Manspreading

Manspreading helps you greedily occupy a peer seat in a remote geth node.

Introduction

Sadly, due to the fact that many nodes on Ethereum network do not change the default --maxpeers settings, most nodes are full and won't accept new peers. Although there are static-nodes.json and trusted-nodes.json where a node owner can hardcode peers that will always connect regardless of the restriction by --maxpeers, these options are buried deep in the document and codebase, so that few knows they exist. Preserving a node peer seat at a peer becomes essential in the development/research on geth.

Manspreading is a proxy server that can be run as daemon and occupies a "seat" at a remote geth peer, so the real geth instance behind the proxy can stop and restart anytime without worrying the seat at the remote peer been taken during the restart period.

Prerequisite

• Golang (v1.8+)
• You need to install geth as the dependency by running go get github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum

Usage

1. go build .
2. ./manspreading --upstream="<remote node enode url>" --listenaddr="127.0.0.1:36666"
   A log line will show what's the enode url of the manspreading proxy in the format of enode://<nodekey>@<listenaddr>
   or if you have a nodekey file that you'd like to use:
   ./manspreading --upstream="<remote node enode url>" --listenaddr="127.0.0.1:36666" --nodekey="<path_to_your_nodekey>"
   Upstream node will be configured as both a static node and a trusted node, therefore even if the upstream disconnect itself, manspreading will attempt to reconnect indefinitely.
3. Start your real geth instance and add the manspreading enode url as a peer by running admin.addPeer("<manspreading enode url>")

TODO

• Making manspreading a 1-to-many or even a many-to-many proxy