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Witness Essentials: Watcher received an update, which includes:

• New command: test which can be used to test notifications & failover in case of missed blocks.
• After a specific time, since the last missed block (1 day default), key-rotation rounds and the missed block threshold will be reset to prevent unnecessary failover
• The interval variable inside config.json is in minutes but has been in seconds in code. This has been changed to minutes now.

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Github: https://github.com/witness-essentials/watcher
PR: https://github.com/witness-essentials/watcher/pull/3 (plus PR #4 and #5)

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What is Witness Essentials?

Witness Essentials is a collection of important tools for witnesses.

Witness Essentials: Watcher is a script for Steem Witnesses to watch for missed blocks, failover towards backup-nodes & alert via multiple services.

• Multiple alert options available (TELEGRAM, SMS <NEXMO, TWILIO>, EMAIL)
• Transaction signing either via private signing-key or private active-key
• RPC Failover
• Rotation between keys supported
• Robust error handling

Github Organization: https://github.com/witness-essentials

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Getting Started

You can find a detailed guide on Github

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Update Information

• Update your packages if you're running it locally (npm update/yarn)
• Add "MAX_AGE_LAST_MISSED_DAYS": 1 to your config.json. 1 is the default value and should be replaced depending how long it takes for your witness to produce a block.
• For testing, simply run: npm run test or yarn run test. You're then able to choose between testing failover via real key signing (+ choose if you want to skip disabling of witness) and testing notifications.
• Make sure the interval(minutes) inside config.json is correctly set

Quick note: the test command is currently not available via docker, only directly via npm/yarn.

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Alright, that's it regarding the new update.

I hope my fellow witnesses find this useful as monitoring & watching your witness-nodes is quite important.

All the best,
Wolf

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^{Do you believe that my work is valuable for Steem? Then please vote for me as witness.}