Witness update 2018-04-13 - Server upgrade

That has been a full month (and counting) that my witness server is running and producing blocks containing transactions people have been doing on Steemit and other websites on the Steem blockchain. Being just a backup witness, the job is much less stressful than that of the top 20 witness who need to produce a block every 63 seconds. But I have learn quite a bunch about the Steem blockchain but there are still a mountain of info to be discovered in front of me.

@quochuy's Witness report

Learn with me

A while ago, @bobaphet asked me about @utopian-io and other websites such as @busy and such.

Before we start, here is what you need to understand Steemit.com and the Steem blockchain are two different things. Steemit.com is just a web app that allows you to interact (browse, read, write, upvote etc...) with the Steem blockchain. Steemit.com is developed by Steemit Inc. and is hosted on their private server(s) while the Steem blockchain is hosted on the witnesses server. The Steem blockchain is decentralised, Steemit.com is not. However, both being two separate thing, they can exist one without the other and the great thing is that you can interact the Steem blockchain from another app. If you know how to develop websites and use APIs, you can make your own website that talks to the APIs on the RPC nodes (most of which are run by witnesses) to do things on the blockchain. This is what @busy, @yehey, @utopian-io, @dtube and more are: separate apps from independent users or team that can replace Steemit.com. You can even run a clone of Steemit.com like what @yehey did at https://yehey.org/ and what this allows is a alternate way to access the Steem blockchain if Steemit.com platform goes down as long as the witness network is still up and running.

Now, some web apps have added extra features not found on Steemit.com:

@busy has added useful features such as instant notifications, voting power slider even if you don’t have a lot of SP etc...
@dtube allows uploading of videos
@utopian-io rewards open source projects: programming, bug hunting, project proposals etc...

All of them are creating a Steem ecosystem and expanding the core features of the platform. In order to interact with the Steem blockchain, you don’t have to use Steemit.com, if you want, you could exclusively use https://busy.org

I will talk about @utopian-io in a bit more details in a next witness update.

Whats new since last update?

on Wednesday morning, I woke up to @ginabots notification showing me this:

What the... I immediately went to connect to my server to see what was going on but the connection was impossible. I went to my hosting dashboard to discover the server was cancelled! 😱 What happened was something went wrong and my request for a cancellation that should have been done on April 30th happened too early. Luckily, I managed to undo the cancellation and get the server back on track quickly before the next schedule.
after that incident, I contacted the hosting company and got it sorted. The support person also helped me transition to a new server and migrated the extra rental days in the old server to the new one. The upgrade was solely on the SSD harddrive as the previous one was getting close to being full. The migration went smoothly and the new witness server is running and producing more blocks.
the current witness server has 32GB of RAM and 240GB of disk space. Although it is possible to use less RAM and copy the shared file on SSD, the difference in price is negligible so I went for 32GB and also stuck on using Zram to compress the memory as it was doing it for a whole month without issue.
@gtg point of view on the 64GB requirement for a witness node https://steemit.com/witness-category/@gtg/ffdhu-gtg-witness-log
@steemitblog also reckon even 16GB can be used if the disk is fast (SSD or NVMe) https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/exploring-steem-scalability

100 STEEM to Witnesses below rank 80

@jerrybanfield has generously offered 100 STEEM as part of his @budgets project to help them cover their costs of running a witness server.

Here are the answers to the questions.

Operate the witness for at least one month and earning at least 10 votes

I’m ticking those two boxes as it has been more than a month now and I have 39 votes as of today.

Contributions, server specs and thoughts

I have done my best to explain to non-technical users the concept of witnesses and other Steem related topics.
as described above, I made a browser extension for the community to use and protect themselves against phishing links
I helped a project to improve DTube IPFS Network by pinning videos and am running two permanent IPFS nodes, one in Canada and one in Australia.
I have helped few users to setup their own witnesse server, this includes @qurator which will be helping them quite a bit.
I have responded to another Witness’ call for a fund raiser for charity and sang “I still call Australia home” 😂
I have started to get involved with the Vietnamese community and am trying to help where I can

Here is my current server specs:

Intel Xeon E3-1245v2
4c/8t
3,4GHz / 3,8GHz
32Go DDR3 1333 MHz
SoftRaid 2x240GB SSD
I didn’t go for 64GB RAM for the reason explained above and being into recycling, composting and sustainable living I want to spend wisely. 32GB and 120 GB worked for one month, I updated to 240 GB because the blockchain file has grown and filled the disk.

My thoughts on the development of Steem. I’m currently still a newbie and have a lot to learn before I can give a decent answer. But from what I’m at, I think Steem and Steemit has too many difficult concepts for mainstream users. Four signing keys when one password is already difficult to handle. A huge majority of users don’t vote for witnesses because they probably don’t even know what a witness does. We need to make this platform more user friendly.

Plan for the future:

produce enough blocks to pay off the witness node and start a seed node
evolve myself as with low SP there is just so much I can do to help when the whole system revolves around that unit
help existing projects and maybe even start my own to support Minnows
find ways to promote Steem outside of Steemit