**GM! World**
So for the past few days I've been on a very hot seat trying to run my very own node and experience it live from my own machine. I use a Linux distrubution from the Debian flavours particularly Ubuntu, so I encounterd next to no errors from permission requirements and bottlenecks that a person using Windows would encounter. That not withstanidng I still faced my fair share of bugs and errors as i tried to run the node.

I would be very frank, at fist I understood next to nothing about the assignment that was given to us. And as I am a student realized that I had very limited time to get the task done. But I Hopped on it with the optimish that it would be completed before the deadline that was stated. I hurried down from school at the University of Jos to the Lab to meet up with a collegaue of mine who was having issues in setting up at the time. And He had began using the Geth and Prysm setup to run his node. I on the other hand am somewhat biased to Rust and as such I didn't even consider the idea of running the node with the execution and consensus clients that were implemented with Go. Omohh I later realized that that was a very rigid way to work as I tell you the details of the things I experienced.

So I got to work installing the softwares that would be necessary to run the execution and concensus clients in Rust and with the guidiance from the Ethereum book. To be honest I didn't even know where to start from and what we were expected to do, were we expected to run a Fullnode, an Archive node, or perhaps a Light node? was it to be a Testnet instance of the block-chain or was it to be a Mainnet synced version or even a Private Network? I had no Idea.. at the beinning but I can say not that I've learnt what instance I eventually got working and even though not perfectly and with a lot of assistance I have actually made it this far.

I was especially shocked at first the requirements needed to run the node. For one the least space needed to store a fullcopy of the ethereum network was 2TB. My machines specs is 16GB Memory with 250GB of Disk capacity so I braved the consequences and got to work. I started by setting up the folder structure then It took quite some time install both the Execution client in rust which is Reth and the Conseseus client Lighthouse. And it was finally time to run the node. Which I did and eventually began to "work". My initial setup required little head work because up to the point where I got the execution and the consensus clients running, I was following the instructions from the Ethereum book and it all "Worked". Unknowing to me that I hadn't really gotten the network to run. My execution client was just discovering random peers and there was no actual communication between the execution clients. I had only one running which was obvious and a flaw of my earlier set-up. So I took screenshots of the logs on the terminal and sent it to the group chat for review but I got feedback from the Instructor that I should have setup private network and configure the execution clients so that they can discover themselves explicitly instead of random peers shown in the picture below

I had to restart my project and eventually got the network to discover the adjacent node and discover it as a peer in the private network which I had set up.

I also faced some issues when running my consesus clients. But i still hope to make more research to update this little document when I actually get it working

I still have a lot to learn and comprehend but this is what I've been able to work on. I know it isn't finished and there would probably be a lot more to get done, But here's my few Bits in into the journey of a Terabyte :)

Here is a more technical documentation of the issues i faced and still will work on.
https://hackmd.io/HRwqKqreQj-5umPloZKwgw

Thank you for reading. Please Like if you enjoyed reading ;)