What I've Been Up To
After a brief outage of my seed node
steem-seed.lukestokes.info:2001, I upgraded to 16G of RAM. I had a bit of trouble with it because during the replay the physical server it was on ran out of memory and so the VPS had to be moved to a different server. Moving around 100's of gigs takes a while, but once that was done, it was back up and running quickly.With that outage, it reminded me how important monitoring is, and I hadn't yet configured my witness monitoring script on the seed node. It's up and running now so if anything happens to it, I'll get a text message.
Speaking of my monitoring script, I got my first notice today!
It seems my Witness node temporarily got on a fork and errored with this message:
728294ms th_a fork_database.cpp:43 push_block ] Pushing block to fork database that failed to link: 00d0da1ffaaf6aea95a5739d5a1a3d4e8366d8fa, 13687327 728294ms th_a fork_database.cpp:44 push_block ] Head: 13687326, 00d0da1ecd685866cd2130d4f58d1bfd06002528 728306ms th_a application.cpp:517 handle_block ] Error when pushing block: 4080000 unlinkable_block_exception: unlinkable block block does not link to known chainA quick restart of the docker container and everything was back to normal with no missed blocks! :)
was kind enough to add me to the Steem Seed Nodes status page here: https://status.steemnodes.com/
I did some tweaking to my price feed docker container and learned a bit about docker along the way. The feed hung at one point because I had some containers that didn't fully clean up after themselves which prevented a clean restart.
I participated in the community discussions about self-voting with this post: Self-Voting: Scammy Behavior, Rational ROI, or Something Else? As of now, there are 283 comments there and some really great ideas. It was a healthy, active discussion, and I'm glad all sides voiced their opinions respectfully.
I was approached by a community member to help out with an as-of-yet undisclosed Steemit related project. They needed an IPFS node they could test with, so I went ahead learned about it and set it up for them on one of my servers. Hopefully you'll be hearing about it in the future.
Since my last Witness update, I posted about HF19 a couple times here and here to help people better understand the changes.
I purchased a new SD card for my wife's camera along with a black backdrop for video recording after consulting with a video editor about my understandingblockchainfreedom.com project. I still have to edit the third video and start recording more. Things have been busy, but I will get back to this as I want to continue helping people understand blockchains and cryptocurrency.
As a witness, my goal is to stay active in the community and communicate technical things in ways more people can understand. With a programming background going back to 1996, I have experience with this stuff, and I'm working to improve my communication skills all the time. Recently I introduced Gridcoin to my followers, posted some thoughts on how early we are to Steemit, got transparent with my HERO margin call story, and why we should think long-term when investing in cryptocurrency. I've also continued my weekly Exchange Transfer report and helped explain some things with the EOS ICO (including a script for calculating price windows, prior to eosscan.io becoming available).
I hope these posts have been helpful to you.
One last thing I wanted to mention, if you haven't done so in a while, please check out your witness votes. Of course, I'd love your vote for 
Of course, I'd love to move up in the ranks and produce more blocks for this platform I enjoy so much, but I also want to make sure the top witnesses and backup witnesses are actively involved. If your witness vote could be put to better use, please do so.
Thanks again for your support!
I'm currently holding position 33 and (so far) have yet to miss a block.
If you want to know more about what witnesses do check out:
You can read my witness announcement post here:
My previous witness updates:
- Witness Update - lukestokes.mhth - June 19th, 2017
- Witness Update - 6/6/2017 - More Human Than Human
Created with ChainBB to support that project.
