Server Upgrades
- What better way to start the new year with yet another upgrade. The current witness is eating 20 GB of RAM, we were at 16 GB one month ago! In anticipation, I upgraded my backup node from 24 GB to 50 GB on a 1 Gbit/s line. The new node is replaying, I'll conduct a block production test tonight. The old node will retire this week.
- I received notification from my main node provider to update the kernel against the Meltdown security bug on Intel based servers. The update went well, the node was replayed and synchronized. There's no general Linux fixes yet, but as soon one is released for Ubuntu, I'll upgrade my other servers.
New Setup
| Server | CPU | RAM | Disk | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Witness | 8 cores | 32 GB | 300 GB SSD | 800 Mbit/s |
| Backup Witness | 10 cores | 50 GB | 1200 GB SSD | 1 Gbit/s |
| Seed | 6 cores | 24 GB | 600 GB SSD | 100 Mbit/s |
| Additional fail-over | 2 cores | 1 GB | 25 GB | 100 Mbit/s |
Witness Parameters
- My APR is at 0%, considering the high SBD price. I also increased my bias to 400% a few weeks ago.
- I lowered my minimal account creation fee to 0.1 STEEM, as previously discussed in this post: Account Creation Fee Review
- The bandwidth limitation has been hitting all users in the last few days. There's no definitive answer why this is happening. There are many ways to address this issue, the most immediate one is to increase the maximum block size. Therefore, today I increased mine by a 1.5x factor, from 65536 to 98304 bytes. Naturally, we need the Top 20 witnesses to increase theirs in order to have any effect on the system.
Miscellaneous News
- My witness position is stable at Rank 30. Only missed 7 blocks since I started witnessing 6 months ago. Let's get me into the Top 20, shall we? 😀
- I continue to help users and witnesses on Steemit.Chat.
- I made a You Are H.O.P.E. Holiday Fundraiser during the holidays; the proceeds were donated to their cause.
- Per request, I implemented a Witness Voting Improvement on https://steemian.info/witnesses. Users can directly vote/unvote for their witnesses, especially those listed outside the Top 50, via SteemConnect.
Programming and Development
- I wrote a SteemJS tool to Recover Account Name From Password
- One of my old Condenser pull requests was approved and merged, I posted about it last month: Condenser Update the Sign-up Page to Include Periods in the Allowed Account Characters.
GitHub Pull Requests
- Update the signup page to include periods in the allowed account characters (approved ✔)
- Indicate the Importance of Decimals and Units on Account Creation (English and French translations included) (approved ✔)
- Fixes for data too long and out of range errors
- Fix for "Unhandled rejection Error"
- Change "People I Follow" to "My Feed" (approved ✔)
- Update the signup page to include periods in the allowed account characters (approved ✔)
Together we make Steem better.
Check out Steemian.Info, the concise information resource about the Steem blockchain
Proud member and delegator of the @minnowsupport project.
Join us on https://discord.gg/GpHEEhV
Available & Reliable. I am your Witness. I want to represent You.
🗳 If you like what I do, consider voting for me 🗳
If you never voted before, I wrote a detailed guide about Voting for Witnesses.
Go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses. My name is listed in the Top 50. Click 
once.
Alternative voting methods
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=drakos&approve=1
cli_wallet: vote_for_witness "YOURACCOUNT" "drakos" true true
steem-python: steempy approvewitness drakos --account YOURACCOUNT
Thank you for your great services and updates I have voted you as witness from last year. Thanks again and have a Great New Year.
I took the time to read about you and went to witness and voted for you :)
It appears you are putting in much effort and thought. I like that you have applied some fixes as well. Thank you
You have my full support for your witness. Thank you for your assistance.
This is an excellent witness update. If only it also included information/application for the minnow support vote. Stares judgingly for not applying!
Will do that next. I have to gather my thoughts and think what I want to say!
✌
You are a really wonderful person providing us with beautiful information every day
Keep up my friend
a very good post ....
I really like it .... if you have free time please pay a visit to my blog ....
Thanks a lot for this post ....
You are the best....
:)
Take this like friendly advice, this is a terrible way to interact on Steemit, it will do nothing to help you grow, nothing to help you get upvotes and support.
Don't waste your time...
ok.... thank you so much.....
:)
Perfect @drakos.. ready for the future and the SMT adventures to come.
Thank you @drakos for updates. 2018 will be the year of Steem/Steemit with the additions of new communities and SMTs. Witness vote submitted.
Thank you for all your work and the support you give the community. I hope this 2018 is an excellent year for you.
You have my vote!
Thanks for the important info..
@Resteem
@drakos Nicely done :) Best wishes
Thank you.
Is this maybe why my bandwidth has been weird? The last 3 days in a row, I woke up at around noon and have had no bandwidth until around 2-3PM, but every day it was almost full when I went to bed at 4-5am.
So.. The bandwidth issue is.. Magic?
What could be explanations?
Where in the code?
What are developers saying?
If steem wants to go mainstream and not stay in this small niche, it has to be addressed.
But upvote, you are the first witness these days to even mention it.
The others don't care or realise, as they have to much power to be affected.
It is high time I took some time to understand and vote on the whole witness thing... there is soooooooo much to be on top of on Steemit! Guh! :)
The FAQ has everything covered. It takes a few readings to grasp it all.