@firepower Witness Update: Undertaking Maintenance & Hardware Upgrade!

It's been a smooth ~5 month run without a single hiccup and 0 missed blocks. My node has been supporting the Steem blockchain without any issues. Hence I felt it's good to make an update about why my node is down for about 2 days now.

The unexpected emergency with the blockchain freezing did throw everyone off. I've missed a total of only 3 blocks in the process. I try to ensure my witness doesn't miss any blocks but it wasn't in my hands this time. But i think it's a reasonably acceptable number.

Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 6.50.10 AM.png

I'm updating my witness to v0.19.5. However during my update Steemd crashed twice during replay. With some guidance on troubleshooting and debugging, I've sorted out the primary reason for the replay not going through fully. Replay takes half a day and is a slow process!

However, there was another issue with the second replay which is also nearly sorted out now. I will begin replay once the log is downloaded and get it signing blocks once again after that. But as you can tell, a lot of time was wasted in the process.

In the past few months of running, my witness has never failed even once. I've never compromised on the quality of hardware needed to run it either.

My backup server wasn't utilised because my primary node worked so flawlessly. My seed node ran fine but it was not listed in the official list at the time. It will be included in the update to the seed node list according to @timcliff's recent update.

But now that the blockchain is bloated to 125+ GB, I have to upgrade the SSDs on my backup and seed node. I've put in the request to my hosting providers and as soon I have my upgraded hardware I will finish the task.

Currently, I'm running 64GB of RAM on my primary node with 2x500GB SSDs. 32 GB of RAM and 2x120 GB SSDs on my backup and seed nodes respectively. But with this update and increased size of the blockchain I will upgrade the hardware of my backup and seed node in this maintenance to a better configuration.

I'm prepared to scale the dedicated servers to whatever is needed to support the blockchain efficiently and effectively in the future.

You can find all the info and more about my witness campaign in this post here

Soon I'll have all my nodes up and running as flawlessly as it has in the past and continue supporting the Steem blockchain as best as possible.

Thank you for your support, patience and trust in my witness supporting our blockchain.


If you like my work kindly resteem it to your friends. You may also continue reading my recent posts which might interest you:

  1. Let's Watch This Fun Video From International Steem Meetup #1—Malaysia
  2. Why You Should Vote For @firepower As Witness—Witness Campaign Post From India!
  3. Steem.Chat Contest #33

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Good job, running your node 24/7 for 5 months with 0 hiccups is certainly a feat

Thanks for the upvote firepower, you're awesome =)

You have my support firepower. It is very reassuring to read this post, so many times there is no news on blockchain projects, you are starved for info. People buy Crypto not just to trade but also because they believe this is the future. Keeping us in the loop shows us all that Steemit is real, is growing and will have a bright future!
I was wondering why Binance deposits and withdrawals were still suspended today, now i understand...... Steem On!!!
resteemed

Thank you :)

For Steem blockchain most of us are updated on what's going on in almost real-time. Top witnesses are also often on standby. Anyone who's serious about their witness will try to get the updates done asap. I hope to have mine running stable soon.

Exchanges need to update their nodes and that can take a bit longer than usual but it will happen soon.

Thanks again for explaining this!

Okay. I did not understand all that, if I did I would try and help.
From what I read you are doing a great job.
Keep up the good work. One of the reasons you are on my witness list.

Thank you very much for your support. I'm just trying to do the best I can to support the Steem blockchain and everyone using it. :)

Steemians must appreciate all witnesses and should rotate their votes for witnesses so that large number of witnesses remain in stand by to support the blockchain for much higher degree of decentralisation. Appreciate u taking all this initiative and pain

Thank you. Hopefully we won't any further issues until the next scheduled update.

after all your witness is running well.

thanks. hoping to get back to this as soon as the updates are done.

What's your witness ranking buddy ?

All right, you are doing nice,hope to see you in top 30 soon.

Congratulations @firepower! You have completed the following achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You published 4 posts in one day

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To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

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Running your node 24/7 for 5 months with 0 hiccups is insane, how you ddo that.

Your name is striked off in witness page!!

That's because my witness is disabled for maintenance currently as is mentioned in this post. :)

Oh ok. So it is not a bad news. Cool :)

Hi Firepower,

Thank you for being a top witness. I am trying to setup a witness server for the first time and finding it hard to get help. I just want to learn more about Steemit and happy to be a backup witness and learn how it all glues together. This is my 9th attempt to build a witness server on my own with no help. This time I got all the way to syncing with Steemd --replay. But I messed up and did a Ctrl-C before it finished. Now when I try to run Steemd --reply it says "block log execption"cannot reindex an empty chain. Any ideas how I could fix without killing the lot and starting again.. :)

Cheers

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