I'm happy to report that as of today, my witness node has been upgraded. The process went smoothly, with no missed blocks and no downtime whatsoever. It was also a good exercise for building and maintaining a backup node (which is something I intend to do, after I come back from SteemFest, next month). The new machine is a 16 cores Intel, with 72GB of RAM.
Until today I was running a bare metal machine form Hetzner, 32GB RAM and 8 cores Intel. I had nothing to complain about it, other than the fact that I already had 2 machines waiting to be allocated to the Steem project. The machines were installed in a collocation facility since last Monday, all I had to do was to configure them.
Having the machines in a colocation facility in my own town will make debugging and upgrading easier.
The second machine - with the same configuration as the witness node, plus a 240 GB SSD drive - is allocated to the content node that I am building for steem.supply and is now my first priority, hoping to get it done next week. In theory, this should bring the downtime of steem.supply close to zero.
Since I am already playing with the Steem blockchain for about a year, I decided to explore the rest of the graphene family too. So I will test a witness node for BitShares as well, then I will try to see how DECENT is going on (hoping to get more info about that form @roelandp, at SteemFest).
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):