Quick Witness Update

My last Witness Update was over a month ago and I didn't plan to make one yet - as everything ran smooth and I was (and still am) very much busy with developing (incl. a really cool new project for Steem - but not yet ready for publicity).

However, I missed a block today due to my witness server going down out of the blue. Even though my (self-coded) witness failover script worked partly as expected by notifiying me via SMS to my phone about it - the disabling of the witness didn't (seems that it's not possible to broadcast a witness-update with the NULL-KEY via steem-js/dsteem) - so I had to do that manually with steempy / conductor (I'm extremely grateful for the witness-disable-option, Hive account@furion!)

After the server was manually started again by Hive account@privex - I've made a bit of research with the help of Hive account@someguy123 and we came to the conclusion that it got hammered by a bruteforce attack which maybe froze the kernel and then resulted in a hard shutdown.

This was possible in the first place due to my mistake of not changing the ssh default port - which resulted in a ton of brute-force attacks, even with IP-banning.

Now, the positive news is that everything is back to normal now (last block was signed few minutes ago) and I def. learned my lesson to always change the ssh port.

Another positive news is that I climbed the witness-ranks over the last few weeks where I stand now at rank 40 - thanks to a lot of new voters - including some big-ones: Hive account@transisto, Hive account@fenghuang, Hive account@agoric-systems, Hive account@unknownbloc, Hive account@redpalestino, Hive account@hitwill, Hive account@nxtblg, Hive account@kingscrown, Hive account@dineroconopcion.

All of you - regardless if you were mentioned - you have my gratitude for your vote!

Alright - that's it for now. The next witness-update will hopefully be a lot more fun and exciting.

~wolf