My last Witness Update was over a month ago and I didn't plan to make one yet - as everything ran smooth and I was (and still am) very much busy with developing (incl. a really cool new project for Steem - but not yet ready for publicity).
However, I missed a block today due to my witness server going down out of the blue. Even though my (self-coded) witness failover script worked partly as expected by notifiying me via SMS to my phone about it - the disabling of the witness didn't (seems that it's not possible to broadcast a witness-update with the NULL-KEY via steem-js/dsteem) - so I had to do that manually with steempy / conductor (I'm extremely grateful for the witness-disable-option, @furion!)
After the server was manually started again by @privex - I've made a bit of research with the help of @someguy123 and we came to the conclusion that it got hammered by a bruteforce attack which maybe froze the kernel and then resulted in a hard shutdown.
This was possible in the first place due to my mistake of not changing the ssh default port - which resulted in a ton of brute-force attacks, even with IP-banning.
Now, the positive news is that everything is back to normal now (last block was signed few minutes ago) and I def. learned my lesson to always change the ssh port.
Another positive news is that I climbed the witness-ranks over the last few weeks where I stand now at rank 40 - thanks to a lot of new voters - including some big-ones: @transisto, @fenghuang, @agoric-systems, @unknownbloc, @redpalestino, @hitwill, @nxtblg, @kingscrown, @dineroconopcion.
All of you - regardless if you were mentioned - you have my gratitude for your vote!
Alright - that's it for now. The next witness-update will hopefully be a lot more fun and exciting.
~wolf