Sync Kusama Network

[amerameen]

Expected Behavior

• Connect to Kusama network and sync to the head

Current Behavior

• N/A

Checklist

• I have read CODE_OF_CONDUCT and CONTRIBUTING
• I have provided as much information as possible and necessary
• I am planning to submit a pull request to fix this issue myself

[0x4a5e1e4baab]

Are there any details on what is blocking this issue?

Id like to follow along with the development of this feature for Kusama & Polkadot networks

[noot]

hey @andyhowell8 , glad to see the interest! the issues that are currently blocking this are #1264 (updating encoding for some network messages) and #1266 (ensuring we can correctly sync the state).

[0x4a5e1e4baab]

Great thanks for the reply, am I correct in saying that the current implementation as it stands will not connect Kusama or Polkadot p2p via the respective boot nodes?

I've done a quick test and noticed that the node never appears to get peers. I'm working on a Masters research project using go-libp2p to connect to Kusama nodes to explore the DHT, I manage to connect successfully but never seem to exchange peers.

On researching the issue I stumbled across this project and the p2p implementation is rather similar, hence my interest in this open issue. I won't pollute this issue with more unrelated conversations by will keep an eye on the progress.

[noot]

@andyhowell8 it should be able to connect, however it likely won't be able to stay connected. the peer will be expecting certain messages to be exchanged, and if they aren't exchanged, they will disconnect from us. currently this seems to happen in around ~15s or so with our implementation.

I'm not sure if you've seen this substrate documentation: https://crates.parity.io/sc_network/index.html it may be helpful as it outlines the protocols that substrate nodes use.

I'm working on connecting (and staying connected) currently and added some DHT advertising and discovery code here: #1269 I tried it with kusama yesterday and it never seems to reach the point of being able to advertise or discover due to being unable to stay connected. This will be our primary focus for a while so we should have some progress on it soon. Feel free to email me if you'd like to discuss further: elizabeth (at) chainsafe (dot) io