How to Update Your Official Skycoin Skyminer to Skywire Mainnet

This is going to be a video guide for updating your official Skyminer from Testnet to Mainnet. I’m doing this on a Mac computer. Bear in mind that software versions and installation instructions may change, so if you are updating your Skyminer to Mainnet, you should probably use this video in conjunction with the official instructions on GitHub; follow-along just to make sure nothing has changed since this video was made. So this is where we’ll start, at the Skywire repo on Github. Here on the Official Skyminer page, we’re going to be working with ‘software’, and then using the Skyimager User Guide to get our Skyminer updated. You can see that this is the preferred option, very easy and straightforward, which is what I’m looking for.

00:43 - If you do know what you’re doing, you can install Skywire from source, but if you can do that, you’re probably not watching this video. On the Skyimager User Guide, you’ll see that the first step is to go to the Skybian release page. There are a few releases on this page and I’m going to use the latest stable release, which at the time of this video is version 0.1.0. Clicking that takes me to the download page, where you can see the packages prepared for Windows and Linux, but since I’m on a Mac I will choose the one labeled Darwin, which is the name of the Unix core at the heart of the Mac Operating System. Once that’s finished downloading, you can locate it on your machine, and unzip it using the system’s built in unzip tool, with leaves you with a folder, inside of which is the application we’re looking for.

01:29 - To open it you can just double click, and note that you may get a security warning, depending on the security settings of your system. So if you’re having trouble, either right-click to open it or go to System Preferences to adjust your security settings temporarily. Once it’s open, you can see on this screen, you will have a few decisions to make before proceeding. We need to choose the base image, in this case I am going to choose 0.1.0. The next question has to do with the number of visor images.

02:00 - Mainnet requires something called a Hypervisor, to control all the other visors, or nodes. A standard official Skyminer from Skycoin has eight nodes. By leaving this box checked, it means you wish to have seven of your Skyminer nodes designated as visors, and wish to generate the Hypervisor image to run on the eighth, “manager” node. It is possible to run Hypervisor on your own computer, which would allow you to control your nodes remotely from anywhere in the world. If this appeals to you, you would uncheck this box, and have the software create eight visor images instead of seven.

02:36 - If you do decide to run Hypervisor on your computer, you will also need to download and set up Git and Golang on your computer, if that’s what you want to do. Today I am just going to designate the manager node on my Skyminer to be the Hypervisor, so I’ll keep this box checked, and only generate seven visor images. This means I will only be able to control my nodes from within my own network, (rather than anywhere in the world), but I’m okay with that. So once you have everything configured the way you want it to be, you can click next, and then start building the images. It will take a few minutes to download all the images to your specified directory.

03:14 - So just be patient while that completes, and then once the download is complete, and the images are all generated, Skyimager helpfully provides two links - one to the directory where your images were downloaded, and the other to a page on the internet where you can download Balena Etcher, which is a free, open source program that works very well to flash the images onto the micro SD cards in your Skyminer. Once you’ve downloaded and opened Balena Etcher, you can start by clicking “select image” and navigating to your images, or you can simply drag the image onto the Etcher window. Start from the top, which in this case is image zero, and work your way down. When you attach your Micro SD card to your computer, you may get a warning that it is not readable. You can ignore that message, because you don’t have to format the cards before you flash them.

04:02 - Select that card as the “target” and then hit “Flash!” and wait for the program to finish. You might have to enter your system password to authorize the program. It will take some time to flash each image so be patient. When it’s over, you may click “Flash another” to start again, this time with the next image in your folder, until all cards have been flashed. Try to keep track of which image is going on which card.

04:25 - Once all cards are flashed, simply plug them back into your Skyminer, (but make a note of which card is going into which slot, in case you need that information later.) Once the newly flashed cards are back in your Skyminer, it’s time to visit the networking guide on GitHub and set the port forwarding rules so that you can connect to the Hypervisor. Unplug the cable from the WAN port on your skyminer, and connect your computer directly to the Skyminer using any of the boards. Restart both the Skyminer and your computer, then connect to the Skyminer in your browser. You should be able to connect using 192.168.0.1:8000. You can follow the guide on GitHub (make sure you’re looking at Skywire Mainnet), but basically you’ll need to adjust the port forwarding options so that they match the ones in the guide.

05:08 - There should be four port forwarding rules, for SSH, the Manager, SOCKS5, and skychat. Once that’s done you can disconnect your computer and plug the cables back into the board and WAN port on your Skyminer. Now it’s time to connect to your HypervisorUI. You should be able to connect using 192.168.0.2, but if that doesn’t work, log into your home router and look for the Skyminer, which should show up as MYAP. Then you can check the IP address it’s connected to, and use that to connect to your Skyminer via your browser. In my case, that address is 192.168.1.3.

05:45 - When logging in for the first time, you will need to click “Configure Initial Launch”, so you can set the password you’ll use to log into the HypervisorUI going forward. After you’ve set your password, you can log in and see all of your Mainnet visors! They have the public keys displayed in the dashboard, but if you click into a visor, you can find the “copy public key” button, which will be helpful for the next step, because the only thing left to do is whitelist your public keys. Registering your public keys in the Whitelisting system is the exact same process that you will have completed for Testnet. So you just need to log in and edit the keys that are already there, replacing them with your new Mainnet keys. Detailed instructions for that process are also on GitHub.

06:25 - And that’s it! Congratulations! Make sure you join Skywire PSA on Telegram to stay up-to-date, and have fun with Skywire Mainnet…! .