Witness report 2018-03-16 - My first few days

@quochuy's Witness report

So it's been 5 days since I first started my witness node, no block yet... I went from rank #387 on Sunday to #260 today with 9 witness votes that include one user setting me as a voting proxy. I need more vote to get higher in the rank and increase my chance of making a block and start making enough SBD to pay for the server rental fees. So if you guys haven't done it yet, I'd appreciate if you could head to https://steemit.com/~witnesses, scroll down to the bottom of the page, enter my nickname quochuy and then click "Vote".

Remember you have 30 votes available, so choose more witnesses to vote for. If you don't know who to choose, choose one trusted user and set him or her as a voting proxy. This can be done on the same page as above.

What changed this week for me?

I've installed ntp, a little Linux tool that keeps the date and time of my witness server up to date
As a witness, I need to regularly send an update on the price of a STEEM. For this, I'm using SteemFeed-JS, however, it has a tendency to crash from time to time. Thanks to @ginabot, I've received notification when this happened and that got me thinking of a way to keep the process up and running without my intervention so I've set up a scheduled job on the server to restart the process when needed (see technical details below).
I had an issue using "./run.sh wallet" with the Docker container (virtual machine) of steem-in-a-box by @someguy123, when the command is too long, it seems to mess up with executing it properly. I solved this by entering the container and launch the cli_wallet command from there.
That issue with the wallet has been resolved by using @furion's Conductor script that makes Witnesses' life easier for toggling Witnesses nodes on and off.
I've bought a new domain name to setup Steemit Condenser on it, it's, basically, creating a copy of Steemit.com. I will use if for development purposes and try to contribute with some new features if I can. But it is also for adding some ideas of tools I might come up with. For now, it is just for internal use.
There have been a lot of complaints of SCAM and Phishing attempts going on at the moment, so be careful to verify all the links you are clicking on. There are Steemit.com clones out there that use a very close name such as Steemil or Steewit. When you land on those clone websites, they ask you to login again and steal your password and drain your wallet of your SBDs and STEEMs. I have created a Chrome browser extension to help with this, see my previous post: A Chrome extension to help with SCAM / Phishing Steemit websites.
When I chose my server to run the Witness node, I saw many tutorials but even those that are just a few months old were already outdated. So my choice of a 32GB server was not the smartest, but I'm not highly ranked yet so getting it swap to the SSD drive will do for now until I can afford an upgrade. For now, to make it hold a bit longer, I've decided to use memory compression by using Zram. It seems to work and the CPU usage hasn't gone through the roof.
Today I noticed everything related to Steemit is super slow, even my anti-plagiarism bot cannot fetch posts fast enough and is timing out on API requests. I will reveal it later on, I'm still not happy on how it works for the moment. But some of you might have seen it in action already. Today, if you want a better experience with Steem, head to https://steemitstage.com/ instead as it is much faster, even https://busy.org/ feels a bit slow.
@witnesswatch has made an interesting post WitnessWatch Weekly Report #8: How much do witnesses make?. I need to get to the top 100 to start getting some good return or I will be paying the server off my own pocket.

Cronjob settings

So here is the cronjob settings I've used. I based it on the suggestion given by @drakos Tips and Guidelines for the Noob Witness Setup. However, I noticed that sometimes it's not just the script that crashes, but the whole Docker container. So I've adjusted the command to restart the container if it is not running

Every two hour, the container is restarted whether or not the script is still OK
0 */2 * * * docker ps | grep feed && docker restart feed

Every 5 minutes, it checks if the container is still present, else, it will start it
*/5 * * * * docker ps | grep feed || (cd /opt/steemfeed-js && docker run -itd --rm --name feed steemfeed-js)

Every hour, I'm generating a hash of the current witness logs and will compare it with the previous hash. If it is identical, then this will mean something went wrong. It will then send me a discord notification via a Discord bot I created.
0 */1 * * * diff /opt/steem-docker/last_hash <(./run.sh logs | md5sum | tee /opt/steem-docker/last_hash) && node /opt/discord-notifications/notify.js -q -m "The witness container is not updating"