Seed server update

Wanted to improve our Seed server stats so that they can be easily monitored using a web link. It is important to check the uptime, ram, cpu, disk, and network usage for keeping the seed node up and running in good health. For those of you who do not know about Netdata, it is a very easy to install, free and convenient tool which allows you to do that.

It shows all kinds of statistics about your server, way more than you will need, but the more the better. Our seed node can be view here http://seed.steemitapp.com:19999/ as soon as the DNS are updated or here: http://46.4.37.176:19999/

For detailed installation instructions of Netdata you can follow this official link

There is a one line setup instruction for easy install that worked for me:

bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh)

Extra controls to stop and start

You can start netdata by executing it with /usr/sbin/netdata (the installer will also start it).
You can stop netdata by killing it with killall netdata. You can stop and start netdata at any point. Netdata saves on exit its round robbin database to /var/cache/netdata so that it will continue from where it stopped the last time.

This website shows the current status of the seed nodes https://status.steemnodes.com/ by @wackou
Have also added a pull request to add our seed node. It has been running for over a month now with no problems, only restarted it once about two weeks ago when testing the auto restart function.

Server specs both Seed and Witness server

64 GB RAM
Intel i7
2x240GB SSD
1gbit/s network
Germany Dedicated Server (privex.io)

All the server security recommendations are in installed, firewall, fail2ban, etc.

Making a seed name in readable format with subdomain of your website

We have decided to make our seed node easier to remember and more readable by adding a subdomain to our steemitapp.com website. Now our server can be reached by both seed.steemitapp.com:2001 as well as 46.4.37.176:2001

To do that you just need to add an A name to your domain. You can either do it in your domain name manually or if you are not sure how to do that you can always contact your Domain Name Registrator (Provider). I actually ended up contacting support of our hosting provider because our Domain was purchased through a different website than our web hosting. They kindly did all the work themselves in under 15 minutes.