Make it harder for users to accidentally launch new (Canton) nodes via faulty config overrides

[martinflorian-da]

A validator operator (using Docker compose deployment route) recently encountered a very hard-to-debug issue that ultimately turned out to be due to the following misconfiguration:

ADDITIONAL_CONFIG_SPLICE_PARTICIPANT_CRYPTO_PROVIDER_KMS=
            canton.participants.participant1.crypto.provider = kms
            canton.participants.participant1.crypto.kms {
                type = aws
                region = ${AWS_REGION}
                multi-region-key = false # optional, default is false
                audit-logging = true # optional, default is false
            }

Hard to see, but the issue is that they did canton.participants.participant1 instead of canton.participants.participant. participant is what the image deploys by default; somehow Canton happily also accepted participant1 here instead of failing, and this resulted in it creating a second participant inside the same container... (They used participant1 because they were following some guide on the Canton docs.)

I'm not sure how to best resolve this and also not sure which other images are affected. Part of this issue is to figure these things out.

I also don't know how often a sneaky misconfiguration like this might happen. I suggest prioritizing this issue only if something related happens again.

[martinflorian-da]

Just to echo from https://github.com/DACH-NY/canton-network-internal/pull/2163

Feels like Canton should not have enough defaults for a node that this is not an error.

So possibly we should discuss this with Canton; @moritzkiefer-da furthermore thinks

this is a Canton issue where they have too many defaults for nodes and it should be solved on that side

[moritzkiefer-da]

Easy option: Remove the port defaults in Canton. I don't think they are useful in any way and removing them would mean you get a config error if you do that.

[rgugliel-da]

FYI: https://github.com/DACH-NY/canton/issues/28691

[rgugliel-da]

PRs have been merged into main and release-line-3.4

[moritzkiefer-da]

thanks Raf!