@forykw 📢 Witness Update #2

Olá olá! (🇵🇹 - Portuguese)

Translation: Hello hello

It's been a while since I did my last Witness update... it's Amazon fault! 😡
Previous update - @forykw Witness Update #1 - (2017-06-26)

What happened?

Over my last update, you can read that my old NAS died due a disk failure. Well, not quite apparently! The RAID was good and it's back working again. But on the other hand, my future upgrade plan got screwed in terms of timeline.

So, after my last update, I decided to buy a new motherboard set and upgrade the NAS. You can see some evidence of the plans on the "Who said you couldn't buy with BITCOIN in NZ? Imagine with VISA!" post.

Then, it happened that the motherboard shipped by Amazon was a mess! Yes, I bought a used item, but it was saying that it was tested and verified as working! But here it is what I found out:

BMC had already a user and password different from the defaults, so I could not get inside it.
Booting the board was not possible due to some electrical problem or damaged component.

I even ordered from South-Korea a pair of BMC/BIOS chips, pre-programmed with the latest firmware to check if that would be the problem. No, still nothing...

Now, I am waiting for a replacement or refund. Shipped already last week... so let's see what happens.

Where is my Witness running?

During the hassle above, it was for a short period running at Auckland on a test server with 64GB of RAM. But that will not be possible to sustain due personal reasons. So I moved to plan B.

I will be building a NAS with higher memory capacity (compared with my current 8GB) or even upgrading my own workstation to support 128GB of RAM or something above that. Although, this is something for probably the end of 2017 or beginning of 2018 due to some hardware strategy I have in mind. I also have a second alternative in mind, from AMD, that can scale easily for the same price to 256/512GB of RAM (but I still need more convincing at this area, in terms of memory pricing).

Meanwhile, I will be trying soon the software tool "conductor" from @furion to disable my Witness until all this happens. I will either do another update and/or post about it. And sorry if I have not told you about any of this news meanwhile, but I am still a young and experimental Witness, well aware of my Witness low voting and therefore I know that there is little room for any problematic.

My other contributions...

Since my last update:

Recruited new and dedicated people around New Zealand (and also at international level) to Steemit. I have been selective until now, but that might change soon.
Giving my 2 cents of help to @jesta and @good-karma by reviewing some of their work and while using their tools, report any issues I find, in a promptly and useful manner, so it helps them solve it quickly.
Helping as much I can, by reviewing posts and motivating users to behave the proper way. Some still don't get they won't be rich in 2 days!
Since I am in a middle of an important responsibility in my professional career, time becomes easily very short! As you might have noticed on a previous post, at my workplace we are preparing to change our Supercomputer and this implies huge transformation plans: New computing platform to power NZ research
Even so, I keep motivated and I'm always trying to help and find awesome opportunities of the blockchain for HPC. Steemit has contributed a lot on that behalf, by allowing me to be closer to the news I need to know about.
I have participated in the 10,000 Flyers initiative from @timcliff and successfully set 3+5+1= 9 Flyers!
I have recently donated 1003 STEEM POWER to the minnowsupportproject.org 😇! Where I have also become a membership user with automatic voting done by steemvoter.com
Attending Meetups/Conferences/Gatherings/etc and exploring the potential applications of Steemit in my community while at the same time trying to expand it with an adequate professional profile (very useful in my view if planning on growing above normal user base level).