@steemcreative: The witness is up and running on HF20.5

swelker101 (66)in #witness-category • 6 years ago

It's been a whirlwind couple weeks now.

So we completed the HF20.4 upgrade a couple of nights ago, and once the RPC nodes were up to date, it allowed many of us to get back up and running, which I was thankful for as I was having issues with the 20.3 release causing issues with my witness. So here's what I was dealing with, while trying to keep things running.

There was a "bug" that did not change the account creation fee for those not in the top 20
The @steemcreative account is brand new, which means that with the 20.3 bugs, I did not have enough RCs to broadcast any changes to correct the fee.
My main account @swelker101, was just short enough mana to delegate to @steemcreative
It wouldn't have mattered anyway as there was a bug not allowing delegation to "count" immediately.

Fortunatley, as soon as HF20.4 kicked in, I was able to perform the above with no issues.

Now, we're currently sitting in spot 166, which kind of turned out to be a good thing for this particular circumstance of having the witness on a brand new account. Any higher and there would have been missed blocks like crazy.

Last night around midnight my time, I noticed a couple of new commits to the steem git. Uh oh, that means a new patch is about to drop, which it did shortly thereafter.

Now, the bad part of being low on the list: You are never sure that your update went okay until you get a block to confirm. We had yet to receive a block in the 20.4 patch, so I did not know for a fact that I had everything correct.

We were informed that this update could be done without a replay (takes about 5 hours or so depending on specs) but would be better for the chain if you do a replay. So I had a decision to make. Do I roll the dice and replay and miss what may be the only block I get for a day or so, or do the "soft" upgrade and replay after (Again not knowing how long it will be until that block comes). I went for the soft upgrade, and waited for that block to come. Fortunately, the block came, was accepted, and confirmed that we are on 20.5. PHEW!

As of this writing, @steemcreative is on 20.5 and currently replaying for 20.5 at around 80% completed.

So unless @isaria and I are to win the steem lottery and score the elusive @pumpkin vote, we should be good to go until 20.6 drops