This will just be a quick update on my witness server. tl;dr it's disabled, but will be back up very soon.
These past few weeks my server had been missing blocks at an alarming rate. It is professionally hosted on an upgraded server package that I was told could handle the load, so initially after checking the logs and seeing it was I/O errors, I thought it may work itself out. [Narrator's voice: It did not]
Seeing as I needed to figure something out, I turned to my trusty Dell r710 which started my witness journey. I abandoned it during the fork to 24 while moving to the professionally hosted server, which allowed a seamless transition without replays. Like a woman that just got a larger purse, I used the new found system resources to run all sorts of different bots for testing and deployment. Needless to say now that it was needed for witness purposes, I had to move things around to make room.
So that's where this journey leaves us at the moment. Current witness is disabled, new witness hardware is currently replaying. I haven't yet learned how to do the new saved state replays that apparently speed up the process, and am just going with what I know to maximize my chances of success. I expect this process to take another 3-7 days to complete, at which point I should be back to producing blocks without missing.
Thanks for all who currently and have supported my witness. If you would like to vote for my witness, well you can't. You'll have to wait a week.