Presearch is a longstanding partner of ThreeFold and is one of the most popular solutions offered on the Grid since the days of the v2 Virtual Data Center. Our Grid v3 deployment has been available in the playground for a while now, but it has been somewhat limited by the requirement that a dedicated public IP is reserved for each Presearch node.
With the recent Grid 3.6 release, any node on the Grid can now host a Presearch node. If you’re a ThreeFold farmer and want to host Presearch on your own node, it’s now super easy. The only restriction now is that a single node can be deployed per farm, to avoid IP address conflicts since each Presearch node requires a unique public IP. This also means it’s less expensive than ever to run Presearch on the Grid, about 105 TFT per month by my estimate.
Quick Start
I’m going to briefly describe how to deploy the Presearch weblet, assuming you already have an account activated on TF Chain and some TFT in a Stellar wallet such as the TF Connect app. You can download the Polkadot.js extension and activate your account on the portal in just a few steps, which are described in detail at the beginning of the farming guide.
Fund your account
You’ll need some TFT in your TF Chain account to pay for the deployment. If your wallet runs out of funds, your workload will be paused but not deleted and you have two weeks to add more TFT before the workload is deleted entirely. Head to the portal and bridge some TFT from Stellar using the swap page from the left side nav bar.
Activate your playground profile
For this step, you will need your mnemonic seed phrase for your Polkadot account. There’s no way to recover it from the Polkadot extension, so if you don’t have your words you’ll need to make a new account. No problem, just transfer the TFT you bridged into the new account.
Now, head to the playground. Click the Create Profile Manager tab, enter a password, and hit the button to create. On the following screen you’ll see three fields. Choose a name, enter your mnemonic seed phrase, and your public SSH key if you have one. SSH is a way to login to deployments and execute commands, but this is not necessary for the Presearch deployment. You can enter a placeholder like “none”.
Deploy Presearch
Once you’re inside the Playground, you’ll see Presearch in the left side nav bar. Click that and fill in your Presearch node registration code. If you have a Presearch node key pair you want to import, use the restore tab to input that. Leave public IP unselected, unless you really want to reserve a public IP and pay extra 
The last step is to choose a node. If you’re a ThreeFold farmer wanting to deploy to your own node or otherwise already have a node in mind, select manual under Node Selection and input the node id below. Otherwise, you can use the capacity filter. Both the farm and country selectors are optional here. You’ll only see the first 50 nodes that meet your criteria in any case.
After selecting a node, hit deploy and wait for the deployment to finish. This should only take a few minutes. Then you can head to your Presearch node dashboard and check that your node is connected.
Did it work for you? Questions? Let me know in the replies.
