@timcliff - Hopefully we can grab a beer someday in the future :) At least i own you few for this chit-chat today!

To clear up few things, so we can both sleep well with new node coming:

1. DDOS equals to impossible. We've been running hosting for more than a decade now. Fiber receiver/router is behind ISP NAT firewall against DDOS, and i'm running on each instance csd/lsf + fail2ban :)

All instances are having weekly management ( local or co-location ).

1. Thanks for clarifying witness state and configuration for full RPC node. Will include it with mention in tutorial once chaos calms down.

2. For a witness node - PureVPN with unique static ip - will do the trick to completely move it somewhere where nobody can know where is it :) In a thin air :D

So, i need one more bright and shiny SSD with high IO :)

Will visit steemit.chat later today to ask for that MULTI CORE read string i know compiler is capable of.... I think it would be helping a lot in --replay-blockchain process :)