Feel like an idiot, stupid decisions and risks I'm taking in my haste.

I have synced the mainnet chain and stopped it short of continuing to the wallet steps for creating a witness.

Then I created a testnet chain which is operational, some of the output is as follow:

1327757ms th_a       application.cpp:204           reset_p2p_node       ] Configured p2p node to listen on 127.0.0.1:11010
1327758ms th_a       application.cpp:279           reset_websocket_serv ] Configured websocket rpc to listen on 127.0.0.1:11011
1327758ms th_a       main.cpp:244                  main                 ] Started BitShares node on a chain with 0 blocks.
1327758ms th_a       main.cpp:245                  main                 ] Chain ID is 0225eb536315d0308462f4299300193ed9f7a99de1abe7f2d99347705840970f

and curl requests result in:

1333874ms th_a       database_api.cpp:242          database_api_impl    ] creating database api 91787728
1333875ms th_a       database_api.cpp:242          database_api_impl    ] creating database api 91819120
1333875ms th_a       database_api.cpp:261          ~database_api_impl   ] freeing database api 91787728
1333875ms th_a       database_api.cpp:261          ~database_api_impl   ] freeing database api 91819120

actual curl output is:

{"id":1,"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"id":"2.11.0","chain_id":"0225eb536315d0308462f4299300193ed9f7a99de1abe7f2d99347705840970f","immutable_parameters":{"min_committee_member_count":11,"min_witness_count":11,"num_special_accounts":0,"num_special_assets":0}}}

(actual command: curl --data '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "get_chain_properties", "params": [], "id": 1}' http://127.0.0.1:11011/rpc && echo)

Now when I attempt to create a wallet using:

./cli_wallet -r ws://127.0.0.1:11011 -u '' -p '' --wallet-file my-wallet.json --chain-id 0225eb536315d0308462f4299300193ed9f7a99de1abe7f2d99347705840970fd

I get the following output:

Logging RPC to file: logs/rpc/rpc.log
3366551ms th_a       main.cpp:120                  main                 ] key_to_wif( committee_private_key ): 5KCBDTcyDqzsqehcb52tW5nU6pXife6V2rX9Yf7c3saYSzbDZ5W
3366551ms th_a       main.cpp:124                  main                 ] nathan_pub_key: BTS6MRyAjQq8ud7hVNYcfnVPJqcVpscN5So8BhtHuGYqET5GDW5CV
3366551ms th_a       main.cpp:125                  main                 ] key_to_wif( nathan_private_key ): 5KQwrPbwdL6PhXujxW37FSSQZ1JiwsST4cqQzDeyXtP79zkvFD3
Starting a new wallet with chain ID 0225eb536315d0308462f4299300193ed9f7a99de1abe7f2d99347705840970f (from CLI)
3366552ms th_a       main.cpp:172                  main                 ] wdata.ws_server: ws://localhost:8090
0 exception: unspecified
Underlying Transport Error
    {"message":"Underlying Transport Error"}
    asio  websocket.cpp:449 operator()

    {"uri":"ws://localhost:8090"}
    th_a  websocket.cpp:678 connect

It seems: -r ws://127.0.0.1:11011

is ignored and ws://localhost:8090 used instead. I built from source, should I recompile using the testnet friendly witness_node and cli_wallet generation or am I doing something wrong here ?

Your server is more than sufficient for running a witness node at this time, and for some time to come.

In order to get voted in, you should provide additional infrastructure, like seed node(s) and/or API node(s). You also need a backup server, preferrably in a different location, that can take over when your main server goes down.

For setting things up and proving yourself it would be advisable to run a testnet witness as well.

Thanks for that. May I ask what type of replication system on a different premises keeps a backup server in sync ? Could something like rsync be adequate to keep the witness state replicated ?