The new world - day 5 : My first block as Steem Witness
Hi guyz,
I am one year old now. Much has happened since the last time.
I stopped beating about the bush and plunged my head first into the honey pot, but plunged into the whole thing and naked.
One moment we must stop asking right questions and be in the matrix, follow the white rabbit and live the experience.
The Origin
@siavach's initial idea was to participate in uniting the Community. So we started doing it during... the holidays, we must have fun in life lol. And fun we had for our SBD, The "Steemian's interviews by @siavach & @elmetro" took us to Russia to meet the lovely @madelenfox in St. Petersburg, to Portugal for the famous Steemfest2 where we met the best of the best of Steem, to Auvergne at the @steemauvergne meetup. Auvergnats team, thank you, it was during the meet up that with @siavach we made the decision to be witness and @exnihilo.witness was born. This is the beginning of a new adventure in this new world.
A new witness is born
The first problems, the server
Being a witness starts with the creation of a steem account. We chose @exnihilo.witness. If you do not know what exnihilo means, please click here. Do not be ashamed, I did not know it either.
Then comes the server. We chose to work with @privex. If you want to embark on this adventure, I recommend them https://www.privex.io. They are new, fast, clean, helpful, they guide you, give you good advice, their prices are competitive and we must pay them with steem or other crypto.
Witness node | Dedicated Server in EU |
---|---|
System | Ubuntu 16.04 |
CPU | intel i7 |
RAM | 64 GB |
Disk | 2 * 240 GB SSD> |
Network | 1 gbps |
Price | $120 / month |
Then you have to remember the computing courses from university, to keep close your best friend google and ask questions to the group #witness on steemit chat. Thanks you to @gandalf, @drakos, @themarkymark, @evildido and all the others, there was always someone to answer my silly questions.
For security I mainly followed the 5 posts of @krnel.
Security set up on the server (hackers, thank you for skipping this part)
- ssh connection by public / private key
- Firewall
- Fail2Ban
- I still have email sending issues for installing Tripwire but this is the next step
To setting up the witness node, I followed the Steem-in-a-box post from the excellent @someguy123. It was maybe the easiest part.
In order to not miss block, I made some optimisations on the server
- zram for RAM compression
- synchronization of the system clock
- disabling ipv6
- netdata.io for ressources tracking
- upgrade to the v0.19.3 of the blockchain version
We also update the SBD / Steem price every 6 hours through @yabapmatt's shared program.
I must say that I am proud of our server. I learned a lot by putting it in place. This is what our server looks like today.
The power of the Community
When I started to ask question about how to become a witness, everybody warns me that it is not easy and that I must give something to the Community. We talked late in the night with @upmewhale to find out what it meant "to contribute to the Community". What is there as a greater contribution than being witness by keeping the blockchain physically up? Is my Steemian interviews is a part of that? Will help and participate in @steemalsace is taken into account? After several hours of reflection, we still do not have the answer.
However, it's true that being active in the Community is very important because at the end it is the Community that elects its witnesses.
Initially our @exnihilo.witness witness was ranked 340, today after one month we are ranked 200.
With this ranking, in a month, we processed a block and therefore received as reward of 1 Steem Power (SP). You can not imagine the pleasure and the pride of having its first block, and without any more problem.
The Community is therefore essential because the principle of publications also applies to witnesses. The more votes you have, the more steem you have.
That's why you must start with the idea of helping the Community, because at the beginning, it's a losing business.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who voted for us. It's thanks to you that we had our first block. Here are the biggest contributors:
@dsound and @prc
@free999enigma
@puncakbukit
@drkent
@alishannoor
@steemalsace
Dear Steemains, if you like our work or just like us lol, you can vote for us by clicing one this picture
Other projects are in progress but it is too early to talk about them at the moment...
The new world
This video The bitcoin bubble makes me laugh each time lol.
I often hear the sentence "to the moon" in the new world. What does to the moon mean? Maybe that there is no limit, maybe that the limit is the moon. If that's it, then you think small dear Steemains. Reaching the moon is not so far 384,400 kilometers and not so hard, it seems that we have even made it.
In my first post The new world: Day 2 - The thirsty desert, I said that this world is a desert. After a year I am more than convinced. In the new world it's us the limit, and our soul is something much more difficult to reach than the moon. We are limited by ourselves, by our fears, by our ego, by our imagination accustomed to the old world. Everything has to be done here, there is place for everyone, there is only to start and have fun. That's what I do anyway.
You can vote for us as a Steem Witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
This is just the beginning...
@elmetro
I dont think privex.io is the best host.
It could happening again that the blockchain goes offline.
You think now, this is not possible?
Imagine, i think ~75 percent of the steem-blockchain is hosted by privex.io if they have any problem or get ddosed, the other ~25 percent get overloaded and break down.
I think this is the reason why the blockchain was offline some weeks ago...
This is just my oppinion. sorry for bad english
I vote for you as a witness!
I didn’t know that they are so popular. If it’s true you’re right. It could have a risk for the blockchain. I will think about that the day I take a backup server. Thank you for your advice and thanks for the witness vote 👍
Welcome back after two month... @elmetro
Steem-witness is an great initiative... well done...
Yeah moon... Why go to the moon? Why not to another galaxy, haha.... Or another universe? No limits!
Why do you disabling ipv6 ?
@krnel in his post https://steemit.com/cybersecurity/@krnel/setting-up-a-linux-vps-securely-pt-2 advise to remove it and I followed all his advise.
"Remove IPv6 listening
Since no one really uses IPv6 yet, disable this and make one less thing your system is checking for.
AddressFamily inet needs to be added.
You can add this manually to the end of the sshd_config file @ nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config."
Hmmmm, very strange consideration.
Yeah bro.... Thanks for this first post. It s just a beginning as u say :-)
Welcome back. Know that you were missed here.
Are you an astronaut ?
I guess you were out on space.
Steem witness is a great project though.
🤣😂 unfortunately I am not an astronaute
Very nice post
Bon retour parmi nous!
Good job! Good luck. I hope I will have the energy to setup a witness too. Proud of you.
Thank you old friend
What? How did I miss this? You a witness? Oh my God! I just voted for you there, too, right now. I certainly support and trust you, @elmetro
I'm ready for the moon too. Attaboy! You can count on me. Accept my congratulations!
How did you vote for the witness? You are not the first who told me that he vote for us but it didn’t work. Can you check if it works please? And maybe vote again. There is a bug somewhere. 🙏
Oh, @elmetro! Precisely! there is some kind of glitch : (. I did it again. Can you check? Thank you for warning me!!!
yes it's good now. Today we had our second block ;-)
I am sure it's thanks to your vote.
Thank you
Heyyyyy, thank you for your support. It helps us a lot. See you soon on the moon 😉