Vote for Brianoflondon's Witness KeyChain or HiveSigner
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TL;DR: Please consider voting for my witness. I've dramatically upgraded how I roll, even as I've been falling down the rankings. I've set up a new witness machine at home using an old laptop. I've also built an automatic fail-over system so if my main witness goes down, the backup machine takes over automatically.
Update: HF28 completed
Witness Update
I wrote a few days ago how I'd commissioned my kid's old laptop to be a new machine for my brianoflondon witness.
But having now put that machine to work and thinking it would lead to me decommissioning a $50 per month Privex witness, I realised I really should run two machines and have a fail-over system.
Running a witness at home is possible, but every now and then my router does reboot and that is an issue. Just this morning we had a 2 hour power cut: my home witness would have been down for that time. So I decided to keep the Privex witness going as my primary, and use my home witness as a fail-over.
VPS proxy
There is a little wrinkle running at home: my ISP blocks all unsolicited incoming connections which breaks the P2P model of Hive. I had to set up a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and picked a local Israeli host so latency is very low. I have a basic $9 machine which relays P2P traffic to my home witness via Tailscale dodging my ISP's restrictions.
Automatic failover
As part of the re-write of 
And so when I upgraded my Privex node this morning (which is basically just deleting the entire machine and starting from scratch to use 
Github
The code for my fail-over system is on GitHub however it isn't really useable as a stand alone system yet. It is integrated into my entire
The specific code for the fail-over system is in this file: link to Github v4vapp_backend_v2
It relies on having a config which includes this:
hive:
hive_accs:
brianoflondon:
role: witness
active_key: active-key-needed-for-switching-machines
watch_witnesses:
- brianoflondon
witness_configs:
brianoflondon:
witness_machines:
- name: legion-witness
url: http://tailscale_ip_1:8091
signing_key: STM73EW8YMXWAMrCUosEuvLEqEPALzFijghyL2KyAQnWZep3whEZD
- name: fox-v4vapp
url: http://tailscale_ip_2:8091
signing_key: STM6Yvdz6HtdhyzAi6oimvm5MFevSWeThYZJvbLGSmq4UeUxAEztgd
# Optional Kuma Monitoring
kuma_webhook_url: https://my_kuma_machine/api/push/huSWPvpQ0L
kuma_heartbeat_time: 60 # seconds
Behind the scenes I use Tailscale to connect all my machines and that is used to monitor them.
I also use a tool called Kuma to monitor the health of my witness nodes. If a witness node stops responding to Kuma's heartbeat pings, my fail-over system kicks in and switches the witness signing to the backup machine
Not production ready
I haven't put this in a package which is easy to use, I'm not really planning to do that separately from the entire v4v.app backend. But if you are running multiple witness nodes and want to help me get this into a stand alone production ready state, please get in touch.
Home Workstation
Here's my home setup with the witness running on the laptop on the right. I'm actually not going to leave it this way, there is a fault with the CPU fan which isn't running right now and I'm waiting for a replacement to arrive from AliExpress. When that is here I'll fold it up and tuck it away (next to another of my kids' old gaming laptops). And yes the "R" key is missing, it fell off a few weeks ago. That won't matter when it is a headless server.
The iMac is a dinosaur but it is special. It is a Retina 5K iMac from 2017 and whilst I've upgraded the storage to a 2TB SSD, the CPU (3.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5) is now officially ancient. But the screen itself is stunning. It is about to fall completely out of support for macOS updates but I simply can't throw this screen away.
There are now aftermarket ways to install a dedicated driver card into this machine (and dump the actual computer) in order to use it simply as an external monitor. Lots of details of how to do that in this YouTube video.
Why no target display mode?
Interestingly the reason why Apple didn't make it easy to use this as an external monitor (they had a system called 'target display mode') was because the machine was designed and released before any display connection capable of driving a 5K display existed.
Inside the machine currently is a custom display controller which Apple designed specifically for this machine and which treats the left and right halves of the display as two separate 2560x2880 displays. Nuts. I actually use it in a 1/2 resolution mode because my 55 year old eyes can't make use of the full resolution!
Thank You!
As HF28 goes live, thank you for any and all votes and support over the years.
Vote for Brianoflondon's Witness KeyChain or HiveSigner
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