ZCash client shut down

Hi,

I’m trying to figure out why the Prohashing mining pool’s ZCash client crashed sometime in the past day. The monitoring system that automatically restarts crashed coins put out an alert that ZCash is always exiting with code 1 and printing the following to stdout:

“Error: This version has been deprecated as of block height 502708. You should upgrade to the latest version of Zcash”

When I perform a Google search for that block number, there are no references returned to what fork occurred at that height.

Is anyone aware of what needs to be changed for this latest upgrade? I can find documentation, but none of it references this specific error and there’s too much money at stake to just upgrade without knowing exactly what changed.

By the way, for those who are watching, a third of the ZCash hashrate went to other coins this morning. That’s not very far away from 50%. This is a dangerous method of forcing upgrades. It’s especially dangerous not to prevent this from occurring very early on a Sunday morning when our employees are asleep but the criminals are not.

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This is the end of release halt for version 2.0.2 see Release Cycle and Lifetimes - Electric Coin Company. The software will stop working after 16 weeks and you simply need to upgrade. You can see the 2.0.3 release notes here: Release Zcash 2.0.3 · zcash/zcash · GitHub (albeit 2.0.4 will ship imminently).

As for timing this is indicated in zcash/deprecation.h at d974ec3fec7e6379b22d773e4463c38350e48b48 · zcash/zcash · GitHub and from that you can calculate the approx deprecation block height. So for 2.0.2 it would be 502032 - it’s approximate only as depends on exactly when the software was released.

It’s easier to see here: Schedule - Zcash. I do think there should be some more noise made around upgrade time - for example I made this thread at 2.0.1 end of support halt as a huge % of nodes were still on the soon to be expiring version.

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Thanks for the reply. I upgraded and it looks like the system is back to normal, although I won’t be able to confirm that until a block is found.

I think this is another reason that the industry desperately needs someone to start a business offering a “software updates feed” for coins and exchanges. I’d pay $2000/yr for this service, and all the entrepreneur needs to do is to check the webpages of the developers of the 1000 or so coins periodically and create a JSON feed with the coin or exchange name, version, URL of the announcement, and whether it’s mandatory.

I understand that you have a site for ZCash updates, but the problem is that I didn’t know I didn’t know about this upgrade. There was nothing to indicate that I needed to check the website to find out about the update. I really hope that someone finally starts offering this service.

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