Hey Steemit friends,
I recently setup a witness node. I faced some issues during this setup. But after some trial and research, I found some solutions that helped me move forward. I wanted to share here to help if anyone else facing similar problems.

Issue 1: Slow download speed with wget

The first major issue that I faced was with the wget command. When downloading the witness files from https://files.steem.fans/, the speed was slow, and I even encountered files corrupted on multiple stages. Turned out, wget was not handling the large download size well on my setup. Thanks @ety001 to help this downloading issue.

Solution: Use axel Instead of wget
To solve this issue, I switched to axel. First of all, I installed and then used it.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install axel
axel -n 10 <add_download_link>

-n 10 option tells axel to use 10 connections, which makes the download much faster than wget. with axel, I managed to complete the download without any file corruption.

Issue 2: Losing downloading when Putty session lost.

Occasionally, the Putty session disconnect and I was lose my download progress. This was incredibly frustrating because restarting the download from scratch.

Solution: Use screen to maintain download sessions
To avoid losing my progress, I used screen, a Linux tool that lets you create “detached” terminal sessions that stay open even if you disconnect.

To install screen, use the following command.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install screen

Create the screen.

screen -s witness-progress

For detach from screen

Ctrl + A, then D

This setup will help keep the terminal processes running in the background especially helpful when downloading large files.

Reconnect to the screen session.

screen -r witness-progress

This simple trick saved me so much time and headache. now, even if I get disconnected, my download continues until its completed.

Please caste your witness Vote to @bountyking5

Currently, Witness rank is 58. Your support is required for rank up! Let’s make Steem stronger.

Special Thanks to @steemchiller , @rme , @ety001 , @justyy , @steem-agora , @upvu.witness , @upvu