Hail my fellow STEEM network inhabitants! Hope your week went well!

Near the end of each week I type up a wee witness update post to keep the people of STEEM updated on my current workings as STEEM witness, developer and general service worker.

This Week as STEEM Witness

With the hustle and bustle of the week I finally managed to get a much needed proper backup server online after retiring my old "less than adequate" backup after the update to 0.19.1 was called. The STEEM.GLOBAL site received a bit of a facelift, upgraded my servers from 0.19.0 to 0.19.1 and got some monitoring and failover scripts set upt to hopefully prevent any extended outage in my ability to sign blocks. More information available below:

STEEM.GLOBAL Updated: Withdrawal Wallet Online!

This project was facing sever stability issues with the wallet in the previous weeks and recently was moved to a larger server as well as upgraded from STEEM 0.19.0 to 0.19.1 to help fight against a minor overflow bug discovered after the HF19 code went live. In addition to the software upgrades the site now also features a status page allowing users to check the status of the wallet to ensure that their outgoing STEEM withdrawals will be sent.

If you've had an issue with a STEEM withdrawal on the site don't hesitate to PM me on Steemit.chat with your issue. The more information you have such as withdrawal # and username the better, speeds up the process of recovering the balance so you can withdraw it to your address. Alternatively you can send me 0.001 SBD and your message in memo.

Witness Server Infrastructure Improvements

A few days back STEEM 0.19.1 code was released and witnesses were asked by Steemit Inc developers to upgrade to this new soft fork version in order to help fix a minor overflow bug that was found earlier in the week. While a backup witness server was in place I decided that it wasn't up to the task of handling the increased blockload the network has been experiencing I temporarily disabled my main witness node for upgrades.

While this was done to ensure I wasn't missing any blocks that the witness was scheduled for it made it aware to me that my old backup needed replaced and so I've acquired a new faster Intel Intel Xeon E3-1275V2 powered, 32GB RAM dedicated server to act as my main and taking the old main witness off it's duty to act as backup.

More monitoring and failover scripts have been put in place and later tonight I will be testing the failover features in place. During these test a block or two may be missed and I apologize to the STEEM community ahead of time for this and ask forgiveness for the momentary lags my testing may cause.

With STEEM.GLOBAL wallet now more stable and the main and backup witnesses updated to the new software version I'll be refocusing my development effort towards the @tippy project. It's my hope to perform more public testing over the weekend and next week as the project begins to come close to completion and subsequent launch.

Thanks for taking the time to read my witness update. Have a good one!

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