Ethereum will go through a hard-fork in the middle of April 2021. This is supposed to be a fork that will help lower the gas fees, which have gone skyhigh after the DeFi boom. The final solution will be when Ethereum moves on to be a PoS (Proof of Stake) protocl instead of PoW (Proof of Work), but the Berlin hard fork is supposed to move the chain a step in the right direction. But, if you run an Ethereum node, how can you upgrade it in order to make it compatible with the hard fork?
If you run an Ethereum node without upgrading it, you will have trouble and the node will most likely be unable to keep record of transactions after the fork has taken place. That is why you will need to upgrade your GETH version to 1.10. But, how can that be done?
I have read several guides with instructions on how to upgrade your node to 1.10. But, I still had trouble, because it didn’t seem to actually upgrade my Geth installation to 1.10, and instead it remained as 1.9.24 or 1.9.25. Maybe your node is even older as well. What can you do to upgrade your Ethereum node?
How to upgrade your Ethereum node before the Berlin fork?
According to the official Geth website, this is what you need to do:
Updating go-ethereum is as easy as it gets. You just need to download and install the newer version of geth, shutdown your node and restart with the new software. Geth will automatically use the data of your old node and sync the latest blocks that were mined since you shutdown the old software.
Now, these instructions are fairly good, but not exact enough. So, let me show you the exact commands that will help you install and upgrade Geth on your Ethereum node so that you will be ready in time for the Berlin fork.
Run these commands to upgrade your Ethereum node
sudo systemctl stop geth
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ethereum/ethereum
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ethereum
sudo apt-get upgrade geth
sudo systemctl start gethIf you run those commands, your node should be updated and you will be ready to record transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, also after the Berlin hard-fork.
If you want to make sure that you have upgraded Geth, you can run the following command.
geth version checkThis will show you the version of Geth that is running on your node, and you will hopefully see Geth version 1.10.1 or something like that.
If you run an Ethereum node, make sure to read more about the StrongBlock project who is out there to encourage node operators and also to reward them. You can read more about StrongBlock righ here. If you would like to run a node, find out more about the best VPS providers for an Ethereum node in this article.
