Validator Unable to get Transaction/Account History

[hub-il]

Problem

I need to be able to obtain a historical account balance as of a particular block and based on the documentation it seems that if I can identify all transactions that an account was part of I should be able to see the rolling balance using the meta key in the transaction output ({"meta":{"err":null,"fee":5000,"postBalances":[478461136360,26858640,1,1,1],"preBalances":[478461141360,26858640,1,1,1]).
Based on the documentation it is unclear how to get historical transactions. I am successfully running a validator node using the following flags and can see the transaction data since I started the node but I don't seem to be able to see any historical transaction data from prior to that date/time.

--no-voting --log - --enable-rpc-transaction-history --private-rpc

The flag --limit-ledger-size is not included.

Is there a way to either (b) obtain historical transaction data, or (b) obtain a historical balance as of a particular slot/block?

I see this medium post about archiver nodes that distribute the historical ledger but its not clear how you would make a request to his archive to pull back data for a specific block, transaction, or account.

Proposed Solution

Add an option to specify a block for the getBalance RPC call.

[mvines]

We recently added these two RPC APIs to serve this purpose:

• getConfirmedSignaturesForAddres - https://docs.solana.com/apps/jsonrpc-api#getconfirmedsignaturesforaddress
• getConfirmedTransaction - https://docs.solana.com/apps/jsonrpc-api#getconfirmedtransaction
  Does this look like it'll work for you?

[hub-il]

Yes, I think this would work in part. If I start my validator today is there a way to use this method to see the transactions that took place yesterday, or use some functionality involving the archivers?

Secondly, do you know the approximate time that the confirmed transactions would be stored on the validator node? Based on the Archiver approach it seems that at some point even without the --limit-ledger-size flag specified the ledgers will get pruned limiting how far back this method would work. Thank you for your help! Greatly appreciated.

[mvines]

Yes, I think this would work in part. If I start my validator today is there a way to use this method to see the transactions that took place yesterday, or use some functionality involving the archivers?

Not possible right now no. You'd only get history for transactions that occurred after the validator started. Archivers aren't implemented yet.

Secondly, do you know the approximate time that the confirmed transactions would be stored on the validator node? Based on the Archiver approach it seems that at some point even without the --limit-ledger-size flag specified the ledgers will get pruned limiting how far back this method would work.

If --limit-ledger-size is not provided, the ledger is never pruned and eventually disk space will run out. In this case you'd just need to manually manage ledger cleanup and validator restarts to ensure that doesn't happen

[hub-il]

Thanks, this is helpful. One last question, if I start and stop the validator will it fill in the gap in blocks that are processed in the mean time?

[mvines]

It depends.

1. If the validator is not given the --no-snapshot-fetch argument, it'll skip ahead and will never fill in any gaps
2. With the --no-snapshot-fetch argument, it'll restart from it's last local snapshot and attempt to repair its way up (thus filling in the gaps). But repair only works over the current epoch, so if you're validator is offline for longer than an epoch then it will not be possible to catchup with --no-snapshot-fetch and those missing blocks will be lost

[HuangRicky]

Problem

I need to be able to obtain a historical account balance as of a particular block and based on the documentation it seems that if I can identify all transactions that an account was part of I should be able to see the rolling balance using the meta key in the transaction output ({"meta":{"err":null,"fee":5000,"postBalances":[478461136360,26858640,1,1,1],"preBalances":[478461141360,26858640,1,1,1]).
Based on the documentation it is unclear how to get historical transactions. I am successfully running a validator node using the following flags and can see the transaction data since I started the node but I don't seem to be able to see any historical transaction data from prior to that date/time.

--no-voting --log - --enable-rpc-transaction-history --private-rpc

The flag --limit-ledger-size is not included.

Is there a way to either (b) obtain historical transaction data, or (b) obtain a historical balance as of a particular slot/block?

I see this medium post about archiver nodes that distribute the historical ledger but its not clear how you would make a request to his archive to pull back data for a specific block, transaction, or account.

Proposed Solution

Add an option to specify a block for the getBalance RPC call.

it's unrelated to this topic but you can check out my Windows builds for another github project.

[zfedoran]

Not possible right now no. You'd only get history for transactions that occurred after the validator started. Archivers aren't implemented yet.

@mvines is this still the case? If so, is there a workaround? Specifically, if a validator or node goes down, is there a way to ensure that calls to getSignaturesForAddress returns all transactions.

I'm having trouble finding info on the current state of this.

[github-actions]

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