Hello world!

First off, thank you all for your support!

Without your support I would not have made it to rank 108. I didn't expect to make it this far so quickly. I've been meaning to make this post for a few days now but I've been so busy. I've been checking up on my witness node to see how it's been running, so far I haven't missed any blocks!

My first block has been recently generated and I'm considered "active" on the steemian list. Thanks to @drakos for making this informative website. Side note: Not sure why block age and active voters are missing data.

Moving forward

I have plans to start a full RPC (and seed) node for the public to use. This will be made publicly available at the steemdunk domain. My server runs on Arch Linux, so setup will be slightly different than the other typical guides using Ubuntu.

Current server specs

• 32 GB of RAM
• 2x240GB SSDs
• Intel Xeon CPU E3
• 1 GBPS network connection

Planned server addition: RPC & seed node server specs

This server will be hosted on @privex as the primary witness server.

• 256 GB of RAM
• 2x480GB SSDs
• Intel Xeon CPU E5
• 1 GBPS network connection

Specialized Failover Infrastructure

Currently, the scripts I found for detecting missed blocks are great, but too simple and not what I've hoped for.

Pros

• As soon you miss a block the failover kicks in.

Cons

• No automatic resets, you need to manually intervene on the primary server
• Doesn't handle when your network or server is down

I have plans to scan the node logs to do real health checks. The idea is to be able to kick in the fail over node before you even miss a block. Of course if the node itself has something wrong, there will still be missed blocks on the network. As a result of that, there will be two levels of health checks. An actual missed block on the network will be enough to trigger the failover.

Initially this system won't be perfect, so it will still need tuning in the event something wrong does happen and the failover can't handle it (yet :). Hopefully this won't be needed much but will always be available for safety. This script will be made publicly available on GitHub. The goal is to be able to have 100% reliability with minimal intervention.

Would you please vote me as a witness because we can grow the community together?

Quick option: https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=samrg472&approve=1
or
https://steemit.com/~witnesses