From Zero to Echelon Witness, Part 1: Preparations

A few days ago, @futureshock published Echelon has been launched. In this post, I share my experiences with setting up a witness for Echelon, as there are a few minor deviations from the instructions in the Readme. Maybe someone else would like to run an Echelon witness as well.

The reason I am looking into this is simple: I would find it really unfortunate, more than unfortunate, if the considerable time and energy invested in this project had been wasted.

So, let's get started with a freshly installed Ubuntu 22.04.

System update

Logged in as root, first perform a system update.

apt update && apt upgrade

Create user

The node should not run as root, so we create a new user named witness and give him root privileges.

adduser witness
usermod -aG sudo witness

Continue as user witness:

su witness
cd ~

What else we need.

sudo apt-get install -y gnupg curl

Install node.js

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nodejs
sudo apt install npm

At this point, node -v gives us v12.22.9 – but we need v20 or higher, which we'll fix right away.

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash

# Ensure nvm is available in the current terminal session
source ~/.bashrc

# Install Node.js version 20.19.4
nvm install 20.19.4

Looks better now, node -v now gives us the desired v20.19.4.

Install MongoDB

wget -qO- https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-8.0.asc | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/server-8.0.asc

echo "deb [ arch=amd64,arm64 ] https://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu jammy/mongodb-org/8.2 multiverse" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-8.2.list

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mongodb-org
sudo systemctl start mongod
sudo systemctl enable mongod

Install pm2

npm install pm2 -g

Check everything is installed and working

systemctl status mongod
mongod --version
mongorestore --version
mongosh --version
node -v
npm --version
pm2 -v

It should look something like this:

Break!

Congratulations on making it this far. The easier part comes in the next few days, maybe even tomorrow. Then we'll get the witness up and running!

But first, we deserve a break.