Hi all - my first post here, and first try at staking.
I'm sorry if these questions are stupid, but hopefully someone can get some use out of them in the future if they are answered.
So I wanted to try out staking in a testnet, so I won't start out with entirely blank sheets if I decided to try staking on the main net some time in the future, but it kind of feels like the hurdle might be too high for now. I read that medalla has stalled because too few people are participating, so I figured I might actually help out a bit at the same time.
I tried running Ubuntu some years ago, but I have since stuck it out with windows, so I'm a beginner at both ends, but I figured I could just as well do both at once. If anyone could be kind and answer just some of my stupid questions I would be very grateful :)
Now I first actually tried to join Zinken, but I'm not sure that is actually up anymore? First I got the error message "Waiting for beacon node to sync to latest chain head" and after some deliberation I realized Zinken might not even be running, so I wanted to switch to Medalla instead.
I have been using the onboarding guide on the prysm site, both for Zinken and Medalla, and as far as I could tell it looks like the beacon chain is synced, judging from Prysm's own "Is everything fine" page. However it took a few days before the chain looked like this. For some background I'm trying to run this on my old work computer, it has an i7 from about 2014 (i7-4600U), 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. Are the specs good enough for the test net? I'm also using an infura eth1 node.
Am I correct in thinking that when I wanted to run on Medalla instead of Zinken I can use the same beacon node without any changes, because they both run on Göerli, and using the infura node.
I was hoping that just doing the official onboarding process again for Medalla, I would be able to just run a new validator with new keys etc on the same beacon chain, however I still get the same message in the validator window - "Waiting for beacon node to sync to latest chain head"
The validator is still listed as "pending" on
beaconcha.in, but my understanding was that the message in the validator window would reflect this, if that was the only error.
Also the Ubuntu installation was completely fresh, so I haven't really done anything except installing and running prysm and the validator client. Was some firewall settings or similar necessary?
What am I doing wrong?
Again sorry about the wall of text, I'm so new to this that I don't really know what to omit and include. Thanks in advance :)
