Verbaltech2 - BitShares Witness Report

Verbaltech was at the top of the list of shareholder votes for the first time this month, which held for almost a week. A big thank you to all BitShareholders and proxies who contributed to that achievement.

This month I'm noticing a significant decline in the market, so I thought it would be prudent to hedge by getting into some BitUSD. Here is the market summary: (all prices via CMC): BTC=$2496.98, BTS=$0.212, STEEM=$1.62, PPY=$9.27.

I have been rather busy tending to software upgrades (and renovations here at home) but it is quite a relief from last months workload. I will report on the PeerPlays witness operation separately, which is coming this week.

I have balanced out my node count to a total of 9, with a 32GB dedicated server soon to go into service on the BitShares testnet. I am a bit behind in getting that done but now that @xeroc's bounty to bring the testnet codebase up to date with BitShares production has been answered and completed I am more at ease with joining in. It is configured to support both BitShares and PeerPlays chains for testing. All but one of the BitShares nodes are now dedicated servers.

The server located in Singapore has been very inconsistent in terms of network connectivity which you can see from the graph below. Although it is a dedicated server I am not happy with its reliability due to network issues. I can see from my logs that the server itself has been quite reliable, but I get frequent monitor reports that there are less than 5 connections. The difficulty is in finding a hosting provider of dedicated systems in that region of the world that accepts cryptocurrency payments AND provides support and infrastructure in the English language. However I must find an alternate provider as soon as possible.

All nodes haven been upgraded to the latest release of bts_tools (version 0.4.14) and the June 6th release of the BitShares witness_node and cli_wallet. The systemd configuration is working well which I will be describing in detail in a separate Steemit article this week as promised earlier. As I mentioned last month this required a great deal of effort to get all the issues resolved. There are quite a few nuances related to getting persistent systemd user sessions working when no X Windows server (GUI) is used, as it typical of servers.

Are these reports useful? Is there anything missing you feel would add value to them? Your feedback in the comments below would be greatly appreciated, so I may better serve the community. Finally, here are the graphs of all the nodes in operation for BitShares:

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