Dmitrydao Steem Witness is Fully Launched Now

After a miner readjustment period for Linux environment, I finally launched a witness. You can see the whole blockchain is fully synced, the server is running smoothly and my feed is being published multiple times since the full start. I'll add an update when I hit my first block, already excited : )

For those who haven't read my announcement post, please do to have some context.

To be honest, the whole process was really awesome which turned out to be a big surprise for me. It was challenging at first but then I loved it because it wasn’t that easy and required to learn some new stuff and adjust.

There are a ton of things I learned during the whole process as well:

1. Use Linux or MacOS/OSX for your installation and maintenance. I started with Windows (don’t repeat my mistake, it sucked). Hopefully I’m a decent Linux user so I switched pretty fast after a fresh install.
2. Some countries (like mine lol) may have shitty ISP and ssh connections are cut off quite regularly. Thanks to @someguy123 brain and experience I installed the alternative to OpenSSH called Mosh. It was a perfect match for my needs and I wasn’t kicked from any ssh connections since then. For those who will launch new witnesses, keep that tool in mind, seriously. P.S. Today everything works fine with both of the solutions.
3. Putty is not the best way to deal with ssh, use terminal instead. It has a lot more features and is more flexible. One neat feature I love the most is an ability to copy your public ssh key directly to your server - ssh-copy-id username@remote_host. It saves time and is handy.
4. Most of the tutorials are a bit outdated, thus recommend stuff that was practical 2 years ago. For instance, choosing ufw for dealing with firewall is not the best option anymore. It has some bugs and can cause various problems with steem-docker (haven’t seen any info on this one in any tutorial). The better alternative is iptables with netfilter-persistent. It is easy to implement and has little or no issues during installation. One of the reasons why I had to re-install the server was due to ufw. Weird, right?
5. Ssh aliases are really cool. I hope most of you know this but still want to mention.

As I already mentioned in my announcement post, I launched a Finland node with the following specs:

• 64GB DDR4 RAM
• 2x250gb SSD
• Intel i7
• Unmetered 1gbp/s

Resources that helped me during installation process:

• Complete Witness Installation Guide by @krnel
• Your guide to setting up a Witness Server (STEEM-in-a-box HF19) by @someguy123
• Steem-in-a-box by @someguy123
• 2018 Beginner's Guide to Setting up A Steem Witness and Seed Node by @brandonfrye

An extra thanks to @someguy123 and @privex team. You guys rock. Chris helped me with so many things, I’m guilty of not helping him. I had to re-install a server a couple of times and he was very open, patient and extremely responsive during the whole process. Love that about him. Keep up the good work man.

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If you like what I do, make sure to vote for my witness (via steemit or steemconnect). Witnesses produce blocks so don’t skip.