quantus

Deployment for a Quantus Network Planck node and its external GPU miner.

Two components:

Component	Role
quantus-node	consensus, P2P, reward address. Disk + network bound.
quantus-miner	Poseidon2-over-Goldilocks search. Pure GPU compute.

Scope: which hosts run what lives in the deploy-node / deploy-miner matrices in .gitea/workflows/deploy.yaml and nowhere else — that is the convention (deployment-gitea-actions.md) and it keeps the fleet's shape in one place instead of scattered through prose. Don't restate host assignments, hardware inventories, sites or addressing in this file.

One node serves many miners. node/src/miner_server.rs keeps a HashMap of connected miners and broadcast_jobs the same work to all of them; each miner picks its own random starting nonce, so there is no coordination or range allocation. A node per miner would only be needed for a separate reward address.

They are split deliberately. Setting --miner-listen-port on the node disables its built-in CPU mining, so the node authors nothing unless an external miner is connected — the split is not optional once that flag is set. The miner connects out to the node over QUIC/9833 and listens on nothing but a loopback metrics port.

Conventions: ~/git/architecture — generic.md for the on-host shape, deployment-gitea-actions.md for the deploy mechanism. Deviations are listed below.

Why GPU, and why only these hosts

The proof-of-work is Poseidon2 over the Goldilocks field (p = 2⁶⁴ − 2³² + 1), width 12, 4 external + 22 internal rounds — an arithmetic hash, not a bit-mixing one. Cost is dominated by 64-bit modular multiplication, the state lives entirely in registers, and there is no memory hardness at all. Measured on this fleet:

Hardware	Hashrate	Power	Efficiency
RTX 5090	368 MH/s	600 W	0.60 MH/s/W
RTX 5090 @ 400 W floor	281 MH/s	400 W	0.70 MH/s/W
RTX 4090	183 MH/s	450 W	0.41 MH/s/W
current-gen desktop CPU, 32t	~4 MH/s	—	—
older server CPU, 12t	~0.5 MH/s	—	—

Measured on representative hardware, not estimated. A single 5090 at its minimum power limit out-hashes a couple of dozen server CPUs combined. CPU mining is therefore disabled everywhere (--cpu-workers 0), including on GPU hosts, where it would add ~1% hashrate for a couple hundred watts. Older server CPUs are node-capable and mining-worthless.

GPU/CPU parity is verified upstream (engine-gpu's gpu_cpu_parity example, 25/25 jobs) — the GPU is doing real work, not advancing a lying counter.

Ports

Registered in ~/git/architecture/port-allocations.md §5.

Port	Proto	Component	Exposure
30333	tcp	node P2P (libp2p)	public — named firewalld service, plus an inbound forward at the site edge
9833	udp	node ← miner control channel	mesh, firewalld rich rule scoped to the miner host only
9615	tcp	node Prometheus	loopback
9900	tcp	miner Prometheus	loopback

Deviation from port-allocations.md §3: these are upstream protocol defaults, not numbers derived from the service name. 30333 is the chain's well-known P2P port and changing it buys nothing; 9833 is the miner protocol's default and both ends must agree. They are recorded in the registry, which is what the doc says actually prevents collisions. Neither lands in the crowded alt-HTTP cluster.

The miner link gets a rich rule rather than a plain --add-service because the fleet uses a single default zone (generic.md §9): adding the service outright would publish 9833/udp on every address the host carries, and upstream is explicit that this port must never face the internet.

GPU power limits

Applied at boot by nvidia-power-limit.service, configured per host in infra-setup.sh's GPU_POWER_LIMITS as host=watts, and clamped to each card's own floor and ceiling — a request the hardware refuses is corrected with a log line rather than silently ignored.

This is not a compromise. Measured on a 4090 mining Poseidon2:

limit	hashrate	temp	efficiency
450 W (stock)	185.5 MH/s	70 °C	0.413 MH/s/W
300 W	183.2 MH/s	61 °C	0.611 MH/s/W
250 W	180.3 MH/s	58 °C	0.721 MH/s/W

44% less power and 12 °C cooler for 2.8% less hashrate. The workload is register-resident integer math and does not need the top of the clock curve, so the last few hundred MHz were very nearly pure heat. It also cuts current through the 12VHPWR connector, the one component on 4090/5090 cards with a documented melting failure mode.

A boot-time unit is required because nvidia-smi -pl survives neither a reboot nor a driver unload. The unit also enables persistence mode, which stops the limit being lost when the last GPU client detaches — a silent reversion that would otherwise show up only as a warm connector. The dashboard's GPU Power gauge reads draw against the enforced limit, so a reverted cap appears as the gauge dropping from ~100% to ~60% rather than as nothing at all.

Monitoring

Scraped by the fleet Prometheus and visualised in Grafana (folder Quantus). Both exporters are unauthenticated, and the miner's binds 0.0.0.0 unconditionally with no loopback option, so what bounds access in each case is a firewalld rich rule scoped to the scrape host — not the bind address.

Asset	Deployed to
asset/prometheus/quantus.yml.tmpl	/etc/prometheus/scrape_configs.d/quantus.yml
asset/grafana/quantus.json	/etc/grafana/provisioning/dashboards/quantus/

Scrape targets are rendered from SCRAPE_NODES / SCRAPE_MINERS in the workflow env:, which must agree with the deploy matrices. validate metrics asserts Prometheus holds every quantus-* target and that all are up, so drift fails the run rather than quietly producing an empty graph.

Two pieces of shared infrastructure needed one-time changes, which is why they live in infra-setup.sh --metrics-hosts rather than the workflow: prometheus.yml gained scrape_config_files: so each project can own a drop-in instead of every project editing one file, and grafana.container gained a dashboards bind mount — it previously mounted only the datasource. Both are additive, guarded, and back up what they touch.

What the dashboard cannot tell you: neither binary exports a difficulty metric or an authored-block counter, and the miner exports no solutions-found counter — so "do we win the share of blocks our hashrate predicts?", the only honest measure of orphan and stale-work loss, is not plottable today. The "Mining efficiency" row shows the measurable proxies and says so explicitly. Closing that gap, and the experiments that depend on it, are tracked in issue #1.

The dashboard is provisioned with allowUiUpdates: false: edit the JSON here and redeploy, so a browser tweak cannot silently diverge from source.

Mainnet readiness

Planck is a testnet. Mainnet is expected 2026-09-09, and this repo exists so that switching is a config change rather than a scramble:

To switch	Change
Chain	CHAIN: in the workflow env: — the unit reads it from config, and the miner credential path <base-path>/chains/<chain>/ follows from the same value
Versions	NODE_VERSION / MINER_VERSION pins
Reward address	inner_hash per node in the matrix

Still to decide before launch day, none of which the deploy can settle for you:

• A mainnet reward wallet. The current inner_hash was derived for testnet. A dedicated mining wallet is the recommendation either way (doc/wormhole-rewards.md §6).
• The mainnet chain spec name, which is not yet published.
• Whether a fresh base-path is wanted. Switching CHAIN creates a new chains/<chain>/ directory and leaves the old one on disk; the testnet chain reached ~1M blocks, so check free space rather than assume.
• GPU contention on any host also serving inference.

Sync at launch is trivial — a new chain starts at genesis — so the long testnet sync is not a preview of mainnet day.

wss://quantus.internal

subxt — and therefore quantus-cli — refuses plain ws:// to any host but localhost (InsecureUrl), so without TLS every client needs an ssh tunnel:

ssh -f -N -L 19944:127.0.0.1:9944 <node>
quantus balance --node-url ws://127.0.0.1:19944 --address <addr>

The tunnel-free answer is a vhost on the site's edge proxy, per architecture/reverse-proxies.md and internal-tls.md:

./script/infra-setup.sh --pubkey ~/.ssh/id_gitea_ci.pub   # includes the edge role

It mints an internal-CA cert for quantus.internal, installs asset/nginx/quantus.internal.conf, arms step@quantus.timer for renewal, and reloads nginx. Operator-run, never CI-deployed — the runner has no rights to read certificate keys or reload nginx on a shared edge proxy.

Split-horizon DNS is a separate manual step (the record lives in the site router's Unbound, not here):

opn-cli --config ~/.opn-cli/<site>.yml unbound host create \
  --hostname quantus --domain internal --server <edge mesh ip>

Two traps worth knowing:

• listen 127.0.0.1:14443 ssl proxy_protocol;, not listen 443. A stream SNI router owns TCP 443 on the edge proxies and hands non-passthrough names to the local https tier. Copy the listen line from a currently enabled vhost — on hanzalova, 11 of 19 enabled vhosts are regular files that have drifted from their sites-available counterparts since that migration, so the sites-available copy can be stale and wrong.
• The RPC behind this is unauthenticated. --rpc-methods safe blocks the dangerous calls, but anyone reaching the name reads all state and can submit signed extrinsics. .internal is mesh-only and must never get a public record.

Reaching the JSON-RPC from other machines

Loopback by default, which is the right posture for a validator. Opening it needs three things, and the flags are the part people forget:

--unsafe-rpc-external                           bind beyond loopback (see below)
--rpc-methods safe                              NOT auto, NOT unsafe
--rpc-cors all                                  only if browsers will call it
--rpc-rate-limit 300
--rpc-rate-limit-whitelisted-ips 127.0.0.1/32   or the local exporter throttles itself

Set them as a complete string in the node matrix's rpc_expose; empty leaves it on loopback. The deploy then opens 9944 with a firewalld rich rule scoped to the node's own /16, derived from its own address at deploy time — so no subnet literal lives in this repo and the rule follows the host between sites.

--rpc-external does not work on a validator. Substrate refuses it and exits — whatever --rpc-methods says — demanding --unsafe-rpc-external or --rpc-methods=unsafe as an explicit acknowledgement. The two binding flags are identical ("Same as --rpc-external" per --help); only the name differs. So the correct pairing is the alarming-looking --unsafe-rpc-external with --rpc-methods safe, which binds externally while still refusing every unsafe method.

safe is the load-bearing one. It still permits every state read and author_submitExtrinsic (signed, so no key exposure), while blocking author_rotateKeys, system_addReservedPeer and the rest of the unsafe set. --rpc-methods auto happens to downgrade to safe once listening externally, but relying on that means the safety depends on a flag nobody wrote down. Never unsafe on a validator.

The rate-limit whitelist matters more than it looks: the arena exporter runs on the node host and makes about four RPC calls every two seconds, which is 120 a minute — enough to throttle itself against a naive limit.

9944 is HTTP and WebSocket on the same port, so ws://<node>:9944 and http://<node>:9944 both work. It must never be reachable from the WAN.

Being dialable

Opening 30333 on the host is only one of three things a node needs to accept inbound peers:

1. firewalld on the host — the deploy does this.
2. An inbound TCP forward at the site edge to the node host. Not managed here; opn-cli exposes firewall alias and firewall rule but no NAT subcommand, so a port forward is a console change.
3. public_addr in the deploy matrix. Behind NAT, libp2p advertises the address it can see — a mesh address no external peer can dial. A forward gets packets in but never tells anyone to send them. Prefer a /dns4/ site indirection name over a literal address so a WAN IP change needs no redeploy.

Leave public_addr empty for a deliberately mesh-only node; the unit takes it as a bare $VAR that systemd word-splits, so empty yields no flag. Validate reports which of the two states a node is in, because an undialable validator still mines and still looks healthy — it just takes from the network without adding to it.

Secrets, and one thing that only looks like one

Name	What	Where
RSYNC_SSH_KEY	the shared fleet runner key	Gitea secret — already exists, do not rotate
inner_hash	32-byte wormhole preimage, one per node host	workflow deploy-node matrix — public, not a secret

The inner_hash is not secret. The node embeds it verbatim in the PreRuntime digest of every block it authors (client/consensus/qpow/src/lib.rs:726), and the mining-rewards pallet reads that digest back and derives the payout address on-chain. It is published from your first mined block onward, so it is configuration, and it lives in the deploy-node matrix with the other infra truth.

One inner_hash per host — never share one. The value is static (derived per wallet, not per block), so two nodes carrying the same inner_hash are publicly and permanently identifiable as the same operator, which collapses the independence that running nodes at separate sites is supposed to provide. The matrix carries one per entry for that reason.

Publishing it is not a theft risk — spending needs a plonky2 proof of knowledge of the underlying secret, and recovering that from the inner_hash means inverting Poseidon2. But it does make mining income permanently attributable: the privacy in this design is at the exit, not at receipt. The full analysis, with source citations, is in doc/wormhole-rewards.md.

That on-chain derivation is also why the node wants a preimage rather than an address: the runtime does the deriving, which is what proves the payout target is a canonical wormhole address rather than an arbitrary account. Passing an address would give the runtime nothing to verify. --rewards-inner-hash that isn't a canonical Poseidon digest is rejected at startup.

Knowing the preimage does not let anyone spend the rewards — spending authority is the wallet key, which never goes near this fleet. Deriving an inner_hash for a wallet you already control is a one-time offline step, done where the seed already lives:

quantus-node key quantus --scheme wormhole --words < mnemonic.txt

The binary refuses --words/--seed as command-line arguments, since argv is world-readable and lands in shell history and audit logs. Nothing in this repo needs, wants, or accepts a seed phrase.

The miner's credentials — miner-auth-token and miner-tls-cert-sha256 — are genuine secrets, and are the only ones here. The node generates them on first start and regenerates them if its base-path is wiped, so the deploy copies them from node to miner on every run. That makes the pairing self-healing instead of a silent auth failure six months later.

Usage

One-time, from a workstation with sudo ssh to the targets:

./script/infra-setup.sh --pubkey ~/.ssh/id_gitea_ci.pub

Re-run it whenever the deploy gains a new file to ship — each job preflights the target's sudoers against the grants in infra-setup.sh and fails up front, naming the missing paths, rather than dying partway through an rsync.

Then set each node's inner_hash in the deploy-node matrix. Derive one per host, offline, from a dedicated mining wallet — see doc/wormhole-rewards.md §6 for why that matters more than being careful.

Then push to main, or run the deploy workflow from the Actions UI. It has two modes:

• deploy (default, and what a push does) — apply, then validate.
• validate — check only, change nothing. Asserts each unit is active, the installed binary matches the pinned version, the node's P2P and miner ports are listening, peers are connected, the GPU is enumerated and drawing power, and miner_hashes_total is advancing.

A deploy that changes nothing restarts nothing. Files are compared by checksum, not rsync's default size+mtime — fetch re-downloads the binaries every run, so their mtimes are always new and the default heuristic would report a change on every deploy. Only a genuine content difference in the binary, unit or config triggers a restart; firewalld definitions are reloaded separately and never bounce the daemon. A unit that is unchanged but stopped is started.

That matters more than tidiness: bouncing a syncing node costs it every peer and a RocksDB reopen, and this workflow is also the thing you run to check an untouched deployment is still healthy.

systemctl is-active alone is not evidence this stack works: a miner that found no GPU adapter, and a node that is authoring nothing because no miner is attached, both look perfectly healthy to systemd. Hence the counter check.

Upgrades are deliberate — bump NODE_VERSION / MINER_VERSION in the workflow. There is no auto-update on a validator on purpose.

Known conflict: GPU contention with helexa ⚠️

A miner host may already be running helexa neuron against the same GPU (architecture/generic.md §11, inference.md). They contend directly: the miner drives the GPU to ~95% utilisation and near its power limit continuously, which makes inference latency on that host by turns awful and unpredictable.

Nothing here resolves that, and the deploy does not try to arbitrate. Options, in rough order of preference:

1. Put mining on a host that is not serving inference.
2. Make the miner yield — --gpu-throttle-ms, or an ExecCondition that refuses to start while a model is loaded.
3. Accept the contention and treat inference on that host as best-effort.

Check what a candidate miner host is already serving before enabling quantus-miner.service on it, not after.

Deviations from house convention

• runs-on: infra, not fedora-43. gitea-runners.md §4 says a deploy needs only ssh + rsync and so fits fedora-43. That is about tooling, not routing — these targets are mesh-only .internal names, and lair/mail's two working deploys both use infra for that reason. Revisit if the fedora runners gain mesh reachability.
• Upstream protocol ports rather than derived ones — see Ports above.
• MemoryDenyWriteExecute=false on the node (Substrate JITs its wasm runtime through wasmtime) and PrivateDevices=false on the miner (needs /dev/nvidia*). Both are annotated in the unit files; neither is tidy-up-able.
• Type=simple, not notify — quantus-node does not sd_notify(READY=1).
• No Rust workspace. This repo deploys upstream release binaries; there is nothing to build, so generic.md §1–§2 do not apply.

Upstream

• node — https://github.com/Quantus-Network/chain (MINING.md is the real doc)
• miner — https://github.com/Quantus-Network/quantus-miner
• guide — https://docs.quantus.com/guides/mining

Note that Planck is a testnet: "tokens have no monetary value". Mainnet difficulty and reward schedule are unpublished, so no profitability claim here is possible yet. Also worth tracking: this PoW has no memory hardness and a small fixed state, which makes it an unusually clean FPGA/ASIC target — relevant to any decision to buy hardware for it.