Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Audit and revise get-started/overview #171

Merged
merged 5 commits into from
May 5, 2022
Merged
Changes from 4 commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
41 changes: 30 additions & 11 deletions content/en/storage-providers/get-started/overview/index.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
---
title: "Overview"
description: "Miners in the Filecoin network are in charge of storing, providing content and issuing new blocks."
lead: "Miners in the Filecoin network are in charge of storing, providing content and issuing new blocks."
description: "Storage providers in the Filecoin network are in charge of storing, providing content and creating consensus."
lead: "Storage providers in the Filecoin network are in charge of storing, providing content and creating consensus."
draft: false
menu:
storage-providers:
Expand All @@ -13,20 +13,39 @@ weight: 110
toc: true
---

This sections contains guides to setup and run succesful mining operations using Lotus and should be approached by **advanced users only**, familiar with [how Filecoin works](https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/how-filecoin-works/), [how mining works](https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/how-mining-works/) and the operation of a Lotus node.
This section contains guides to initialize and run a successful storage provider operation using Lotus and should be approached by **advanced users only**. You should read through and be familiar with the concepts outlined in these two articles: [how Filecoin works](https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/how-filecoin-works/), [how mining works](https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/how-mining-works/), as well as having a Lotus node running.

{{< alert icon="warning" >}}
Lotus Mining for _mainnet_ has stringent minimal **[hardware requirements]({{< relref "hardware-requirements" >}})**. Do not attempt this installation if your computer does not meet the minimum requirements.
Being a storage provider on the _mainnet_ has stringent minimal **[hardware requirements]({{< relref "../../../storage-providers/get-started/hardware-requirements" >}})**. Do not attempt this installation if your server does not meet the minimum requirements.
{{< /alert >}}

## Getting started with Lotus Miner
## How to read the storage provider documentation

The following guides are essential starting points for those willing to launch a Lotus miner:
The guides in this section are meant to introduce high-level concepts early in the documentation and bring in more advanced topics and configurations later on.

- The miner installation is covered in the [Installation guide]({{< relref "../../../lotus/install/prerequisites" >}}). Once the installation is complete, the Lotus node, Lotus miner, and Lotus worker applications should all be installed.
- The `Get started` segment contains a high-level overview of the tasks the `lotus-miner` binary does, introduces the basic economics of being a storage provider, and outlines some hardware and architectural requirements.
- The `Setup` segment contains all the necessary information for initializing the storage provider on the network.
- The `Operate` segment contains the necessary information about operating the storage provider daily and introduces more complex operations like SnapDeals, Batching and Index Provider.
- The `Workers` segment contains guides for setting up dedicated workers for offloading tasks from the `lotus-miner` binary.
- The `Advanced onfigurations` segment details all the configurations you can tune to optimize your storage provider setup.

- The [Miner setup]({{< relref "initialize" >}}) covers all the details to configure your miner to achieve the maximum performance and avoid common pitfalls.
- The [Configuration reference]({{< relref "configuration" >}}) explains what the different miner configuration options mean.
- The [Seal workers]({{< relref "seal-workers" >}}) guide covers how to run additional seal workers co-located or not with the Lotus Miner.
We recommend careful reading of every existing section and gaining as much background as possible before proceeding with a Lotus storage provider deployment.

We nevertheless recommend careful reading of every existing section and gaining as much background as possible before proceeding with a Lotus miner deployment.
## Key concepts
You should be familiar with these key concepts related to being a storage provider before moving on to the next page. The Filecoin [glossary](https://spec.filecoin.io/#section-glossary) is handy when you need to look up a word or subject.

### Sectors

A sector is the default unit of storage that storage providers submit to the Filecoin network. Storage providers can decide if they want to commit 32 GiB or 64 GiB sector sizes when they first initialize their storage provider. It´s not possible to change the sector size once it has been initialized on-chain.

A sector can contain data from multiple deals and clients. A storage provider can also submit “Committed Capacity” (CC) sectors. CC sectors are available to the Filecoin network as committed storage power but do not initially contain storage deals. Actively proving CC sectors can be upgraded at a later date to include storage deals in a process known as Snap Deals.

**Sealed sectors**
An unsealed sector contains raw storage deal data. These sectors may optionally be retained if the client requires fast retrieval of their data.

**Unsealed sectors**
A unsealed sector is the raw data. Some clients request that their unsealed data is kept for fast retrievals.

### Epoch

The passing of time on the Filecoin network is divided into epochs of 30 seconds in duration. For every new epoch, a subset of storage providers are elected to add a new block to the chain.