Witness Update - @themarkymark 09/17/2017

Just checking in letting you know where I am at as a witness.

Complications

I had my first block miss a week ago due to a docker error. I upgraded docker and the Linux kernel and everything is humming along ago. I upgraded Docker not too long before that (a week maybe?) so I am not sure why it bombed then. I have since setup Conductor from @furion (thanks for a great tool!). I have a remote machine monitoring my witness with a kill switch if anything goes wrong. I caught the missed block right away, but this is an additional safeguard.

Server

I am configured for 16GB shared ram, but I can easily scale to 48GB.

Settings Proposed

I lowered my SBD interest proposal from 5% to 1% and considering setting it to 0 for now. I will run 1% until I find a reason to change it. All my other proposed settings remain the same.

Software Updates

I am running 0.19.2 and have been since the day it was released. I will continue to upgrade as quickly as possible to new releases once I am comfortable it is safe to do so.

Witness Monitoring

I am looking at writing some scripts that will provide better monitoring of my witness and a more sophisticated witness monitor that is more proactive than waiting for missed blocks. I also want to wire my witness monitor into NetData my favorite open source system monitor.

I'd love to know if anyone else is running NetData and if they have created any custom hooks already.

Mobile App?

I have also been thinking about building a mobile app to display my witness current status and to send push notifications if there is a change in status. I am not sure if anyone else is interested in this, if so please let me know anything you would think would be useful to monitor.

Witness Votes

I have followed a few new witnesses, with a heavy preference on ones that run a full node.

I currently vote for:

I don't follow a lot of witnesses as I am very selective of who I follow. As I get more exposure to the Steemit community I will add more I am sure.

What have I been doing?

I am running a contest where I am giving away all my Steem Power (500) for four weeks. I posted an update to the contest and my own challenges yesterday. There are still a few days to enter.

@buildawhale is growing, we are now 21% bigger and our Curation Digest is getting better each issue. We are finding and sharing more and more of the great content from Steemians. It's getting harder to only pick five each day. I participated in the curation in our Saturday issue.

I introduced a friend of mine to Steemit who has had a very successful first week. @makerhacks has been picked up by both @curie and @ocd in his first week, multiple times, I'm still hoping for the first! He posts daily about 3D Printing, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and recently returned to drawing again on a daily basis. His artwork is really fun, but more importantly, he runs a large maker community with over 7,200 active members. Hopefully many come over to Steemit once he introduces them in the near future. Chris is a great guy, he is also very well known in the big name Blogging circles, in fact that is how we originally met many years ago.

I recently created a Chrome Extension for @randowhale that notifies people when @randowhale wakes up, the current price for submission, how much voting power he has, and when he goes to sleep. It has been very popular and has a lot of active users and is available in the Chrome Web Store. Security of running a Chrome Extension has been brought up and provided an in-depth response how RandoAwake does not have permissions to capture any data. I am currently playing with an idea of a community plugin for Chrome & Firefox but have not finalized the details.

I posted my first gaming stream, playing some Hearthstone. It has been a while since I have streamed and considering picking up a game and doing a Let's Play. I'm leaning towards Horizon Zero Dawn but I have posted some other games I'd play through if there is any interest.

I am about to start my first issue of my Workflow Series. I will be introducing many of the tools I use on a daily basis to work efficiently and work a little effort as possible and go into detail on how they work. My first issue will likely start simple with my password manager of choice as security is important to me and I think it should be to you as well.

I currently post 100% power up for all my posts as @themarkymark and for @buildawhale daily Curation Digest.

I am spending more time in PAL Discord lately and is usually a good place to find me or on Steemit.chat as myself.

I can't think of anything else, give me a shout if I missed anything.

Image Source: 1

Please vote for me as a witness here