How To Setup a Ethereum Validator: Create Bootable Device, Open MetaMask Account, Request Goerli ETH

Transcript

hello my fellow e-stakers and welcome to the validator workshop explainer series i am innovative.eth one of the core e-staker community members and in this series i'll be guiding you through step-by-step on how to set up and configure your own validator on puremont testnet now it's good practice to deploy a validator on testnet first before setting up and running a validator main net since no real ether will be used now rest assured the steps outlined in this explainer series are exactly the same as if deploying onto mainnet to begin i'll walk you through how to install balina etcher to create a bootable usb device next we'll go through opening up your own metamask wallet and

finally requesting gurley testnet eth so without further ado let's get into it now the first step here is to create a live bootable usb device using ubuntu 20.04 the reason for this is we want to create a fresh environment for our validator we don't want to be running any other programs or any other software on our validator we want to make sure it's a very clean environment so let's go ahead and get into that first open up a browser session and head over to bellina.io etcher once you're on their website click the applicable operating system that you're currently using to download their software before

leaving your your browser session one more step is to download the ubuntu operating system and you can find it at ubuntu.com download slash desktop you should see a download button on top for ubuntu 20.04.2 lts go ahead and click the download button and just make note as to where you saved that file we're going to be using it later now after the etcher software has downloaded and you've installed it onto your computer go ahead and open it up and the first thing we're going to do is locate the ubuntu iso file that we had just downloaded in my case it's in my downloads folder i'm going to go ahead and open that up

the next thing we're going to do is take a usb device and plug it into your computer once plugged in click click on select target and then select the applicable device finally hit the flash button and in our case we have to put in our administrative password and now it's going to begin flashing that usdb device after a few minutes the program will finish and we will now have a bootable usb device with ubuntu 20.04 alright so we have our live usb bootable device with ubuntu 20.04 we're just going to set that aside for right now the next thing we're going to do is open

up our metamask account so to do that we're going to open up a browser session and we're going to head on over to metamask.io and we're simply going to hit the download now button and we're in firefox so we're going to go ahead and install metamask for firefox then we're going to add to firefox and there we go now we're going to go through the metamask setup wizard so we're going to go ahead and click get started now this is going to be instructions for a new metamask

account so let's go ahead and do that we're going to go ahead and agree to this now we're going to create a password for the account please make sure that you make a strong password but one that you'll remember okay so we've got our password and we're just going to agree to the terms of use now this step is incredibly important and you need to pay attention when opening up your metamask account this is your secret backup phrase or your seed phrase right now i'm going to click this to review it but you would never in the real world

share this with anyone for any reason effectively whoever has access to your secret backup phrase has access to your ether so unless you want to give up control of your ether as the only time that you would ever give up the seed phrase then we're going to go ahead and click on next it's going to ask us to recite the seed phrase because this is important not only does it control the access to your wallet but if you lose your seed phrase and need to regain access for whatever reason you're out of luck there's no way to recover this type of information so it's imperative that you copy this down correctly and keep it in a safe place

okay we've confirmed our seed phrase metamask has confirmed that we do in fact have it down correctly so we're going to hit all done we're just going to close out of this and now this is our metamask wallet now currently we are on the ethereum main net and we can see that we don't have any funds in there now for this explainer series we're going to be working with the corley testnet network now that we have our very own metamask wallet the next step is to request gurley eth in order to fund our validator the minimum is 32 gorilla eath so we're going to go ahead and request that from the east acre discord if you aren't already a member of the

e-staker discord server please join us at invite dot gg eastaker once you've joined the e-staker discord you'll notice on the left-hand side of channels if you scroll all the way to the bottom you'll see a section for test nets we're going to go ahead and click on the request girly eath channel and what we can do is scroll to the bottom and then request corley eth by typing in exclamation point gourley eth and then our wallet address so if we go back go back into metamask and then just click on account one this will copy the entire ethereum wallet address

okay we've got our full wallet address pasted here we're just go ahead and hit enter and we see the automated bot has confirmed that yes the deposit has been made let's just wait a few minutes so if we go back to our meta mask wallet now if we look in our gourley test network metamask we see that we have 33 eth and now the minimum to spin up an ethereum validator node is 32. this allows us the full 32 staking amount with a little bit to pay for the gas fee for the transaction now the next thing to do is install the operating system to the hardware that we're going to be using for the validator now first thing you need to do is plug

in the usb device and then turn on the computer you'll be using for the validator now what we want to do here is boot from the usb device now depending on the hardware and manufacturer the button to push to boot into a usb device can vary it's usually one of the f keys like f11 or f12 it could be something unique like ctrl r or control h make sure when you're booting up your computer for the first time and watching the splash screens to look for something that says uh boot priority once you have booted into the usb device you should see something like this once

booted into the usb device we're going to go ahead and step through the installation wizard in our case we're going to go ahead and install ubuntu in our case we are english we're going to go ahead and keep that the same i'm actually going to switch this to minimal installation especially since we're only installing the validator software we don't need things like office software games or media players we're going to go ahead and click continue and then i'm also going to keep this the same we want to make sure that there's no remnants of any other software on this machine so we're going to blow away any other information and allow ubuntu to erase

the disk used on this that being said please make sure that this isn't a production machine or a home machine because if there are any valuable information photos media it will be lost so make sure that again this machine is completely dedicated for validator use only so let's go ahead and click install now it's going to ask us to confirm that yes in fact we do want to install on this disk and yes in fact it will delete we'll go ahead and click continue we will verify our area in our case we are out of the phoenix area we'll hit continue now it's going to ask us for some naming details

make sure you remember this password as the administrative password will be used heavily installing additional software necessary for the validator let's go ahead and click continue and now ubuntu will be installed on our applicable machine something to note while this loads is the amount of time that it takes to install on your machine is going to vary greatly depending on the resources available mainly the cpu power amount of ram and disk so let's just let this go and we'll come back in a couple minutes to see when it's finished up all right looks like our installation is complete let's go ahead and restart and look at that looks like we have a fresh new copy of ubuntu 20.04 installed

so there you have it to summarize we set up a live usb bootable device and installed ubuntu 20.04 we opened up our very first and then requested guerrilla eth in order to fund our validator node now the next steps are to install and configure the validator node itself we'll be exploring that step by step in the next video alright we'll see you there