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My Witness Moved
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Over the summer my younger son got a job as a lifeguard at the beach here in Tel Aviv. He worked pretty hard, sometimes starting at 7am and ending at 7pm and he was well paid. And all he wanted to do with that was replace a 3 year old gaming laptop with a proper machine.
So two weekends ago we drove to Eilat in the far south of Israel where you can buy stuff without VAT (18%) and he bought all the components he needed for a pretty decent gaming PC. He's never built a machine and I haven't built machines since the days of 80286 and 80386's more than 30 years ago!
He specced it all himself with a friend, and we pre-ordered all of it. There was a snafu with the mother board but he was able to substitute with a similar one that was in stock.
Which is just a long winded way of saying I've now taken his 3 year old Lenovo Legion gaming laptop and turned it in to a witness!
Fans and disk
The cooling was pretty hopeless on it: we'd never opened it up and we should have done because one of the fans (the CPU side) had completely seized up) and the other was clogged with dirt. Cleaned that all out and I've ordered a new CPU fan from China.
I also bought a new 1TB NVMe drive to supplement the one it already had.
Initial Sync
I installed Ubuntu on it with Grok leading me through the process: so helpful to know exactly how you are setting up the disks with one for the OS and the other holding the Hive blockchain. I decided against more complicated RAID setups.
One bad fan notwithstanding, I set it up as a witness using 
This also means I've moved to the next Hard Fork and I'm running 1.28.3 right now.
Ports
One minor glitch. Whilst I have a great 2GBs down 250MBs connection that is very reliable, the ISP here has blocked all unsolicited TCP syn packets. Basically you can't run any kind of server anymore at home. I know this was possible in the past: I used to run Minecraft servers.
But again with the help of Warp and Tailscale it was pretty easy to set up a tunnel system so my node appears to be on a VPS machine. Instead of using another Privex machine (Hive is a little too dependent on Privex) I just opened a VPS with a provider in Israel with a data centre either close (or maybe even co-located) with my own ISP. That gives me a very low latency tunnel that's working nicely.
Backup Witness
I'm keeping the Privex box as a backup for now, but I'm very happy to now have a more powerful witness node and I'm happy with having it here in Israel and independent from most of the other providers which host other Witnesses.
Value for Value
For the last few months while building 
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