tobiasrieper Witness Node Announcement and pointers for setting up the node

Hi everybody,

This is tobiasrieper, I'm a computer hardware, crypto currency, blockchain and mining enthusiast. Also as you can understand from my nickname, I like video games and I'm a huge fan of Hitman series.

I have a strong background in programming, computer architecture and Unix systems. I understand very well the hardware, system, application software stack and I believe that I have all the necessary background to run a reliable witness node.

I hope that running a steemit witness node will earn me a few extra bucks per month. As return to the community for trusting me as a witness, I will be sharing my experiences on running a witness node, as well my experience with mining other coins. I hope that this way I will help people that want to be involved in mining crypto currencies.

Please consider supporting me as a Steem Witness by voting for me at the bottom of the Witness page; or just click on the upvote button if I am in the top 50:

POINTERS FOR SETTING UP WITNESS NODE BELOW latest update 7/9/2017

So after spending some time with setting up my witness node, I'm ready to share with you my experience.

First of all here are my server specs and from where I got it.

i7-6700 up to 4GHz Quad-Core (8 logical cores with Hyperthreading)
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Hard Drive: 2 x 500 GB SATA 6 Gb/s SSD (Software-RAID 1)
OS: Ubuntu 16.04

Basically I'm renting a dedicated server from hetzner https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex41-ssd for 46.41 euros per month.

The specs are more than enough for running a witness node. I would say that these specs are quite future proof. I find 32GB of RAM more than enough as currently the steemd on my server is consuming just above 10GB.

I would have written my own guide for witness node setup but I feel that it would be redundant as you can just follow https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19 from @someguy123.

I find this guide excellent and if you follow the steps, you should have a working node in 3-4 hours (downloading and syncing blockchain takes some time). Note that this guide is for running steemd inside a docker, which is perfectly fine. For price feed update again you can use this guide https://steemit.com/witness-category/@someguy123/steemfeed-js-a-nodejs-price-feed-for-witneses again from @someguy123.

There are also other great guides like https://steemit.com/witness-category/@bitcalm/how-to-become-a-witness from @bitcalm and https://steemit.com/witness-category/@klye/the-complete-noob-guide-to-steem-witness-setup from @klye. These guides are for a non docker setup. I have followed those guides but unfortunately I did not manage to successfully set up the witness node. I ended up having issues like segmentation fault, steemd consuming all 32GB of RAM, tons of errors during blockchain sync.. So I recommend you follow this guide https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19. This is also a more recent guide compared to the others and it is really noob proof.