Witness Update

^{Ignore the fact it's disabled, it's currently undergoing maintenance after a server crash at the time of this post.}

I am currently rank 98! With an active rank of 85. That's pretty decent but it's not high enough for me to justify a public API node just yet. I'd love to get to rank 75 or higher, I think then I can justify running a full API node quite easily, Unless the price of hive goes up a lot then I can probably justify it at my current rank. All depends on how much it makes in £ terms.

Anyways ignoring the fact as I'm writing this post I'm currently repairing my witness after a crash.. Everything has been running very smoothly.

Fortunately after the last few server failures, I've learned and worked out some very simple and speedy methods of getting back up and running, typically it would take 1-2 days to recover before but now it's less than 12 hours, sometimes maybe 1-2 hours depending on how old my snapshot is.

Better Methods

To share these methods with you, keeping in mind that my setup is built from source and does not use docker.

If my block_log gets corrupted, I simply navigate via the terminal to it's location and use the command truncate -s -1G block_log I then redownload the remainder of the block_log from a trusted source in this instance I use @gtg's block_log.

To get the file I use the command wget -c https://gtg.openhive.network/get/blockchain/block_log which downloads the remainder of the file, this speed things up over my old method which was to delete the whole thing and redownload or copy over from my backups.

After that I also rm block_log.index and then do wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/blockchain/block_log.index to download the match block_log.index file for the block_log

I then rm shared_memory.bin I'm not sure if this is neccecery but I do it just to be safe as it's gets rebuild and populated when loading in my snapshot.

Now I can start up hived with hived --load-snapshot <snapshotname> of course this assumes you have snapshots available otherwise you'd have to do a full replay of the blockchain with hived --replay-blockchain

I regularly make snapshot when I do maintenance on my node, once or twice a month, even a month old snapshot can cut a HUGE amount of time off replaying. You can make a snapshot by running hived with hived --dumb-snapshot <snapshotname>

I learnt this method from @gtg! many thanks for making my life a loooot easier.

Hardware

While my host machine is a beast of a computer, Currently my witness node runs on a 4 core, 16GB ram virtual machine on my home gaming rig and it seems to be enough to run very smoothly. This is likely partly due to having a extremely fast NVME drive also. Most hosting companies do not have adequate I/O speeds due to using cloud storage, etc.

Future Plans

Now for future plans. Well. The next step is to run a Full API node as soon as the new HAF based hivemind stuff is ready to go.
That is.. If I can afford to build a NAS storage server to store everything on. Currently I do not have enough HDD space and the NVMEs I brought to go up to 6tb total turned out to not have good lifespan for the kinda data I was going to put on them.

So I plan to build a roughly 10-20TB NAS server using regular SSD drive in a raid config of somekind, It's probably be quite expensive not only to buy and build but also to run with how energy costs are at the moment.

So to really justify going to this next step I'd need more support and votes for my witness.

The overall goal with these upgrades and expansions is to run a number of witness servers and API nodes as well as my websites at least as far as my internet bandwidth will permit. Which is quite a bit as I've upgraded to 500mb/s down and 30mb/s up. Async speeds would be dope but those are not available on home broadband. At least not yet.

In closing

So yeah that's all for now. I'm going to continue fixing up my nodes and also update my snapshot while I'm at it.

Feel free to vote for my witness if you feel I'm deserving of it, you can find a link below or you can also go to any of the sites below

https://peakd.com/me/witnesses

https://wallet.hive.blog/~witnesses

https://vote.hive.uno/@shmoogleosukami

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If you enjoyed my post feel free to upvote, reblog, and drop a comment below too!

You could also vote for me as a hive witness
I'm a high availability witness, I'm always at my computer which houses my witness so can fix problems very quickly unless im sleeping. =p

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Where to find me:

PeakD | hive.blog | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Youtube | 3Speak| Vimm.tv

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