Already for quite some time I've been thinking about contributing more significantly to hive. Instead of just being active on the chain through the various APIs and projects I wanted to do more on the infrastructure side of things. Running a witness that is...
While looking for more information on how to proceed I stumbled upon a nice post by stayoutoftherz in which he explains the basic steps of setting up a node.
With the post being quite self explanatory if you have touched a terminal before I decided to give it a go. After receiving some good tips on cheap VPS options and searching the web I found a good black Friday deal for a suitable VPS. The deal even came with a free storage update! The hardware specs of the server are as follows and should, as far as I could figure out, do the job. The specs below show only half the storage. I ended up doubling to 800GB for free.
A quick check on the hardware details by running lscpu via an ssh session show that the actual CPU type is the AMD EPYC 7282. Coincidentally the same as what I use on my daily job for computer simulations:
As I have never worked much with VPS infrastructures, I must say I was amazed at how fast one could get access to some computing power. Ten minutes after placing my order I was ssh-ing into the server. Ready to get going!
Although I have already started working on building the node, I will post more on this in the coming weeks. First and foremost as form of documentation for myself, but also as a reference for others interested in setting up a witness node.
If you have any remarks or handy tips and tricks, let me know. For now, let's see how far I get :)