Essential tools & scripts for STEEM Witnesses.
Github: Witness Essentials

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As a witness, the most important job is it to make sure that our servers are running smooth. This is needed for a secure and stable blockchain.

And as a good witness, we have tools to enhance this job and make our servers more reliable. But no matter how good those tools might be, there can always be problems that arise randomly - for example, Technical Difficulties.

Now imagine you've got 3 servers for your witness. And the first server has a problem, which causes missing blocks. Normally, your tools would detect that and change to another server. But this time, it doesn't happen. You're just getting the notifications about missing blocks and that's it.

And as chance would have it: you're not at home and have no way to access your server. Maybe you're on a trip with your family. Telling them that you need to get back ASAP would be quite a bummer.

But that's what a good witness would do, right?

However, is it really needed to make a decision with such a huge drawback for a task which is pretty much just a single command - change-signing key or disable witness?

What if you could send commands for your witness right from your smartphone?

Introducing: Remote Control via Telegram (+ Notifications)

You're now able to remote control your witness and receive notifications via Telegram.

Features

• /enable <key> - This command will enable a specific key
• /nextkey - This command will rotate through your specified signing keys
• /disable - This command will disable your witness
• /confirm <password> - This command is needed to confirm all others commands with your password
• /help - Get all available commands and your USER/CHAT-ID

As you've seen in the GIF above: remote controlling your witness via Telegram is easy and secure.

And setting everything up isn't difficult at all.

Getting Started

The steps below are needed both for remote control and notifications with Telegram.

1.) Follow the steps on Github: Witness Essentials on Github

2.) Create a new telegram bot through botfather: https://core.telegram.org/bots#6-botfather. This bot will only be used by you, for maximum security.

3.) If you've done 1) and 2), you should have an .env file including the following variables:

TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=
TELEGRAM_PASSWORD=
TELEGRAM_USER_ID=

Add the token that botfather gave you toTELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN.

Then add your custom password to TELEGRAM_PASSWORD, which will be used for /confirm.

Last but not least, when you start the conversation with your bot or press /help, you'll get your TELEGRAM_USER_ID which you need to add to the .env as well.

4.) And that's it. You're now able to run: npm/yarn run remote

New Version - Upgrade Instructions

Now, this version update will also make your old config of Witness Essentials deprecated. Which means, you need to copy the new examples and then edit them:

cp configs/config.example.json configs/config.json
cp configs/config.pricefeed.example.json configs/config.pricefeed.json

Additionally, make sure you run npm i or yarn inside the main-folder to get the new node-modules.

Links for Utopian

This section is for Utopian.io. I did my best in commenting the code and giving the commits useful messages.

Commits: https://github.com/therealwolf42/witness-essentials/commits/master

Epilogue

I hope that this update will bring a lot of value to the STEEM Witness-ecosystem and make the life of my fellow witnesses easier and less stressful!

Your (fellow) witness,
@therealwolf

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Making Steem Greater

Projects developed by @therealwolf for Steem

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Smartsteem.com	Steem Chat-Wallet
Witness Essentials	Utopian.io Signup

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