Sector pledging
Pledging sectors is a technique to seal sectors with random data to make increase the miner's power in the network. This guide covers the motivation, steps to create and upgrade pledged sectors back to a usable state.
Reasons to pledge sectors
As explained in “How mining works”, the amount of power of a miner in the Filecoin network is directly proportional to the amount of live storage (active sectors) contributed to the network. Miners with more power have more chances to be selected to mine new blocks.
By sealing sectors with random data, a miner can demonstrate to the network that it can potentially offer that much storage for real deals when there is enough demand or when it decides to do so. This is known as pledging. In the meantime, pledged sectors work similar to regular sectors and result in an increase in the miner’s power.
Taking the above into account, pledging sectors [on mainnet] network makes most sense when doing it at a scale where it provides enough power to have real chances to mine new blocks. Otherwise, it is only useful for testing purposes.
Pledging a sector
To pledge a sector use:
lotus-miner sectors pledge
In Lotus, this will pledge the space for ~538 days by default.
The protocol allows a sector to have expiration time between 180-540 days. Lotus will allow user to set the committed capacity sector expiration time upon pledge once issue #4760 is addressed.
$TMPDIR so make sure that there is enough space available.Check that the sealing job has started with:
lotus-miner sealing jobs
This will be accommpanied by a file in <PATH_FOR_SEALING_STORAGE>/unsealed.
After some minutes, you can check the sealing progress with:
lotus-miner sectors list
# and
lotus-miner sealing workers
When sealing for the new is complete, pSet: NO will become pSet: YES.
Adjusting the expected seal duration setting
If you pledged a sector, you can use the duration of the operation to update the ExpectedSealDuration setting.
To find out how long it took to seal the sector, run:
lotus-miner sectors status --log 0
Then follow the instructions in the configuration reference linked above.
Inspect expiring sectors
You can check which sectors are about to expire. Sectors that will expire within 60 days can be checked by default with the following command:
lotus-miner sectors check-expire
If you want to check for sectors that will expire within 33 days (669600 epoch in devnet) , add the --cutoff option along with your desired epoch:
lotus-miner sectors check-expire --cutoff 669600
ID SealProof InitialPledge Activation Expiration MaxExpiration MaxExtendNow
5 5 59.605 nFIL 1519 (1 day 9 hours ago) 691857 (in 4 weeks 2 days) 5257519 (in 34 weeks 3 days) 1587303 (in 10 weeks 2 days)
10 5 59.605 nFIL 3588 (1 day 7 hours ago) 697617 (in 4 weeks 2 days) 5259588 (in 34 weeks 4 days) 1587303 (in 10 weeks 2 days)
11 5 59.605 nFIL 4695 (1 day 6 hours ago) 697617 (in 4 weeks 2 days) 5260695 (in 34 weeks 4 days) 1587303 (in 10 weeks 2 days)
15 5 59.605 nFIL 6891 (1 day 4 hours ago) 700497 (in 4 weeks 2 days) 5262891 (in 34 weeks 4 days) 1587303 (in 10 weeks 2 days)
17 5 59.605 nFIL 7004 (1 day 3 hours ago) 700497 (in 4 weeks 2 days) 5263004 (in 34 weeks 4 days) 1587303 (in 10 weeks 2 days)
Extend sectors
You can extend the lifecycle of a sector with the lotus-miner sectors renew command:
lotus-miner sectors renew [command options] [arguments...]
NAME:
lotus-miner sectors renew - Renew expiring sectors while not exceeding each sector's max life
USAGE:
lotus-miner sectors renew [command options] [arguments...]
OPTIONS:
--exclude value optionally provide a file containing excluding sectors
--extension value try to extend selected sectors by this number of epochs, defaults to 540 days (default: 1555200)
--from value only consider sectors whose current expiration epoch is in the range of [from, to], <from> defaults to: now + 120 (1 hour) (default: 0)
--max-fee value use up to this amount of FIL for one message. pass this flag to avoid message congestion. (default: "0")
--new-expiration value try to extend selected sectors to this epoch, ignoring extension (default: 0)
--only-cc only extend CC sectors (useful for making sector ready for snap upgrade) (default: false)
--really-do-it pass this flag to really renew sectors, otherwise will only print out json representation of parameters (default: false)
--sector-file value provide a file containing one sector number in each line, ignoring above selecting criteria
--to value only consider sectors whose current expiration epoch is in the range of [from, to], <to> defaults to: now + 92160 (32 days) (default: 0)
--tolerance value don't try to extend sectors by fewer than this number of epochs, defaults to 7 days (default: 20160)
Renew sectors in an epoch interval
This is an example of selecting sectors with a an expiration epoch between epochnumber-a and epochnumber-b, and renewing those sectors with 1555200 epochs:
lotus-miner sectors renew --from <epochnumber-a> --to <epochnumber-b> --new-expiration 1555200
Renewing 59 sectors:
{
"Extensions": [
{
"Deadline": 0,
"Partition": 0,
"Sectors": "2282,2285,2383,2386,2388,2394-2396,2400-2406,2408-2416,2418-2420,2422-2423,2428,2430",
"NewExpiration": 3760173
},
{
"Deadline": 2,
"Partition": 0,
"Sectors": "2417,3769,3771-3772,3775-3776,3781,3783,3786-3787,3790-3791,3800,3802,3808,3814,3816,3834-3835,3839,3852,3860-3861,3878,3894,3904,3922,3961",
"NewExpiration": 3760173
}
]
}
59 sectors renewed
Please note that the command has to be executed with the --really-do-it flag to actually send the message. Its good practice to check that the output is what the user expected before adding the flag.
Renew sectors in a txt-file
This is an example of updating the lifecycle of sectors read from a file, and renewing those sectors with 1555200 epochs:
lotus-miner sectors renew --sector-file <your-sectorfile> --new-expiration 1555200
Renewing 7 sectors:
{
"Extensions": [
{
"Deadline": 0,
"Partition": 0,
"Sectors": "2282,2285,2383,2386,2388",
"NewExpiration": 3760196
},
{
"Deadline": 2,
"Partition": 0,
"Sectors": "2417,3769",
"NewExpiration": 3760196
}
]
}
7 sectors renewed
Please note that the command has to be executed with the --really-do-it flag to actually send the message. Its good practice to check that the output is what the user expected before adding the flag.
The format of the sector file has to be in the form like this (a single sector number per line):
1
2
...
Renew only-cc sectors
If you only want to renew CC-sectors, there is an additional flag --only-cc which will ignore any deal sectors in a given intervall, or file, when renewing.
lotus-miner sectors renew --from <epochnumber-a> --to <epochnumber-b> --new-expiration 1555200 --only-cc
Renewing 2 sectors:
{
"Extensions": [
{
"Deadline": 0,
"Partition": 0,
"Sectors": "2282,2285",
"NewExpiration": 3760206
}
]
}
2 sectors renewed
Please note that the command has to be executed with the --really-do-it flag to actually send the message. Its good practice to check that the output is what the user expected before adding the flag.