Witness Node Upgrade
I'm happy to report that as of today, my witness node has been upgraded. The process went smoothly, with no missed blocks and no downtime whatsoever. It was also a good exercise for building and maintaining a backup node (which is something I intend to do, after I come back from SteemFest, next month). The new machine is a 16 cores Intel, with 72GB of RAM.
Until today I was running a bare metal machine form Hetzner, 32GB RAM and 8 cores Intel. I had nothing to complain about it, other than the fact that I already had 2 machines waiting to be allocated to the Steem project. The machines were installed in a collocation facility since last Monday, all I had to do was to configure them.
Having the machines in a colocation facility in my own town will make debugging and upgrading easier.
The second machine - with the same configuration as the witness node, plus a 240 GB SSD drive - is allocated to the content node that I am building for steem.supply and is now my first priority, hoping to get it done next week. In theory, this should bring the downtime of steem.supply close to zero.
Since I am already playing with the Steem blockchain for about a year, I decided to explore the rest of the graphene family too. So I will test a witness node for BitShares as well, then I will try to see how DECENT is going on (hoping to get more info about that form @roelandp, at SteemFest).
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
I should also update my setup at some point. It's hard with all the crypto projects going on.
Yes, at some point I had to make a decision, I can't spread the resources I have (which are scarce, to be honest) to all the projects that I follow, so I had to choose. Steemit was among the winners :)
Awesome news. I guess the machines are pretty expensive though
have fun at SteemFest!
You're making a good job by accumulating new equipment, if we have such enthusiastic people we shouldn't worry about Steem price
very nice post my friends love it very much
I fancy building a node too. Are you hosting your node at home or farming it out? @dragosroua
it's in a colo facility.
Is there a facility that you would recommend. I'm in the UK
Have no idea about colocation companies in UK, I'm in Romania.
I'll check out the local options. Good luck with the node.
Interesting. I know nothing about any of this and have ben trying to learn about witnesses and their role here on steemit. I use an app/program not sure what to call it to track activity on steemit. This whole week it has been off more than on. I see a message that says node maintenance. So maybe this is what you are talking about.
You may start here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@dragosroua/steemit-newbie-faq-witnesses-what-are-they-and-why-should-you-care
Yay, thank you.
That's awesome to know about :D