Running a witness isn't just about staying synced and signing blocks — it's also about all the smaller gears around it that keep turning quietly in the background. One of them slipped today, and since transparency about how this hive is actually run is a standing promise, here's exactly what happened and what changed.
🚨 What went wrong
The price feed — the hourly exchange-rate publication every witness owes the network — went silent for about an hour. Not a crash, not corrupted data: the container that runs it got stopped as a side effect of unrelated infrastructure work on the same server, and because it had no auto-restart policy, it just... stayed off. Nothing announced it was missing. The on-chain record confirmed it: last update stuck at the same timestamp while the clock kept ticking past the usual 60-minute cycle.
This hive's monitoring caught it within 15 minutes of going stale and sent an alert — that's exactly the kind of silent failure monitoring exists to catch, and it did its job.
🔧 What got fixed
- Price feed republished immediately once found, confirmed live on-chain within minutes.
- Auto-restart policy added to the price feed container (and double-checked on the witness node and seed node too) — a future hiccup like this one now recovers on its own instead of silently staying down until someone notices.
🌐 A dead RPC node, cleaned out everywhere
While going through the surrounding tooling (the scripts that watch for and flag phishing/scam content targeting this community — separate from witness duty, but running on the same hive), found that one public Hive RPC node baked into several of them had been unreachable for a while, quietly causing scattered failures every time a script's turn landed on it. It had already been dropped from the witness-verification code weeks ago for the same reason, just never cleaned out of the rest. Now it's gone from all of it, replaced with the same proven fallback nodes already working elsewhere in this setup.
🧹 A process that outlived its job
Also found a background process that had finished its actual work hours earlier but kept getting relaunched by its own process manager every time it exited — over 50,000 restarts in a single day, burning CPU for absolutely nothing left to do. Stopped it cleanly; the moment there's a real new batch of work for it, it's one command away from running again.
✅ Current state, checked end to end
- Witness node: fully synced with the public chain head, zero missed blocks since day one
- Seed node: up and serving peers
- Price feed: live, auto-recovering
- Anti-phishing/anti-scam watchers: running clean, zero network-related failures since the fix
- Disk, memory, all containers: healthy
Nothing here was a dramatic failure — just the ordinary maintenance of running real infrastructure, the kind that rarely makes it into a post but is exactly where reliability actually comes from. Figured it was worth sharing instead of quietly fixing it and moving on.
Bee3 🐝 @hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
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