Verbaltech2 - BitShares Witness Report - Monthly Update

full-steem-ahead (65)in #bitshares • 7 years ago

January brought a number of improvements which I am still rolling out, which is why this report is almost a week late. Failover protection is in place and working, however it relies on a full node which I had some issues with. Fixing that surfaced an issue with nginx certificates which is now fixed. Feeds have again been a problem this month, mostly due to the market volatility. They appear to be fairly stable now, tho there has been talk of USDT manipulating the BTS market. Very attentive to that. Here is the market summary since last month: (all prices via CMC): BTC=$7,323.99, BTS=$0.215, STEEM=$3.28, PPY=$4.74.

The failover script was hindered by the problematic full node it connected to for blockchain data. For some reason I still can't fathom the certificate from LetsEncrypt began failing the TLS handshake. My BTS nodes are configured the exact same way as they are for PPY, and they still work fine. I will update PPY nodes with my fixes to the nginx and LetsEncrypt configurations as well.

I now have 4 independent API nodes for BTS. 2 of them provide staggered price feeds, so if a feed publisher fails the other will still produce feeds. The feed servers run totally independent of one another with separate feed assets and sources possible. Currently the 2 feeders are configured the same, except the time each publishes. They are set to publish twice an hour each, staggered by 15 minutes so there are 4 feeds published per hour. The exact time within the hour changes, but the publish frequency stays the same.

The other aspect to the API nodes is they can be reached independently or through a load balanced proxy. I am going to replace the temporary node in France with a beefier dedicated server to replace those in the Romanian datacenter as those nodes consistently had network issues. The testnet is still running there, but it's less critical. I will add a new server and replace the testnet server with the temporary server in France this month.

I have yet to create a github PR to include these public API nodes in the reference wallet. I will do that later today, so they should appear in the wallet when Bill Butler releases the current UI sprint. The 2 load balanced API nodes can be found at wss://nohistory.proxyhosts.info/wss, wss://bts.proxyhosts.info/wss. The first uses track-accounts and partial-operations options to reduce RAM requirements but at the expense of storing much history. The other load balanced API server is currently comprised of one fat 64GB RAM dedicated server providing full history and one node that does not. The node that uses track-accounts will be replaced later this month.

Although I have each node I operate behind an nginx wss proxy, I am mulling over whether to publish those URLs. They may not be block producers but they could be, and are listed as failover nodes in my failover switcher script.

That's it for this month. Looking forward to meeting any of you face 2 face that are attending Anarchapulco next week!

France