

Node Operators
1

I’m don’t have any knowledge in programming (command lines), that’s why I setup my node using the windows GUI version. Since January 2020, I used the web dashboard to monitor my node but on October I got the unsent order issue. Its when I did not receive my October payment correctly that I realized my node has an issue!

Is it my fault that I rely on the web dashboard to monitor my node because I don’t have any knowledge in command lines (programming)?
OR
Is it the fault of Storj Labs for having an unreliable web dashboard that can’t notified SNOs (show or send notification) when the node is not working correctly or when the node is not working under ideal condition?

2

It is your problem.
If you do not have the knowledge, you are required to acquire this knowledge. I mean: Using a console is really not difficult and even easier than some GUI. There are enough instructions and if you are too lazy to read you just go to Youtube. I do not sit in a crane and hold the manufacturer responsible for damage because I did not have the knowledge to operate the crane. If you only spent half of your time on manuals that invested in ailments, you would know how to use a console.

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3

Well if I live in the African region and work 16 hours per day and I so lazy (tired) from my full time job that I don’t have the time to read all the instruction then what I must do?

4

It’s up to you to only do what you have energy and knowledge to do.
The community here is helping you as much as it can but as LinuxNet said, if you had spent only half the time on reading manuals/googling that you spent on writing comments about your missing $2, you’d almost be an expert in watching your node.

And by the way: A quick look into the log file would have revealed the orders error. From your screenshots it seemed that it started in september, so you could have noticed that in october but apparently you noticed in the middle of november after multiple payouts.

I think the best thing you can do is look forward, learn from your mistakes, check your dashboard and occasionally the logs (there are multiple threads here that explain how and it can be done within minutes) and enjoy your future payments.
Keep storj income as a “stress-free”, passive income and spend what little time you have left after your 16 hours day with your family. That’s probably worth more than the few cents a storagenode makes.

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5

You should take this as a learning experience, First of all your learning like the rest of us and were all here to support each other.

But when you have came here only to try to blame storj for your storagenode failing we don’t know how stable your system is how everything is connected together, how stable your internet connection is.
You say you work 16 hours a day but it seems you have plenty of time to bash storj about your missing 2 dollars kinda loose the creditability, what is done is done storj sent out extra payment and then doubled the payment the next month. Storj already did what they said they were going to do what more do you want?

When you signed up for being a SNO you signed up to be responsible for your storagenode and keep it healthy.

6

Well, you have to read the instructions. Not just to set up the node itself, but what about the server you run it on and monitoring?
I guess, Storj could make a “1-click” option that would automatically set the node up, monitor it, monitor the hard drive it’s on, set dynamic DNS and forward the port. However, this would take up a lot of development time that could be used to make the Storj service itself better.

So, you have to have at least some knowledge how to run and monitor the node. At least you didn’t get disqualified. Also, Storj requires pretty good availability and data integrity - do you know how to achieve that?

Or, I guess, you can wait a couple of years, maybe then the node software will have the “1-click” option.

7

It’s difficult to detect every type of error, especially in a young software. An error like db corruption or file corruption is not a program error but results from hardware, OS, external factors like power surges or unsafe shutdowns etc.
Of course there could be done more to report errors better etc but ultimately it’s just not possible to react to every possibility. Therefore as an SNO I should at least check the logs occasionally, check the payouts, etc.

8

Or at least monitor the audit and uptime scores. If those are at 100%, then the node is probably fine, well, at least not in immediate danger of getting disqualified.

9

that wouldn’t cover the problem of unsent orders (which should be completely fixed now)

10

I don’t agree with the consensus here. I think that uptime robot should be enough and silent failures like this are not the op’s fault.
However, although I think you are entitled to be upset, you should accept it and move on.

(if you reply “ok boomer” I’ll accept that)

Anyway, fault and blame aren’t useful here. The correct concept would be trust and ability.

Can you trust storj lab to pay you and are they able to do it?

If you don’t think so then that is yours

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11

While the unsent orders problem is annoying, at least it does not lead to DQ. Also, IIRC it’s not much that a SNO could do about it anyway, the devs needed to ix it.

12

hi @NS1 I am sorry that you are feeling frustrated. it can be hard to work a long day and then when you are tired, to find there are more items requiring your attention.

I do think that each person decides as an individual, whether running a node is “worth it” to them. Its a judgment call that is a very subjective and personal decision.

The company tries to be reasonable and appreciative, as much as possible. We also must balance stringent uptime requirements, because that is what paying customers expect.

I respect that you are just asking questions, and have the right to do so. My advice would be to read through the other comments on this thread, ignoring anything that seems emotionally bothersome to you. Look for the concrete advice.

If you are wishing to feel more comfortable in the command line, codecademy has a guide which I believe is free.

Our documentation is at at https://docs.storj.io – if you see ideas for improving it, let us know : we are Open Source and ready to incorporate feedback or contributions on how to be better

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13

I will never say “ok boomer” to you , unless I was making some kind of nerd joke about Battlestar Galactica. All generations are welcome here :space_invader:

14

OK, boomer

(Sorry, couldn’t resist) :wink:

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15

Starbuck, is that you?

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16

That’s why the blame game doesn’t really help. This topic suggests it’s either operator or Storj Labs’s fault. But looking at what caused this issue in the first place, it could be the HDD or memory manufacturers fault, or Microsofts fault. File corruption is usually caused by either hardware issues or sudden interruptions, which in turn could also be caused by hardware issues.

As for not noticing the issues. That’s a bit more tricky. Most SNOs that encountered this noticed it when their payout wasn’t correct. I would say in the first month, it was unlikely a SNO would notice, so probably not “their fault”. But that doesn’t mean it’s automatically the fault of Storj Labs. Logging every error to the dashboard would get way too noisy and would simply lead to people ignoring those as well. I would like it if Storj Labs would put some effort into labeling errors better so that most of the errors that aren’t causing interruptions in functionality would be logged as a warning. So that means pretty much any error in uploads and downloads that will be caught by overprovisioning. That way any other error would stand out more and they could be displayed on the dashboard. But don’t underestimate the size of this effort. It would be a lot of work to get that right. So does that mean it’s Storj Labs’s fault. No, it really doesn’t. They have their priorities too and this was a new issue that wasn’t foreseen and it was quickly fixed.

I think it’s valuable to realize that all parties learned from this, including Storj Labs. And while both you and Storj Labs had a role and responsibility in this, I wouldn’t call this anyones fault. The best way you can walk away from this is with everyone learning something and with fixes that prevent this from happening in the future. I think we got all that.

@NS1 please know that everyone in this community is happy to help out. I appreciate your limited time, but usually a quick search on the forum would already yield some great information on what to look into. Won’t take more than 10 minutes to find and fix in most cases. This was definitely the case when the orders issue started impacting payouts. There were several topics with hints on how to manually resolve it and get orders rolling again. In this case it didn’t even require any command line stuff. If you can’t find anything, please don’t hesitate to ask yourself. I hope your experience will be better in the future.
I would kindly like to ask you again to limit the number of topics you open regarding the same issue. Most people don’t read all forum topics and it would be better to have all the context in one topic so we don’t have to search around for it in order to help you out or answer your questions.

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17

well by outsourcing your work globally (storj) for better earnings you certainly has a leg up on many others in your region.

just a matter of hanging in there and try to give it the best odds of success with what means you have to work with.

i cannot imagine how rough it can be for people in some regions or many regions of africa, but i must say from what i have seen, either hunger and despair tends to ruin your progress or there is a dissonance in the frame of mind of a large portion of people.

but i digress… make a plan for your storagenode project, a projection of how it can go and if you think it’s worth the effort in your particular case, and then try to push to make it profitable, in that reinvestment is the key… generally

i know that kinda sucks, because one wants to take stuff out and gain earnings from the work one does… but much like planting a field, the grains to plant is the first required resource and without that it doesn’t matter how fertile the field.

the world is full of infinity traps as i call them… much like one cannot swim across the atlantic, but one can invent an airplane or ship and sail across it with enough skill and thought.
some things are just like that… impossible tasks that cannot be achieve without taking vastly different approaches to the problem.

anyways, i wish you the best of luck and sorry if the 2$ makes a huge difference for you current life, but think of it as an investment in a future where you might be ahead because you sold your work in a global market, rather than enriching the local lord or businesses.

Best of Luck, and look for you regional advantages to help make your project’s a success.

P.S and in regard to you actual question :smiley:

i don’t think anyone really knows who’s fault it was, it’s a combination of data degrading over time and databases with errors being migrated into newer solutions often makes a mess.
when new stuff is being built, it will have unforeseen effects…

if you had been running using server/enterprise grade solutions, i doubt you would have seen a problem… like wise if Storj Labs where a decade older they might have had solved this kind of issue long ago and it would be built into the solution to compensate for errors in the database.

who is to blame… both could be blamed, but why do we need to blame anyone, it doesn’t change anything, i doubt it will keep happening, because like i said there are software solutions that can compensate for what i believe went wrong…

i duno that was what went wrong, and i have no real way of guessing it either… but it seems quite obvious that when on migrates a database from one system to another and it breaks, then it’s highly likely that there could be some corruption in the database itself before migration…

and since many storagenodes run on regular hardware and the databases are the most active data set, then this is where most read / write and memory corruptions would end up, because non enterprise hardware isn’t designed to run 24/7 nor will it fix errors along the way, since the cheapest solution is to fix such issues in software or just have people reboot their computer… and load everything from scratch, because in 99.9% of all cases a consumer wouldn’t have been saving many hundred of GB that needs to be 100% correct…

so what a movie had a bit get corrupted… doesn’t matter nobody will ever see the error because the data stream is to fast and people just watch it…

but encryption, math and compression doesn’t really behave like that… 1 wrong bit and it can throw off stuff… sure most computers can fix a simple bit error… but then what about 2 bit errors the problem always exists, its just a matter of how likely it is to occur… and on consumer grade hardware… it’s actually pretty likely…

like say breaks a file in like 10TB transferred in my experience

it’s rare for disasters to be a single cause… it’s most often a long sequence of 3-15 mistakes and or states and or conjunctions that line up and create a disaster or accident…
which is why failsafes are such wonderful things…

one doesn’t want people to be able to make stuff blow up, because they really will… not by malice but just because they are asleep at the wheel or something changed and they didn’t notice … and all of a sudden the box of candles was now sticks of dynamite…
not something that’s easy to tell in the dark if one is use to finding the box of candles on the edge of the table…

reality is rough… the universe is out to grind us all in the light and scatter us across the universe…
or said in fewer words the universe is out to kill us… plain and simple, it has no other goal

18

Well, I don’t need to add anything. I just wanted to say; don’t worry man, its actually easier than “programming”. Visually, it looks awkward to decrypt, but with the help of users on the forum and basically, the well summarized Storj documentation Jocelyn shared to you + Storj videos, you’ll be able to understand better how the things work, and monitor the logs of your node on Windows Powershell.

I strongly recommand you to use Windows Powershell and use the command to show your logs in realtime, so you’ll be sure the activity is normal. And actually, it represents more dynamically how the things are turning into than the “static” dashboard.

To know how monitor your logs in realtime; check this link and click on Windows GUI to see the command; https://documentation.storj.io/resources/faq/check-logs

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19

So what you’re saying is that you don’t like that being an early adopter of a revolutionary decentralized storage technology requires knowing how to use a computer?

Think of it like this, it’s easy to buy bitcoin now, but in 2013 it was basically impossible without knowing how to use google and a computer. You can either read and learn, or wait until the project has advanced enough to where anyone can participate with 0 effort.

You don’t need to know how to program or use command line. You need to learn how to copy paste and about an hour to read the instructions.

20

NECROTHREAD!!! :joy:
(20 characters worth of Necro, too…) :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

1 Like