We are excited to see the spk network get further ready for launch. Several months ago, as the testnet was made available publicly, and as we always do, we did setup a node to host the testnet version for spk network. (we already run 3 encoder nodes as well as an spk node as part of our actifit support infrastructure for hive, spk, and hive dapps)
Last week, we saw the updated announcement, so we went ahead and updated our node that's been running for 3+ months so that it runs the latest version and takes part in running a validator on the chain.
screenshot below taken from the testnet monitor (monitor is setup by the cool guys 
Our setup did not come hassle-free, as we had to work around to trim some mishaps along the way.
First, the old version of the testnet did not cope well with the latest running version, so while we tried to make it function it would not bring the services up to start validating.
We tried dumping our existing version, and using a fresh copy of the latest github code of trole, this didn't help either and the installation did not work properly.
We also got slowed down by an issue with spk user groups, which was a bug in the install.sh script that we overcame by commenting out the group check lines
Eventually, we had to setup a new node completely, and then fetching the latest version of trole went successfully (again after commenting out the group check lines in the install script), and as you can see from screenshot above we are successfully validating.
Our node is running and accessible via https://spk.actifit.io/
We were able to claim our Test Larynx
Our BROCA here
We were able to create a storage contract successfully using BROCA and upload an image by creating a post
Props to 
