Mining Monero (XMR) with my current gear? Let's look at some numbers!

Goblin Mining Co. Is Born! Let the Water Era Begin! All behold, VEGAS!!!

Hey everybody sorry for the delay between posts just been extremely busy in real life. If you've been kicking it in the IRC channel then you've heard all about triple homicides, my ventures babysitting, and of course, the nonstop miner grind! A user on LinusTechTip's forum declared he couldn't wait for season two to begin and that's been the real motivation I've used to push until I've had something to show for all this downtime. (shots to Jrhumphrey89 my boi in Dallas) Oh Goblin, how much you got into mining right now? Try $4850 by the time you add up all the little parts and pieces I've needed along the way. An of course, a lifetime of tech knowledge being worked to the edge to keep things optimal and running at all times. This really is not a small journey to go on as you can probably gather from the last few months of this blog.

So what's been happening while you've been gone? Well hackers busting my networks nuts, I flooded the 5930K with half the res directly across the board into the ram slots and everything, and I've completely taken apart a number of different systems to build my current setup which is pushing peaks of 13 KH/s. Balling baby, and I'm positive I can push everything even further as I'm just getting familiar with the Vega technology. Already my top peak across four water vega 64s is 9.5 KH/s as reported back from the pool itself in accepted shares. With some additional tweaking I want to see more!! Though I don't want to let this sound all roses and hot kitten, I've been grinding some insane hours, skipping meals, smoking way to much ganja, and living on coffee through this project. I felt like every minute I wasn't mining I was just kicking myself right in the nuts so sleep has been pretty rare lately.

I'll cover the hacker related network changes in another post, for now lets stick on the Vega train. I took apart my old 5820K rig and added two vegas to it, pretty straight forward build. Formatted it completely away from any notion of a normal machine, stripped down windows 10 pro using a combination of pXc-coding's DoNotSpy10 & ccleaner. (DNS10 to rip 10 up, then CC to uninstall every additional component of the os down to an installed program list of nothing) Then after applying all the newest system updates I put a pause on them for the next three months so they wouldn't stop my efforts in the middle of the night or while I was away. Finally I went through the really long task of understanding how to properly get these blockchain drivers to work. I followed the Definitive Monero & Vega Guide that was posted on reddit. It works great and that guy knows his shit, you need to be very exact with his instructions.

Mainly about crashing!! Anytime you crash the HBM2 your mining rates will take a huge dive and the driver software will report everything is great. You have to manually turn it off and on as well change your auto to manual voltage controls + fan curves every time inbetween crashes. Sometimes a solid reboot is required to get it to turn back on. It really is unstable as fuck and hard to work with, turning on and off monitors will instantly crash it. You can read his solution was an additional dongle, but my solution has been doing internal network remote desktop connections. This way I can work from another room over and not have to run back and forth to the mining room nine-hundred times to work through the crashes until I get it up and running stable. This prevents the stress of flipping on monitors over there or even using a KVM switch, it's by far the most stable solution I've came up with in regards to the HBM2 as well, it really helps to fight the crashes via remote connections. (RoadTripGuy gave me this idea btw, shots man thanks!) You'll get the pattern of exactly where you need to click to fix the problem down in no time. If I get a bit more free time I'll gladly write out an AutoIt script that automatically does all the tedious as fuck mouse work after a crash. That'll be really nice, I love automation like that.

I then took the new rig I just posted about purchasing off craigslist & completely gutted it. His wiring was shit, the cables where really thin, and sadly, that gold rated power supply he had in there just wasn't going to cut it for peak consumption after I looked at how my other unit was handling things. Also, it came with a 1TB 7200 drive, that's not going to cut it, you have to have an SSD to vega mine well. So I dropped by the CSU surplus store and they where sold out of SSDs and didn't have any good power supplies left in stock either. So I bit the bullet and went to bestbuy of all places, I know, fuck my life right? They had PNY SSD's on sale and then while I was there I got raped over another 750W power supply to replace the 650. Sadly all they had in stock was a bronze unit and I don't like running anything under gold, specifically for how hard mining is on a power supply. Though it was either that or wait for shipping so I grabbed one there and figured I'd test it out. This is another spot where I really lost money compared to buying second hand as this was brand new gear from a retail store, massive fail. Anyways I got back, rebuilt the system, tried to clean up things a bit & fired it up. This machine is VERY BITCHY compared to my other machine. If my hash rate doesn't look right I don't even guess, I log directly into this machine as it's going to be the one that's causing issues. It really likes to drop 500 H/s and start trying to equally mine across it's threads instead of having a dominate one like the configuration calls for.

I've found by adding 6% more power in Wattman to the first card in the system it seems to stabilize it a bit more then I've been use to over the first few days of testing. It also allowed that card to peak in the low 2000's for hash rate instead of sitting around the 1990s but it doesn't stay up there. It's being done purely to help keep the cards in that system stable. Though now I had a 1080 waterforce and a 980 classified sitting around. I thought I would add the triple stack of cards to my 5930K box, sadly this went really badly. My T2 1000 doesn't like trying to power a Titan X (Pascal) on EKWB cooling, a 1080 waterforce, and a maxwell 980 classified all at once while also mining on it's 5930k and powering the rest of the gear. Just wasn't going to happen. I had to rearrange the cards to do this so I had to move the titan, which meant I needed to replumb the custom loop. In the middle of doing this I accidentally soaked the whole rampage v10 edition motherboard in my loop coolant. Had to take the whole thing apart after my paper towel stuffing nonsense just wasn't going to cut it. I spent hours wiping down each part and then left them out to dry over night. The next day I rebuilt the system and still was to scared to turn it on, instead I got a fan out and blew air into the case over the course of the day & over the night.

Finally the moment came where I could wait forever but I needed that machine up. So I flipped the dip and pressed the button. Shit rebooted about ten times, then was locking up in the bios, and going apeshit. Clearly things where not happy, though I didn't know what to do but turn it off longer or try and maybe evap whatever leftover humidity was in there I wasn't getting out through letting it run a bit. I let the system spin fans and attempted reinstalling an operating system for about three hours. Finally it just started working again out of no where, I reset it back to stock by then so I started overclocking it, posted right to 4.6 like it use too, then I ran stress tests on it. ??? It's acting the same as always ??? fucking sacrifice a 1050 to the hardware gods, we've got life back in it. I don't know, I don't really understand it, but we're rolling again! The final build as you can see is just the Titan and the 1080, which when added to the other systems completes the I ONLY MINE ON WATER BITCHES PCMR EPEEN #1 first rollout of Goblin Mining Co. The EVGA 980 Classified is literally sitting on a a shelf next to a dead EVGA 04G-P4-3975-KR. Damn thing takes some serious juice to turn on and I know I'm being awful #firstworldproblem here, but it's got air cooling on it. I'm uuhh looking down upon it from my throne of radiators that keep my ass warm in the middle of winter with no heat on in my entire place but my gear nice & cool. #waterbois #fuckaircooling #thingsPCMRsays

Though that heat is no fucking joke. It's snowing here & I left my window to the mining room wide open all night. I woke up this morning bright an early an found it 98F inside the room. It was a fucking desert as soon as you hit that room, I mean it was really trippy to be cold in one room, snowing outside, and then a loud hurricane of fans in the next room that's as hot and dry as satans starfish. I grabbed the horticulture fan I used to dry the 5930K rig off and placed it on the floor right infront of my mining corner, angled it upwards, and proceeded to try and blow all the heat out of the room by circulating large amounts of it. This helped alot with exchanging air through the window and outside but it actually helped instantly heat my entire place up multiple degrees. You could just stand in the doorway and sweat. WHEW, do not under estimate the heat stacked mining gear (even on a small level like this) will generate in even a decent sized area. They are totally space heaters that just happen to make you money as they burn large amounts of juice. It almost burned my hand to touch the case where the radiators screwed in! I took both the side case panels off the vega rigs to allow for better air exchange & angled the ground fan to blow directly into both of them. This has really lowered temps and taught me a pretty valuable lesson in Vega output.

Also speaking of learning lessons. Before applying the undervolt modifications I wanted to measure my cards consumption. I was mining just like I'm doing now but they wouldn't hold 1100mhz on the memory at all so I told the software to use up to another additional 20% power to try and stabilize it. This set off the loudest series of alarms I've heard from my batteries since owning them, I looked up and the screen was flashing 1250W over-load and initiated immediate shutdown procedures. Guys, these systems are only running 750W power supplies!! Not only did it pull 1250W through the 750W PSU but it wrecked the battery system it was plugged into completely. Talk about fortunate we're running semi-quality gear here, if any single part of these builds was in slightly worse shape I fear that would've been the death of an entire rig. (before it even had a chance to earn a single XMR!) Whew, you should've seen my face when it all turned right back on afterwards.

Overall the entire operation is now: six GPUs, five CPUs, four ARMS, a monster pfSense 2U rack dual xeon router, a NightHawk X10 access point, comcast gig internet, a VPN provider with five licenses, five 1500PFCLCD battery systems, four hyper-v load balancers, & a whole lot of tech skills. Yeah PCMR, make a spot at the table, because I'm mining that XMR like it's the only crack in the hood.

Vega 64 Wave Edition Fresh In Packaging:
Second Rig PSU & SSD Upgrades:
This many fans? 1-To-4 PWM Splitters To The Rescue:
Mining Rig #1 (5820K):
Mining Rig #2 (6600K):
Mining Rig #3 (5930K) (soaked):
Last Day Of Drying The Rig Post Swimming:
Thank The Grand Architect For EK EVO Koolants:
Mining Powered By ATI:
Next Level Mining Tachometers Really Add That #PCMR:
The Red Glow Of Late Night Profits:
Keeping Your Gear Cool Is #1 Priority:
Let's See Those XMR-Node-Proxy Load Balancers:
Vega Rig #1 GPU Hash Rates:
Vega Rig #2 GPU Hash Rates:
New Peak Mining Record! Whole Operation @ 13 KH/s - Vegas @ 9.5 KH/s:

Creating Live & Interactive Custom XMR-STAK Statistics Screen Layouts: (...doing it the 90s way!)

Sup everybody! Sorry for the delay between content, I got to go on a vacation, was rather nice! Anyways, while I've been out I've been thinking nonstop about mining and the approaches people use. I planned a couple meetings with other miners on my trip so I could see how they setup their operations, the equipment they use, & even the financial angles to their companies. As in, how are they cashing out, where do they pay taxes, what fines, little man fees, and misc expenses they're going through, etc. No business is ever as simple as just produce product, or in this case, coins. So finding how the entire process A-Z works for other people has been pretty useful information for the inspiring miner like myself. Like every industry there's a range from the hippie hobbyists to the commercial enterprises, and personally I love them all! From a couple graphics cards to help pay off home bills to a monumental TWO-HUNDRED & FORTY 290X wall to wall rack stack with automated environmental control. People getting down on mining are good folks coast to coast.

One thing I noticed is that everybody has their own way of managing all the information that's required to stay on top of your operation. Literally from folks just flipping through stat screens on their phone while they sit on the can, to people physically keeping records of their mining equipment as it ages. As in, how many hours are on a card, what its voltages ran brand new vs. what they're at three months down the line after a 24/7 overclock & mining, what's the efficiency of any given piece at any given time, etc. It seems to be a major pain in the ass for every miner, there's sooooooo much data to consider. I wasn't even doing a mining related activity when the idea hit me, you know those XMR-STAK screens you can turn on for your local network? What if you just went back to like the oldschool html websites we use to love in the late 90s & whipped out a super basic table structure that loaded iframes? Surely it couldn't be that easy could it? Yes. It's that easy. Using ancient html code to create custom table layouts & then iframing the built in stat pages from XMR-STAK you can create live, interactive, & fully customizable layouts for your equipment!

It had actually been a moment since I'd just sat down in notepad and wrote a website up in such a fashion. Really had to reach for the memory there at points, let's not even start with the fact that at one point I converted over from surrounding my elements in angle brackets to surrounding them in square brackets like I was sitting here making a forum post. I didn't even notice it until I booted my code the first time. LOLOLOL. Anyways I went with a basic four wide layout as it matched my 16:9 screens fairly well, though you can customize this as much as you want. If you weren't alive when this time period of the net was the hotness, or it's just been two decades like it has for the rest of us, then feel free to google "free html5 editor" or the likes to get a couple different WYSIWYG options. Though if you're stubborn like me, just fiddle in notepad for a while until it all starts coming back to you.

Neat things about doing it this way is; I.) It's all locally ran as a simple .html file inside your browser of choice. Since it's just a single file you can easily transfer it from computer to computer inside your mining network. (really anywhere you want to have a big ass live stats screen) II.) If you wanted a smaller version, or one that does something weird, well go nuts, all you gotta do is open the file in notepad or your favorite html editor if you still have one of those installed & let your creativity become your limits. III.) You can put your most troubled machines or points of interest at the top of your list, or even troubleshoot issues via watching entire systems at once. I actually discovered, diagnosed, & fixed an issue from this new stats screen that I had missed from before! (another post on that one coming) IV.) Hard crashes, lockups, basically catastrophic level mining failure is instantly noticeable because the entire iframe will change to one of two different error screens. (one that lets you know it's down and one that gives you more detail if it's having network issues) V.) Most basic failures like vegas dropping their HBM2 are more easily noticed as your eyes can glide across a horizontal plane of results between cards comparing all of their hashrates at once. VI.) Adaptive automated refresh rate means you can check in on your equipment as often as you want. I have it setup for every sixty seconds, which I like because it matches STAK's middle field.

Now the code you need to do this is VERY SIMPLE, like WTF it makes me laugh. All you need to do is simply change the network addresses, card identifications, & the title / header as you probably don't care for my name being on your screen. To make it copy and paste simple, I'll go ahead and throw it in a code box directly below. All you'll need to do is highlight all the code in the box, copy it, paste it into notepad, make your localization changes, then save it as a .html file. Once you open that file up, ta'da you've got a live & interactive stats screen that you can click around your mouse with to check different stats per miner:
Pretty straight forward isn't it? Sure it could use some custom backgrounds, some spinning .gif files, three frame per second flames popping out when cards go down, oh and a midi track of Joe Esposito's "You're the Best" playing on constant loop but you're going to have to add those other lovely wonders of the late 90s internet in on your own. (kids, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, go find some archive of the best geocities websites, that'll keep you laughing for a while) Moving on, you can drag the browser window around and they'll all stay in the center of their own tables. This means it works great at different resolutions or if you have other things taking up screen real estate. Once again, I went with a quad layout, you can simply trim this to a tri layout or expand it, whatever you need it's drop dead simple old code hacking things together. As you can see I tried borders, borderless, outlines, all sorts of options for snazzing it up but this clean an simple layout won the day for easiest to use & easiest to stare at. Though this of course wouldn't be a Goblin post if I didn't bring some screenshots!

Simple & Clean Grid Layout Reporting Network Wide GPU Stats:
Crash Screens When Miners Go Down:

Water Vegas Going Super Saiyan @ 2250+ H/s:

I've been trying a couple different configuration options on the Vegas lately & one of them provided some surprising results! Woke up to check the stat screen & make sure everything was still mining away when I noticed the highs across all the cards where pretty narly. Not only are the Pascal cards occasionally flipping their entire workload between sides of the cards (as they're currently evenly spitting their streaming multiprocessors into separate miners via speed racer) but the 1080 is showing occasional peaks where it's running 750+ H/s where previously it was pretty much stuck at 650-660. Then you look down at the Vegas an somewhere over the course of the night they all started going 2250+ H/s minus one that only got up to 2183.7 H/s. Now that's some neat shit to catch on the board when you wake up, it'll make your morning tea twice as sweet! I think some of the difference is I've recently tried running them at lower temps then I have been thanks to exploiting the fact that it's winter outside.

As you can see in the Behold Vegas post the maximum rate I've got in reported accepted shares from the pool via my Vega Proxy is 9.5 KH/s, which when divided down is 2,375 H/s per card. So while these results are good to see on my side locally instead of through the pool's natural ebb & flow I know I can still do better. There is a ton to be said about how you run your mining operation; what software you use, what operating systems, how your network is setup, etc. People on the more hobbyist side who just fire up some software then walk away are truly missing out on an entire world of optimization. Even for those of us trying to stay on the bleeding edge there's always people doing better. Hopefully with advancements in the community's understanding of Vega, further mining application development (can't wait to try the new unified release of stak), & some new blockchain drivers we'll find that we can still dig deeper into unlocking their true mining potential. Though for single card hash rates.. yeah I can't really complain here! #vegabois #titshashrate

This Morning's GPU Stat Screen Showing Things Digging Along:

Using Device Console Utility (DevCon.exe) To Reset Your Vega Cards Automatically:

Now this is something I found digging through vega conversation and I'm not entirely sure where I ultimately came up with it. I did not invent this, write this, or do anything but immediately implement it into my operations. Though I remember reading somewhere that a guy on Craigslist or eBay (???) was charging $10 bucks for it and the guy I downloaded it from thought that was just hilarious given it's widely available across the net for free. Moving on, to use this you need a copy of Device Console Utility (DevCon.exe) which is a tiny little program that generally comes packaged inside the Windows Driver Kit. Given nobody wants to download the entire package for this tiny .exe & nobody trusts random .exe download websites (or should anyways) then it leaves people asking where do I get this thing? Thankfully this smooth cat Amirhossein maintains a blog called Networchestration where he very clearly shows us how to obtain devcon from Microsoft directly without all the hassle of installing or downloading WDK.

Once you've got that covered drop it in a folder you've created just for this & then open up notepad. (or your favorite text editor, I recommend notepad2) You'll copy and paste the code from the box I'll create below & then save it as a Windows Batch File (.bat) with whatever name you choose. (mine's simply called Vega_Reset.bat) Make sure you save it (or place it afterwards) into the same folder you created for and placed the devcon.exe file into. Now whenever your HBM2 crashes, your hash rates get screwy, or basically ANYTHING AT ALL looks wrong, then you just right click on this bat file and hit "run as administrator" then sweet as a spliff of Dr. Grinspoon all your problems are solved automatically. If it fails to turn off your vegas and restart them it's because you forgot the whole run as admin part.
As you can see it's an extremely simple script but damn is it effective! No longer will you ever have to open up the AMD software, turn off your HBM2, turn on your HBM2, go to Wattman, turn manual voltage control back on, change your fan curves again, save everything, then restart your mining in the hopes it's going to stay mining at the high end hash rates without any issues. That whole process, all that madness, fixed with simply running this quick little script. I watch the stat screens I showed you how to create in the previous posts & while it's extremely rare to have a card go down once it's up and running it does occasionally happen. Actually more common, I'm dicking around making changes with the systems testing new ideas and/or concepts & creating crashes on my own. So for whatever reason something isn't correct, well, do a secure remote login to the IP listed on the stat screen, run the script, start the miner back up, wham we're done in a couple seconds.

Literally one of the most handy things I've came across in all of mining so far. For it's simplicity it works great & helps stabilize systems immediately since you're not screwing around with things and waiting for the amd driver software to reload a bunch of times. Most the time it just takes one run of this script to see all the vega 64 cards immediately post to 1990ish H/s and stabilized there until I screw with it again. Now how's this work? Well as you can see if you go into Windows Device Manager, right click onto a Vega (or really any device), then click properties, inside the new window click the details tab, then in the drop down box select hardware ids, this is the beginning device ID for Vega cards. So while there is additional identifying information about the hardware listed, this script simply looks for the beginning part to find all vega related cards, then it turns them off, waits a couple seconds, & finally enables them again. It's absolutely brilliant & I want to hug whoever thought of this first. Enough that I'm here sharing it with you guys as an excellent tool & technique to use in your own mining operations. #vegabois #devconmagic

TheJerichoJones said:

Here have some goodness cuz we love you.

Click to expand...

Oh hell yeah!! TheJerichoJones swooping in for the win! Thank you very much fine sir that is an extremely helpful script you've got going on there, I deeply appreciate the share. I sent you a PM a while back but you never triggered the open notification so I'm assuming you're unaware of it's existence. Check your account! MUCH <3!!

Thirty+ Miner HTML Stat Screen Continuation:

Well guys I've finally swapped over my entire operation (minus three ARMs) to the new Unified XMR-STAK that allows you to mine across all your CPUs & GPUs inside the same application for Monero. It's extremely good an has all sorts of new fun little features to play around with. It also comes with an auto configure setup that attempts to give you the best settings across all your equipment right away without any tweaking. It's getting fairly decent but I still had to go in and play with everything before I got back to my hash rates I was seeing before the swap.

Though as you can imagine this is somewhat counter-productive to my entire Speed Racer concept so it took some playing around before I could get that all up and running the same as before as well. While I was getting it going I decided to overhaul my stat screen project from a couple posts ago. It now covers the entire mining operation per network location & I'm working on tying all the separate clusters together in my free time. Currently this spot has thirty-five miners running though three of them are ARM devices so they don't have the cool XMR-Stak stat screen like the rest of them. Leaving thirty-two miners on my board though I honestly check this via my laptop alot more then I do the board. (just not in the mining room as often)

Speaking of the laptop (the 3770 + quadro) it can and does hit higher rates but I've been working on it all day leaving it a bit hammered. So the rates shown are a bit lower then they should be but hey there you go on real world examples of user loads hindering mining performance. This version actually does a much better job with the K1000M then the previous XMR-STAK-NVIDIA did so I'm pretty pleased with picking up the extra 60ish H/s. Other then that I updated the stat screen code while I've been playing around, just little tweaks here or there nothing major. Though it's enough I'm going to repost it in a code box for anyone else who picked up the idea and is currently using it.

Huge Code Box Covering 32 Miners In 90s'tastic HTML:
Though like always, people want those screenshots! So here's the above code as it's currently in use for my Alpha cluster: (fullscreen here)

LinusTechTips Forum Replies, A Crossover Ars Reposting: (since I reposted the new vega script there, we'll bring chatter from there here)

On 11/12/2017 at 6:58 PM, BuckGup said:
How profitable is it? I have a 270X, 7950, 1080, 6800K, and Ryzen 1200. I would be willing to contribute to a pool even if it's less profitable then say ETH or ZEC

Click to expand...

That's an interesting question! There's a wide range between profits even on the same equipment and the same coin all depending on how you set up your operation. This entire thread can be read as a venture from novice to wherever I stand now and part of that was slowly integrating newer ideas and concepts into my mining practices until it's built up to where it stands now. There's a wonderful website I've mentioned before in this thread called WhatToMine where they have a plethora of calculators across all the primary coins. Here is the Monero calculator to find out exactly how much you'd make at any given moment in the market.

Though you will need to know your basic hash power per device, which if you don't want to do any trial runs then I'd suggest using MoneroBenchmarks.Info to find what other people are running your equipment at. Once you have a rough estimation of your hashing power you'll need to figure out how much power you're consuming to achieve this rate. The website from before should help you with this but it really shouldn't be that hard to figure out. Always over estimate so you don't get a bad day at the end of the month. Then you need to look up your local area's price per kilowatt hour (kWh) that you're paying to actually plug all this gear in. Enter each of these values in the calculator from above an TA'DA that's your basic profits for mining Monero before you get in there an start really tweaking and learning about advanced techniques. (like bios flashing for memory timing adjustments, undervolting, etc.) 

On 11/14/2017 at 7:50 AM, Ithanul said:
That some nice Vega cards there.  Some sweet hash rate too. How much those Vega 64s cost ya?  I been toying with the idea of getting a Vega to mess with for my F@H/BOINC/mining rig. Though, I do know of store here with RX580s in stock.

Click to expand...

Thank you fine sir! Those hybrids ran me eight bones but right now if you're looking newegg has them at seven for the MSI Waves. I don't know why, don't really care, that's a decent price on them. It might be because XFX's hybrid and some other third party manufactured versions just arrived. Even though I paid an extra bone a pop compared to today's price they've already mined it back so I'm not sweating the investment. Given the dominance of Vega at the moment I've seen some pretty crazy deals on craigslist lately if you didn't mind going used. I'm also watching brand new retail boxed 64's go for cheaper then 56's so who the fuck knows in this market. Madness I say!!

Most the people I know simply watch a number of places for their inventories to refresh an as soon as they change the limit per order/customer to five each on anything decent they'll strike. Literally just adding five of each brand that's well priced an deciding well, this is the natural time for rig expansion. I know we're fueling the global problem and the gaming community has a general distaste for us at the moment but this is the business world. Cash is king & this is one situation where even high end gaming machines don't touch or even really compare to mining clusters in terms of moving hardware. Until your average gamer is sitting around just waiting to purchase 5-20+ graphics cards at a time this isn't going to go away until the supply side of things changes. (kinda went on a bicycle ride there but thanks for coming along with me)

Stripping Windows 10 Down & Fine Tuning It Into A Mining Beast:

I was working with another Arsian on a mining project that was entirely Linux based. I can get around and my Nix Fu is decent, as you guys can see throughout this thread there's been some fun times, but damn I was getting really annoyed at my lack of ability to just do stuff in a snap. Even if it is just a short trip down memory lane or a quick google search away it's just not the same as knowing everything in and out. While I've been using Linux since the late 90s, most of my life has been spent working on, operating within, and overall using Windows. (including the Server editions) It occurred to me during an XMR-STAK compile that if I raced myself or even my friend I would be light years ahead if we where using any slightly comparable Windows OS simply from familiarity.

I had a copy of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS booting on the mini i7 workstation as seen throughout this thread. It was a cool place to play around with different misc. mining tools while comparing them to my Windows based hash rates. Though out of interest I grabbed a copy of the new version of Microsoft Windows and Office ISO Download Tool from Heidoc.Net, downloaded the newest Windows 10 Pro build (1709), used Rufus to slap it on a USB stick & off to the races I went. Given I've been using Windows since 3.1, it was like going home after being gone for a couple decades. Just for the completeness of this post I had the machine plugged into the internet during this process & let it download all the updates while going through it's install. When the desktop came up it was a fresh Windows 10 Professional copy with all the hoops, spyware, nonsense, stores, and bullshit you could want updated to the date of this posting.

The first thing I'll do is start downloading DoNotSpy10 from pXc-coding. I've mentioned them before in this thread but this is a tool used to remove vast amounts of things from the operating system like telemetry. If you're unfamiliar with this term our own Peter Bright did a story on this back in April when the process became slightly more transparent. It also allows you to strip elements like Windows Defender, Windows Updates, Windows Stores, blah blah blah away from it's bloatware filled fresh out of the box experience. ***THOUGH BE CAREFUL WHILE INSTALLING*** as the author of the software attempts to drop additional adware/malware/general bullshit during the installation process if you just spam right through the prompts. Make sure you read each page, turn off whatever revenue generating crap he's laced the installer with, and move forward with just his software alone. NOTE: this doesn't happen in the donation tier version but we can safety live without it by being aware & cautious instead of click monster noobs.

Go ahead and use Edge to do it since you won't have any other browsers unless you came prepared. At the same time this is downloading (preinstall) I'll download CCleaner which while offering a pro version, once again we'll take the freebie one. During the install this one will actually ask if you want to install Google Chrome along with it (one of their sponsors at the time of posting) so if that's your jam for browsers then you can go ahead and grab it right there instead of downloading it separately. (which they probably appreciate as I'm sure there's some kickback program going on there) Now if you've seen CCleaner in the news recently but don't know what it is, it's probably because as Dan Goodin covered they recently had a booby-trapped update. Though I've been using this program for well over a decade now and can highly recommend it to everybody. What it actually does is automatically detect then scrub caches, history files, & misc. leftover data on your machine after each use. Though it also has alot of neat other tools inside like a very efficient & direct uninstaller.

I'll also grab a copy of the Notepad2 Installer during this preinstall download phase. If Chrome isn't your thing or you simply don't want to have it installed via CCleaner then you'll need to grab your browser download stub now as well. Other software worth mentioning (specifically if you're mining Monero) that I'll always grab is the msvcp140.dll and vcruntime140.dll runtime package directly from microsoft (do not use missing dll scam sites) & MSI Afterburner which I'll use for all the GPU tweaking as well keeping an eye on CPU temps, power consumption loads, etc. This is also the time to download your newest GPU specific drivers to override the default windows ones. Just a whole bunch of downloading going on here, not much more to say for this part. If you have specific SSD drivers you need to enable hyper modes or say additional overprovisioning (thanks TechQuickie) then like everything else, this is your time to grab it. I generally completely ignore motherboard specific bloatware like overclocking utilities, etc. Any board related overclocking I do is done in the bios and not from a soft overclocking perspective.

Once you've got a packed download folder I'll start with DoNotSpy10, heed the warning above while installing. Once it's done I'll have it start the program from the installer on exit. Here we will use the checkmark all box to select everything it has to offer. We will decline it's offer to make a checkpoint before nuking the system. Afterwards it'll say the changes have been made but require you to reboot. Do not reboot. Next we'll need to install, then open, CCleaner and go right to the options -> settings section. (it's on the left hand side of the application with a gearwheel for a symbol) Here we will turn off the first four boxes (unmark them) then we will turn on Secure Deletion; simple overwrite(1 pass) w/ alternate data streams and cluster tips also getting wiped. (checkmark them) Next we'll go to the options -> monitoring section and turn off system monitoring and active monitoring. Ignore it's bitch windows that pop up and turn it off. Next we'll click into the options -> advanced section where we only turn on "hide warning messages", "close program after cleaning", "save all settings to ini file", and "skip user account control warning". To make this clear, everything else on this page should NOT BE CHECKMARKED.

Moving on we can now leave the Options section and click the Tools section right above it. As you can see the first part of this section is the almighty Uninstall that I hyped before. This is one of the most fun parts of the process so get ready to be excited, it's almost like riding a rollercoaster so be prepared! See all the bullshit that came with your new shiny operating system? Well outside of ccleaner and donotspy10 which you just installed, plus maybe calculator if you're bad at the maths, you're going to uninstall all this crap. Plus it's easy! All you need to do is right-click on each of them, then click uninstall. The prompt that pops up to confirm this decision can simply be accepted by pressing your enter button. It'll take no time at all depending on your system speed & wham you're already starting to feel an empty windows 10 environment showing up.

To be clear you can get rid of OneDrive & Skype here as well. PRO TIP: start with the app installer you see in the list. It's the pesky little fucker that likes to keep reinstalling crapware across your computer. I say this because I've literally started uninstalling things before it, only to find it had reinstalled them using my gig internet before I had gotten down to it itself. Which meant I had to go back and reuninstall the same thing I had just uninstalled. Sooo yeah kick that one in the nuts first, then remove everything from the OS until you have nothing but official security patches or the software you just installed on the machine. This is also an excellent time to click your start button look at the madness of live tiled bullshit going on, right click on all of them, and hit "unpin from start" so all the place holders don't show up blank with outlines on your next reboot.

Once done with this close CCleaner, click the start button and type in "control panel", open the app that pops up. In the new window look for the "view by" button in the top right side of the screen under the search bar. Select "small icons" in the drop down. Now that you can properly see all the items here we'll be going into "programs and features" first. Next inside the new window on the left hand side we'll be clicking "turn windows features on or off" which will bring us to yet another window. Here we'll select Hyper-V if it's required for your project, if not we'll deselect "internet explorer 11" & "media features", then click the OK button. This will ask if we want to download the required files from the internet in which we tell it we do.

Once this is done it'll prompt you for another reboot, decline it once again. Then close the programs and features window by using the back arrow in the top left. This will return us to the Control Panel. Here we're now going to select "power options" where we will select the "high performance" plan that is below the two normal plans. Then we'll click "change plan settings" which will change the window to a new one. Here we now click the "change advanced power settings" text which surprise, opens another window. Here we'll make sure to turn off (by entering zero minutes) hard disk auto shutdown & sleep mode. You can now click apply, and then OK, to return you to the edit plan settings page you where left at before.

Next (an you hoped we where done, lol) go ahead and press the back arrow button again until you return to the Control Panel. Here you'll now click the "system" option which will change the screen again. On the left hand side we're going to click "remote settings" which will bring up another window. Here we're going to deselect "allow remote assistance connections to this computer" as well make sure "don't allow remote connections to this computer" is the bubble selected below it. Then we'll go one tab on the top over to the left and click into "system protection". In this screen we'll click the "configure..." button & in the new window we'll disable system protection, crank the max usage down to nothing, then click the delete button as well. Once we've cleaned all that up we'll click the apply and OK buttons returning us to the previous screen. We'll click apply again then move to the next tab over on the top again, this time the "advanced" section.

Here we'll click into the "performance" section's "settings..." button. In the new window we'll select "adjust for best performance" then click the apply button. We'll then go into the next tab over from that, the "advanced" tab, and click the "change..." button under virtual memory. Inside the new window we'll deselect "automatically manage paging file size for all drives" then select the "C" drive, or more accurately, the drive in which you've installed Windows too. Next select the "custom size" button. If you're on SSD & mining via Vega you're going to need to assign 20GB (1024x20=20480) for the initial and maximum size per Vega. Now these numbers have been debated, I've ran slightly lower I've ran higher, but that's basically where people place these values. I've even done this on non-vega machines while mining and had positive results. If you're not Vega mining people traditionally set these values at how much system memory they have. (16x1024, etc.) Make sure you hit the "set" button before clicking OK to leave this screen. You can now click OK in the screen it returned you to as well.

Now we should be back in the "System Properties" window. Here we're going to go to the very left tab called "computer name" in which we're going to click the "change..." button. Here we'll change the name of the machine to whatever you prefer. Say like "Miner420" if you wished, next we'll select OK, then we'll enter the same name you just used into the "computer description" box as well. Then we'll hit Apply, then OK, and boom now we're back into the System section of Control Panel once again. Now complete with this part we can close the window completely by clicking the X in the top right corner. It is probably going to prompt you to reboot for a third time here, go ahead and an decline it as well. (and if it doesn't don't worry about it, kinda going by memory here) It occurs to me that if you need to be told how to do most of this then you're not going to survive long in the world of dynamic coin mining. Though if you're just getting your feet wet & I'm you're first step into the world of crypto-currency then keep following along as we're getting closer and closer.

Next we're going to need to enable large page support. Thankfully the XMR-STAK config file has a wonderful step by step guide to this that I'm going to copy and paste into place here. So THANK YOU to the devs for this next step. 1. On the Start menu, click Run. In the Open box, type gpedit.msc. (gobby note: in windows 10 just type "gpedit.msc" after clicking the start button, it'll popup the same as we did with control panel before) 2. On the Local Group Policy Editor console, expand Computer Configuration, and then expand Windows Settings. 3. Expand Security Settings, and then expand Local Policies. 4. Select the User Rights Assignment folder. 5. The policies will be displayed in the details pane. 6. In the pane, double-click Lock pages in memory. 7. In the Local Security Setting – Lock pages in memory dialog box, click Add User or Group. 8. In the Select Users, Service Accounts, or Groups dialog box, add an account that you will run the miner on (gobby note: make sure you click the "check name" button before leaving this screen)

Once you have the account(s) you'll be mining on added you can click Apply & OK back to the group policy window then simply exit out of it. These changes won't actually take effect until you reboot but like every other time we're going to hold off still. It's also important to know that Windows tends to fragment memory a lot. If you are running on a system with 4-8GB of RAM you might see problems when trying to obtain a large enough chunk of contiguous memory, just a heads up. Though this change is worth about a 20% boost in mining performance so it's important to attempt it even on low memory systems. So here's the point in which you install your SSD drivers, your real graphics drivers, VPN software, your browser of choice, & whatever other tech tools you need. Then finally, here we have it, our first reboot post install.

Coming back up, once you're on the desktop again we're going to reopen CCleaner. Go ahead and click in the section above the Tools section called Registry. Make sure everything on the list is checkmarked then hit "scan for issues", when it's done make sure everything is selected and hit "fix selected issues". If there's a huuuuge list of problems here don't worry about it we just did alot of ripping shit up. Next we'll go one above the registry, to the cleaner section. (on the left) You can select any extras that are currently not in the list of checkmarked items but go ahead and click "run cleaner" just for a solid once over now that we've done all that. If you truly want to clean things down to nothing just checkmark everything. Another suggestion is to go back into the settings and have this run everytime Windows turns on, that way you get a fresh taste in your mouth everytime you power cycle. I would suggest setting up your graphics card drivers now, getting your start menu customized with your pinned items of choice, and if need be configuring your VPN or any third party security software at this point. (VPN/Security stuff was not discussed in this post, you didn't miss it or anything, just more tossing out there that hey, you do that right about now) I generally tend to setup all my overclock profiles on my graphics cards right now inside Afterburner and make sure I have a single "max overclock" profile and then an emergency "stock" profile right next to it. This is actually for when I'm testing things and produce crashes, you can't predict how hard any given crash might be so the second trouble is about I'll drop my clocks to the stock profile asap.

Finally we'll give your machine one last reboot before considering it ready to punch into work for a solid lifetime spent mining its ass off. That should be pretty much it though I'm sure given the length of this post I've missed a step or two. So you know, please don't eat me alive if I've overlooked some simple and obvious optimization. Though a kind post about what I've missed & where I've gone wrong would be tits for everybody reading this, including myself. Don't be afraid to come in here and speak your mind! So back at where we started this journey, full circle, I was able to do this entire process in a very speedy an effective manner. Mainly because I've been stripping 10 down since before it even officially launched and converting a box into a miner isn't that far off. I don't need instructions for any of this and that's probably why I've done such a poor job of typing up a basic guide for you to follow. I often found myself forgetting what any given screen was called simply because I can do it like a robot at this point. I was up and mining in my stripped down Windows 10 Pro environment post fresh compiles of the dev branches in about half the time I was putting out boxes in the Linux environment. That's not to say anything about which operating system is better at all, that's simply to say, I know Windows Jiu Jitsu far better then my Kung Linux Fu. I shook my head at how much experience makes a difference on the production line & how badly I needed to touch up my Nix-Fu skills.

Anyways, there you have it. That's the basic Windows environment strip down I perform on every machine I use that's not linux or server based. Once you've got it down you'll Bruce Lee this bitch in no time, all flowing like water an what not. I hope this has been helpful to some of you out there & overall an educational journey to have gone on with me. Even to some of the more experienced users reading along I hope you found something of value buried in that wall of text. #gobbypost #walloftextcrits #windowsminers #tenbois #afterburneroverwattmanallday

Getting blasted on Reddit in /r/MoneroMining for being a noob:

After my last post about optimizing Windows 10 for mining user Nexion21 commented: "My goodness this guy sounds like he has no idea what he’s doing and lies/exaggerates like it’s his job. Maybe it’s a money generating blog in which case that would make sense. I just read the whole thing and gained nothing from it other than a story of someone with too much money hoping and praying everything works". I ignored it, though more discussion continued and he also continued to get upvoted on his comments. Another user by the name of bangblunt came in & told him to go easy as I was just trying to learn. He returned again commenting: "Yeah my first comment was definitely cruel, I’m leaving it because I really don’t want other people coming to this thread thinking they’re going to get what the title tells them. I was fully caught off guard with his blog because I was expecting something close to the title." Also commenting: "I just really dislike the spread of misinformation." Which I gotta say gave me an extremely sour taste in my mouth for a while as I thought about it. I really wasn't going to comment but the traffic through Reddit to both Ars & LTT is pretty decent. I wanted a chance to explain myself not just to Nexion21 but everybody who questioned anything they might read in my thread, aka: the mining blog. Specifically since the Windows 10 post has been constantly downvoted there an is wildly unpopular on Reddit. After posting & continuing to think on it, I decided to bring it here so more people could gain from the entire event.

Here is the original reddit thread that this all comes from: https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/7da4a2/stripping_windows_10_down_tuning_it_into_a_mining/

Nexion21 your point stands an I do appreciate your interaction. Now I was going to just leave your comment untouched, frankly I get far worse then that on a daily basis being a moderator for SupportXMR. If you read my entire thread start to finish you'd see a large progression from novice to where I stand today. I don't really care where that happens to fall on the scale of eliteness I simply care that I'm learning. Now I'm not a great technical writer, I'm not putting out manuals or decent step by step guides to doing anything. English is extremely difficult for me and I find my grammar is absolutely atrocious though I'm trying to help the community, specifically new comers to the hobby/industry.

Now I wouldn't recommend to anyone something I wouldn't do myself or deem safe. I've been into computers & the overarching industry since the late 80s and building systems since the mid 90s. This is not some attempt at inflating my ePeen and is simply put out there for reference to speak to my ability as the author. I actually currently am investing my time & energy in crypto currency for a living, it pays my bills including my mortgage. (day trading included not just mining) Though it's new to me, obviously since the creation of the blog. Before that my only experience mining was playing with Folding@Home since it's creation long ago. To expand on my professional life I've been a long time FDA verified & listed pharmaceutical aseptic technician. I ended up specializing in Leuprorelin & Doxorubicin, I also own my own medical cannabis company. Focused on CBD access for the extremely ill & treating patients in fashions my chemotherapy background can't help. I've also been a chef, a welder/metal fabricator, a salesman, & a corporate IT cubical monkey though I found all of those jobs so boring I left them as soon as I could.

I list these to show I've been around the block & am not some "hi i'm twelve" experience you generally come across on reddit. I currently hold (although super outdated now) records on multiple leaderboards for overclocking, have destroyed a plethora of equipment over the years from pushing things too hard, and am fairly educated in how far you can take equipment in this field. Your thoughts about the power supplies are something to bring up but are not issues I'm concerned about. I have each machine plugged directly into their own 1500PFCLCD & I can watch it's actual pull from the unit live on the screen. This includes the use of their emergency management software where everything is logged & real situations dealt with immediately. Each Vega machine is drawing 625W and peaking at 700W, each power supply is 750W, leaving 16.66% baseline overhead & a 6.66% overhead during maximum peaks. As shown not just in the thread but experienced throughout a lifetime of tech fuckery these power supplies can handle way more then this. (although not recommended or advised to constantly do so) Still running a 750W power supply at 700W is not unheard of, it's not even uncommon in any industry but high-end enthusiast PC builds where people baby the shit out of their gear. If the world was going to explode tomorrow at 700W they would not rate it at 750W. Now this is a particularly bad practice for the overall efficiency of the unit, I'm waaay off where I want to be on that curve. So yes, I'm wasting money & profitability over the optimal use, the best usage case scenario of it's designed operation. Though it's not in danger, there's nothing terrible going to happen, I'm not in fear of middle of the night fireballs. Though I was in worry of this with the EVGA 650 Gold that came with the craigslist machine, which is why I replaced it before ever turning it on. (as the thread discusses and shows)

The blog is written to be entertaining as well educational. In the modern world of the internet where text mediums are dead & people hardly watch videos to completion it's alot to ask for people to work their way through my poorly structured & extremely long winded posts. Though at no point is it misleading or purposely taking people down the wrong path. I don't waste my time writing these for anything more then the fame of helping noobs, I'm not making additional money mining coins because I talk about it online. If you really want to see novice level interactions within mining then jump into any major pool's support channels. This is how I've gained access to developers & people of interest in the mining community. It's because I've been in the chatrooms giving people a hand and helping true noobs for weeks on end. It's donating this type of time & energy into any industry or topic you find intriguing that will ultimately bring you into the fold. Not to go on a bicycle ride here but life works like that, it doesn't matter what you're trying to do, as long as you keep putting one foot infront of the other you'll eventually get somewhere. So please view my continued blogging on the subject of mining not as some end all be all masterful explanation of how the world works, but as a guy putting one foot in front of the other while offering a word or two along the way to others.

As for the idea of having to much money, this is the gear I bring to the table. If you read the thread from start to finish you'd see I owned all of the expensive gear before I got into mining crypto. The monster EKWB Titan rig was a box that was crammed in the corner of a 4K studio I owned for a while. The over the top cooling on it was because the EV RE20 in the booth next to it wouldn't pickup the lower RPM speed of the Vardars. The fact that it's mining now is nothing but using what I have laying around. It's not like I went an bought any of that gear specifically to mine on. As discussed the only equipment I've actually put money down on purchasing for this is the craigslist box, the vegas, a mini workstation to play around on, and the NightHawk X10 for an access point. The mini workstation & access point where going to be purchased for other projects anyways so they're not really a mining related expense. So a decent 6600K rig I got at half price off and some vegas, that's what I've got going on here in terms of investment. This all fit together into the previous equipment I owned quite nicely. Is it a BTC+ board with 19 PCI-E slots, risers running out to a open air frame, multiple power supplies using add2psu, booting off a dirt cheap celeron? Fuck no it's not. What if I wanted to do something with these boxes other then mine on them? I mean I could easily take these to a family event, lan party, or who knows what & still play games on them, etc.

The entire debate of water cooled equipment, it's place not just in the mining industry but in the enthusiast gaming crowd is beyond the scope of this response. Needless to say I got blasted for a week straight in SupportXMR's chatango for going water 64s over cheap 56s. Literally between the people who write the mining software, the load balancer software, and run multiple pools, we've debated the situation extensively. It's an investment argument more then anything else but at the end of the day it simply doesn't matter. All of the machines in my home that are hand built are on water, I do water cooling, I like water cooling, I'm a guy who really enjoys his water rigs is another way to put it. Though they're not specifically mining machines, none of these are. Proper mining racked clusters, stacked ontop of each other, with proper environmental based cooling, is coming. Though it's not been something I've covered in the blog so far. If you read the whole thing you'll see I've been traveling alot lately, meeting with large scale 200+ card stacks all the way to small time miners like myself. Outside of reading manuals, I learn at an accelerated rate by actually doing things. I don't care how stupid I look, or how the wide public opinion of me swings, I'm doing my own thing & slowly getting there. Though I do care about helping others & I'd be a liar to say it didn't sting when people just shit all over your efforts.

If you'd like to form an extended opinion on everything, quote the shit out of my fifty+ post blog, and educate the public as to each an every place I've gone wrong over the last four months then please please please do. The amount of educational value you'd hold in that post would be absolutely massive. You could teach everybody from experts to people who just walked in the door like myself how to mine at the highest rates, at peak efficiency, with the most optimal system & network designs. I'm all ears as I don't know all of that, I'd love to know all of that, but you know, it's an educational journey we're on here. So please blow my mind in advanced knowledge & present it all in a very well constructed an laid out manner. That would be tits & I'd upboat you all day long purely for the time and effort you put into it. Hell people will probably just scroll through it's epicness and gild it without even reading it. Accolades for days! #ordoabchao

Trade Show Quad Tesla Liquid Cooled Miners:

Saw these at a trade show a while back and totally spaced to make a post about it until now. These are quad stacked Tesla machines cooled completely by water & marketed for artificial intelligence work among other things. Talking to the Nvidia reps they laughed when mining was brought up saying there was definitely a heavy interest in the purchasing parties using them in the off times for crypto to recoup the costs. Which I know is going to be the next question in your mind... $69,000 as configured. They even had the business cards for who I needed to call if I was really interested in getting a couple of these babies. 

Here was the Tesla M10 display at the Nvidia Booth:
Inside the $69K Tesla Show Rig: (yeah just stick this below your desk in the corner, casual style)

Hey Sexy, that's a nice Nvidia DGX Station you got there: (deep ai and chill?)

Well those pics got some attention with alot of people wanting to know what machine that was & for the love of god did I typo the price or something? Surely that had to be a mistake on my or the reps part right? I was pretty sure I got that right, but honestly couldn't remember and alot of my other photos came out blurry as I was talking to a ton of people that day not really focusing on pictures. The rig I posted above is a Nvidia DGX Station which they're touting as "the world’s first personal supercomputer for leading-edge AI development" so atleast my memory grabbed that part from the day. Then yeah, just scroll on down to order one of those puppies and... still $69,000. Whew not a cheap box to invest into but check out that build quality, pretty tits.

Questions Round Mcabre Brothers: Is it possible to mine with a cellular connection?

Nov. 26th 2017 11:41AM - lieder1987 said:
...I want to know if it is possible to buy an LTE modem and hook it up to the Ethernet connection and just let it go. I am of course talking about doing this after it is all setup through my local network. The reason: need to do it at another location because they are hot, loud, etc. and my wife / apartment will not be happy with the noise. The LTE should offer a stable enough connection and the PING should be fast enough to make it so I dont have much rejected.

Click to expand...

Absolutely doable! I tested my entire operation for a couple days off my LTE Band 12 Yagi setup and it worked great. I did this for a guy specifically in your position who wanted to know how well remote mining would work and had no real gear to test it out with himself. So before he tossed any hard cash at the situation I did a weekend run with all my gear. Ran things for a bit over forty-eight hours while spread out across his living room.

Everything worked perfectly, no flaws or issues! I picked up three invalid shares over the course of the trial & those were specifically from times where I was dicking around integrating the pfSense mining network into the MOFI network. Once everything was up and running (see: left alone) it mined consistently while earning all positive shares. I also changed up my techniques while on this remote of a connection & it didn't matter one bit. From Speed Racer 3.0 to just firing up standard non-load balanced clients, it all worked just fine. #LTEmining #remotebois #XMR247365

Utilizing Supratim Sanyal's Blog To Take Your pfSense pfBlockerNG Security To Hutchinson Levels:

Now I've been talking off and on since the creation of this thread about how important security is. Not just for your own home equipment & mining gear, but for the pool operators ...aaaaannd basically everybody connected to the internet. I've personally had a hell of a time dealing with all sorts of lulzsecian good times since starting this blog & hanging out in support / help desk chatrooms all day long. You may remember my PowerEdge 2950 I tried mining on for a bit to show off what happens when your CPU's don't support AES-NI. Which meant it was a terribly inefficient beast burning all sorts of juice for very little hashing power. So I turned it into a pfSense router, converting the NightHawk X10 into strictly an access point, & putting the modem back into bridge mode again.

Certainly bringing some power to the table for running the mining operation as well providing some extra ease of mind. It also makes an amazing network wide ad-block just the same as my Hyper-V Pi-Hole use to, just much better. While I had set it up with my best intentions and knowledge, including OpenVPN + pfBlockerNG (GeoIP+Reputation) use, it's just not cutting it. Then a short bit of google-fu later, I turned up The Ultimate List of IP and DNSBL Blocklists for Home Internet Security Firewalls and Gateways provided by Supratim Sanyal's Computing Blog. This man has done his homework on blocklists and setting up some layered security inside pfSense utilizing the pfBlockerNG package. Make sure you very accurately read his instructions if you're new to pfSense and/or pfBlockerNG, including the comments section which is also full of helpful advice.

You're going to want to get familiar with the whitelist function if you need to watch some ad-whoring network like CBS as it's going to straight shit on their background advertising and overall general nonsense to the point it'll break everything from their website to their applications. You can also attach a VPN inside pfSense fairly easily so that your entire network will being encrypted from your ISP as well. His guide does not cover alot of advanced settings inside pfSense as it's not scoped for that, nor does it touch on Geo or Reputation settings, but damn if it doesn't do an excellent job at getting an extensive block list up and operating in no time. Now what might all this extra security do? Well mainly it helps control the spread of command-and-control (CNC) botnets particularly those looking to infect digital security and surveillance systems, cameras, routers, televisions, optical media players and all sorts of devices making up the Internet of Things (IoT). The other primary threat today is from Ransomware, so there's additional layers against the more popular problems out there like; CryptoWall, Locky, TeslaCrypt, TorrentLocker, and Zeus.

There's also wide spread malware / viral domain lists, active 24/48 hour compromised IP records, live ongoing attack watches, anti-telemetry, anti-fake porn, anti-fake news, anti-spam, & even spearhead defense built in after you get done with all that. Your next step would be installing Suricata or the likes for another layer of real time intrusion detection (IDS), inline intrusion prevention (IPS), network security monitoring (NSM) and offline pcap processing. Though that's going to have to be a whole different post for a whole'nother day. Make sure you drop into your Reputation settings and turn on even their basic defaults for dealing with repeat offenders. Also if you're clearly just mining / doing business in places outside China, Russia, or even say Mexico, feel free to Geolocation ban out those entire parts of the world. Sure your 1337 russian warez torrent connections might cease working but your security, well, it smiled today.


PowerEdge 2950 pfSense Dashboard: (xbox huge router achievement unlocked)
GeoLite2 GeoIP Banning Out Most Of The World's Population: (insert cheeky trump wall joke here)

$80,000 Mining Operation w/ 70 Hybrid SC2 1080Ti Cards: (amazing interview)

Well the channel BitCoinHog recently released an extremely good video detailing an eighty grand operation that has just swapped over to utilizing Nice Hash.

It can (and should!) be seen over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXHAjBMLRqY

This is an excellent interview and chance to get an inside peak into people who take mining seriously & to the proper business levels. This man clearly knows what he's talking about, his advice about pulling heat away from the gear instead of putting cold air onto it is absolutely golden, those are words of a professional miner! It's also neat to see how they went with Hybrid SC2 cards & how he talks about accidentally destroying a couple during the learning phase. I would recommend checking this video out for anyone who is into mining at all, as it's well worth your time. It's really neat to see the Nvidia stack as most the people I get to deal with or have been blessed to see the operations of, all use Team Red. Speaking of which, hopefully here soon I'll get the paperwork squared away to show you all a vega stack that's about twice the size of the operation in this video built specifically for Monero! Which is pretty cool because the mining operation really had alot of the same problems discussed in the video above. The sitting around the table smoking a bowl stories that come out of the hardcore mining community are pretty much just the tits of tech & it makes me proud to call this my industry.

Well, even though I've been six feet under for some time now, the pony express never fails! Don't worry, once I live again I shall return but for now I'll leave you all with some cardboard premonitions...

Oh my, what's in this big box from EVGA? Could it be Hybrid FTW3?
Green Berets on tap like snow bunny bitches in Vail:
Hey, you over there, yeah you, sssshhh, heard you wanted some Team Green:

...and then I walked amongst the living again: (hey now, it's 2018, would you look at that)

Hello internets! It's nice to see you're all still alive and trolling as normal. As some of you have noticed (and sent me some very nice emails over) it's been a couple months since I've been around. As you can tell via the linkage in my previous post I've been dealing with some health issues & have been out for treatment pretty much exclusively since then. As much as I'd love to talk about high gamma ozone insufflation right now, an would find comfort in discussing it with folks of like mind, this just really isn't the time or place for that. This is a mining thread! Which as you can expect no matter what happens in my personal life the business world keeps on moving & I've been trying hard to keep up to date!

Which uuhhh, has anyone looked at the markets lately? It's a dark day for miners and traders alike everywhere! (and has been for a hot minute) Though I've found great pleasure in reading and listening to others reveal what seems to be another well orchestrated market manipulation that has lead to the crash we're currently riding out. Given one of my passions in life has been understanding fractional reserve banking, the concept of applying interest to it, and wealth creation in general it's been a real trip to see market mouth pieces hop on over to my side of the conspiratorial fence for a while. Banksters going to be banksters! What do we expect? LOL! This has actually all made for a pretty rough journey for the casual miner trying to go large. I've got a fifty plus page business plan and have hit banks, hard money lenders, even traditional mineral mining operations trying to get them to see the light of Proof of Work based crypto mining. I've toured mega mines, I've built and retooled more rigs then I can remember, I've checked out pool operation, I mean I've really tried to get 10,000% into this scene no matter the angle.

Mainly I've made a large fool of myself a number of times as I'm just a single man with a dream. When your health is down you tend to not give the best presentations or even speak to people with the respect and consideration you generally should show your fellow man in life. I've tossed off emails to media outlets like LinusTechTips, having some very nice exchanges overall but being a bit of an enthusiastic nut job through the process. How much sense I really made at any moment was probably thanks to how I felt on a given day. As I watch damn near every tech channel on YouTube I just want to throw out that I think Stephen Burke over at Gamers Nexus puts out the best mining and hardcore tech related content I can find, respect, and appreciate. I'd recommend anyone who's reading this thread in particular to head on over and check them out both on their website an affiliated channels. Getting back on track this all means that over the last couple months I've not managed to open my own sizable mine yet. Even the logistics of getting five hundred of any respectable graphic card delivered to my doorstep is a real eye opener in distribution. (if there's any reps out there reading this thread, send me a PM if you can help)

Another logical problem is funding such a project! I've got three locations, two sitting around the 100K mark to get them up and running and one that would be absolutely god damn epic but require a real deep pocket to even consider, easily 500K to start. Hell it'd take half a year of just working every day to put it together, even with extra hands on board. Have you tried explaining blockchain, mining, efficiency curves, PoW vs. PoS, etc. to anyone who's not a nerd? Look if the bank itself doesn't already have a private mine with it's name on the side of it then they're not giving you money to create your own. Atleast in my last few months of experience on the manner, it's not like I've got years of experience here so maybe I'm still fumble fucking my way through doing it wrong. Then there's just the endless waves of clueless venture capitalist guys who are spitting out more random nonsensical industry terms per minute then a bestbuy cashier who wondered away from their register. Good lord I just want to build out a couple mega mines, thousand card stacks, run some pools, and get into some real interesting market plays once I have power to leverage. How hard could this be right? ROFLMAO!!

I've really been wanting to post here and share the journey I've been on. I could've tripled the size of this thread if I'd continued to actively blog on my experiences. But life has really been a learning curve for me lately and in all honesty, I should be dead right now. So not blogging, not being online, not even looking at a cell phone for large periods of time, that's been key to turning the corner an coming back at life full force. So while I've been missing the interaction I've come to enjoy so much with all of you, I've needed to be away as well and it's been good to be gone. Though like I said before, this is a mining thread and I'm sure you guys would like to see something cool instead of just reading about my experiences in the trenches! So today I give you a new machine I just finished putting together, the parts have been around for a while but I've not had the time to finish it until now.

The actual design has gone through a large number of revisions as you'll be able to see in the pictures. There has been some fun things to learn on this build mainly because things really needed to be customized at certain steps. At one point I had the entire thing spread out across a monster six foot by six foot metal rack though let's all be honest, that's jank and not professional at all. I wanted to show you guys the process of putting together a cool little mining machine for your home while having a rig to be proud of an not to be embarrassed by when the fellow nerds come on over. There was also the problem of actually moving such a computer, the first few versions proved to be a nightmare to carry around. Which is why I've ended up with it's current two part design of a controller tower with an attachable plugin open air GPU frame. I'll be sure to attach a parts list onto the bottom of this post after all the pictures so people can follow along at home if they want to join in on a replication. It's also important I feel to note, I know this could be done differently and even better! This is just the current revision and I already have a growing list of things I want to change and/or just make better overall in the next one.

#00: Pro Tech ToolKit FTW!
Info: I see this company all over the internet advertising their kits and honestly I'm glad I grabbed one. This thing has came in sooooo handy. #notapromo #paidfullprice
#01: Quality power supply goes a long way!
Info: Corsair AX1500i PSU.
#02: Lots of power supplies go even further!
Info: More AX1500i goodness.
#03: Just lots of power supply box porn going on.
Description: Two EVGA 1600w P2 Supernova PSUs & a Corsair 150i Pro RGB AIO.
#04: Going ham on ram for lots of future hyper-v overhead.
Info: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2400mhz 32gb (2x16) Kit.
#05: Straight out of China here's our graphics cards new home.
Info: Veddha 8 Open Air Mining Frame.
#06: ..and like magic we've got a frame!
Info: Veddha assembly completed!
#07: Here we'll just gut this old mid sized gaming case and reuse it.
Info: NZXT S340 Black/Blue.
#08: ZOMG HOW MANY GPUS & PSUS!?
Info: Asus B250 Mining Expert Motherboard.
#09: Always wire up your big ass power supplies outside the tiny case then slide it in for success once it's done.
Info: EVGA 1600w P2 Supernova being installed into the basement of the S340.
#10: Getting creative with power cable management.
Info: These ten power cables (eight pci-e and two sata) are routed from the basement through a hole an out the side of the case.
#11: Cleaning up the controller tower wiring.
Info: Thirteen cables extend outwards from the tower, the extra length is so they can be plugged into the GPU frame that will sit next to it.
#12: Building bridges of fans, yes, bridges of fans!
Info: Seven EKWB Furious Vardar 3000 fans bridged across the front of the frame with safety grills installed.
#13: These annoying little fuckers are like red headed step children.
Info: The key to attaching anything to this mining frame is learning to utilize these all over the place.
#14: Fan cables everywhere! What to do with this mess?
Info: Each Vardar needs to be wired to the controller tower.
#15: Cleanbois wiring only! #alexfaciane @facianea
Info: Here I've used an EK-Cable Splitter 4-Fan PWM extended length dongle to bring four Vardar fans together.
#16: Flipped for that extra cleanbois feeling!
Info: The GPU frame upside down to attach wiring on the bottom.
#17: Cheap bits getting the job done!
Info: These things cost $4 but I only needed one of them in particular to match the current hole size sooo three bucks down.
#18: Things getting messy around the build site!
Info: 1080Ti's hanging out staying sexy.
#19: Video card placement and radiator management complete!
Info: Twelve EVGA 1080Ti FTW3 Hybrid Edition Cards mounted.
#20: Under the upper class graphics cards lives a windy world of pissed off vardars.
Info: Fresh air comes in below then gets pushed around the cards themselves and finally out the radiators above.
#21: Extra airflow being added to the sides!
Info: Two Corsair high performance 120mm fans added to the sides to pull in more air.
#22: ONE WIRE TO RULE THEM ALL.
Info: After multiple dongles tying them all together there's one single input cable that comes out of the GPU frame and plugs into the controller tower.
#23: Two giants of power consumption and supply hanging loose.
Info: Two Corsair AX1500i power supplies.
#24: Power cabling hanging out everywhere.
Info: Decided to remove half the side intake fans and mount the power supplies this way instead.
#25: Let's take a second to relax and chill.
Info: Here's where all the magic happens. Goblins love mines.
#26: So many cables!
Info: Another eight power cables on each side (two per card) need properly cable managed.
#27: Keep with the zip ties!!
Info: Still need to clean this up some more but here's the basis of my attempt at getting two cables up to each card.
#28: More power supply cable management.
Info: This is the second power supply that's mounted on the GPU frame. (pre proper management going up to each card in the back)
#29: Meet a Riser.
Info: One Supercope PCI-E 006C 16x->1x Powered Riser Adapter Card w/ 60cm USB 3.0 Extension Cable & 6-Pin MOLEX to SATA Power Cable.
#30: Riser Orgy.
Info: Or maybe gangbang?
#31: Keep on that cable management train...
Info: Is there ever an end to wiring? Here's usb & power cables from the risers. Good work bois. #TPB
#32: One big blue cable of bondage
Info: Here's one of the riser cable bundles for connecting the graphics cards to the controller tower.
#33: Wiring of the GPU frame finished!
Info: Three bundles of riser cables (four in each) plus the cable that controls all the extra fans.
#34: The two meet for the first time in the basement, on the white table, next to the monitor, ready to explore each other but still scared of being rejected.
Info: Uptight medium sized Controller Tower A meets huuuuge junk in the trunk open air GPU Frame B.
#35: They hang out for a while before she decides he's worth sliding on the 1x pci-e usb adapters.
Info: Notice how they get closer to each other over time as a bond begins to form. Here you can see his long black extensions being emphasized in hopes they'll soon couple.
#36: The importance of that one cable to rule them all.
Info: Remember that master fan controller cable for the GPU frame? It plugs in right here.
#37: Clearly some very naughty things have occurred.
Info: Full on blue tentacle sync here, some type of odd Japanese fetish. (oh that's a nzxt kraken x62 in push+pull on the cpu there)
#38: An entire shelf of innocent side devices deal with having seen the merging.
Info: EVGA has been consulted with personally for bringing in the appropriate trauma related counselors.
#39: Sparks can't fly without the power!
Info: That's not a knife, this is a knife.
#40: After netflix and chill the two decide to make a life together by updating their drivers.
Info: Installing graphics drivers takes a really long time when you have twelve of them. Just go smoke a bowl and relax.
#41: One pretty tired Goblin calls it quits for the night.
Info: Oooohh it glows.
#42: Then the next day we finally get to take a look around.
Info: Task Manager showing off one management iGPU and twelve ready to mine 1080Ti inside Windows 10 Pro.
#43: We also clean up the project area. Remember a clean mine is a successful mine!
Info: Don't you remember? Goblins love mines.
#44: You know what would make this better? Remote temp monitoring!
Info: Yeah that's right, I went to home depot or some other big box store and bought something.
#45: I think it goes right here next to this block.
Info: Yeah, bitches love blocks that light up when you tap them.
#46: See now you can smoke a bowl and relax while still knowing how hot it is downstairs!
Info: Gives you today, last 48, and weekly lows/highs. See the secret is that "outdoor" actually means "on top of the miner".
#47: Let's go ahead and fire up some mining and see how stable our new baby is.
Info: Thirteen hours and thirty-three minutes into our first test run. (gpu+cpu mining as well acting as two separate hyper-v proxies)
#48: Let's add some airflow to this party and go to bed.
Info: One eighteen inch oscillating fan added to help keep the air moving & house warm.
#49: Twenty four hour test run eth mining results! (ethminer+ethproxy+dwarfpool)
Info: Whew boi, let's play spot the twelve gpu rig! Ready? Yeah.. that was easy. The other machines are two double wave vega 64 rigs and a single 1080Ti FTW3 Hybrid edition box I'm using for comparison.
Build Log Parts List:

• 
  1x Windows 10 Professional x64 Operating System
  1x Veddha 8 Open Air Mining Frame
  1x NZXT S340 Black & Blue Mid Sized Case
  1x Asus B250 Mining Expert Motherboard
  1x Intel i7-7700K CPU @ 4.5ghz
  1x Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2400mhz 32gb (2x16) Kit
  2x Corsair AX1500i Power Supplies
  1x EVGA 1600w P2 Supernova Power Supply
  3x Extra Heavy Duty Power Extension Cables
  8x EKWB FF5-120mm Furious Vardar 3000 Case Fans
  7x 120mm Metal Fan Protection Grills (still need two more for side fans)
  3x Corsair High Performance 120mm Case Fans
  4x NZXT 140mm High Pressure Radiator Fans
  1x NZXT 140mm FN V2 Fan
  1x NZXT Kraken X62 AIO
  1x EKWB Ectotherm Thermal Compound (3g)
  4x EKWB 4-Fan PWM Extended Length Cable Splitters
  1x Asus 3-Fan PWM Cable Splitter (two inside case fans + gpu extension plugin)
  1x Asus PWM Cable Extender (runs behind board then secured for gpu controller)
  1x PNY 240GB SSD Drive
  12x EVGA 1080Ti FTW3 Hybrid Edition GPUs
  12x Supercope PCI-E 006C 16x to 1x Powered Riser Adapter Cards
  12x 60cm USB 3.0 Extension Cables
  12x 6-Pin MOLEX to SATA Power Cables
  24x PCI-E Power Cables (16 from Corsair, 8 from EVGA)
  5x SATA Power Cables
  1x SATA Data Cable
  3x 4-Pin Molex Power Cables
  50+ Zip Ties & Misc. Cable Management Items
  8ft Industrial Strength Velcro Strip
  1x Cooler Master Octane Wired Keyboard w/ Optical Mouse
  1x SteelSeries QcK Mass Mouse Pad
  1x Pellucid HD Series HDMI Cable (sixer)
  1x Asus VX238H 23" Monitor
  1x 25' CAT7E Network Cable
  1x 18" Oscillating Fan
  1x Remote Outdoor+Indoor Weather Station
  1x Minecraft Light-Up Redstone Ore Block
  1x Unisex Novelty Miner's Helmet With Light
  A Whole Naughty Fuck Load Of Time

The whole system has been incredibly stable since turning it on, I expected more problems to be honest. The 7700K is running at 4.5ghz because that's the max I can get it to accept inside the bios. It's chugging along at 1.25V on the core. The fan cable coming off the GPU frame that plugs into the controller tower is actually monitoring the CPU temp for it's fan speeds. Inside the bios you can only monitor CPU or Motherboard so I've gone with CPU. The fan curve is 60+C runs at 100%, 50+C runs at 75%, and 40+C runs at 50%. Same with the CPU's AIO pump as well it's supporting four 140mm fans in push+pull, plus the extra 140mm+120mm case fans. When playing around with full blast you can hear this machine rev like a car engine and it actually passes through the floor overpowering the living room. The Vardar fans are no joke and move so much air it pushes papers off the desk next to it and gives the admin sitting anywhere close to it a wicked dry eye. Each 1080Ti is running at 2025-2050mhz on the core (depending on where it decides to sit, generally depending on room temp) & 11244mhz on the memory. I've tried running these same cards at 2075mhz on the core but they'll only go for eight-ten minutes before locking up.

While this is a thread specifically about Monero mining, we can clearly see this happens to be a Team Green rig. Ethereum was the test currency of choice just to get things rolling quickly though the machine will become more agile as I have time to setup more complex software. Each power supply covers four graphics cards. Each card is currently drawing 225W of power at max which gives us 900 watts of draw though when flipping to other currencies or projects the cards can draw up to 300, even more if you dual mine, which would leave us in the 1200-1300W range. This is why some pretty premium grade parts have been selected here for power supplies, it's really important to keep them operating in the top efficiency peak of their curves so I went with as big as could be purchased given the situation. They also each power five fans on top of the graphics cards. Except the controller tower power supply, as it powers the system plus an additional fan as well. This is why it's slightly bigger being a 1600W instead of a 1500W like the other two. Each power supply has been ran to it's own individual twenty amp breaker meaning this machine has the ability to consume sixty amps maxed out. Each power supply comes with a rather large warning sticker on it saying not to plug it into anything less then a fifteen with twenties being recommended.

This rig heats the entire home it's placed in and air flow is critical. You know if somebody has shut the basement door pretty quickly as you'll hear the Vardar fans spin up to 3000RPM even while watching something on the television. Though since this is a 100% water cooled rig the parts themselves never tend to get to hot just the entire rest of the house. This is really cool when it's snowing outside and you have the windows open on your top floor with the heating turned off completely and no fire to tend too. As far as space heaters go though this is one huge sum'bitch that not only heats your home but trades electricity for crypto at the same time! I guess if you needed a password or two cracked at some point you've got that covered too.

Anytime you want to move this computer you simply disconnect the risers and the power cables coming out of the controller tower. Two people are absolutely required to lift the GPU frame in any sort of safe manner. The tower is pretty light weight as it's only a medium sized with no peripheral bays. The big boi amount of memory was put in for alot of hyper-v headroom and for misc. experimental projects. It already hosts two proxies, one for ethereum & one for monero7. That's actually still what all my leftover CPU time is devoted too, mining Monero. I sat on Aeon for a long time but have came back to XMR full force after stacking up some other coinage. Given those Wave Vegas are like having two of these 1080Ti's when it comes to cryptonight & cryptonight-lite algorithm based coins it feels like a waste to toss this system on the Monero right away when I could be trading more profitable to mine per hour coins into Monero at a higher rate of return. Though that's a post for another day as this one has taken a pretty long time to write.

At this point I'm pretty exhausted. Going to post this, check on the systems one more time, get back on the treatment train, an once I'm out of pain I'm going to go attempt to hug a pillow. I apologize for any details I've left out! Feel free to post with any questions or comments, I'd love to hear what you all think and any suggestions you might have moving forward. (optimizations!! give me the optimizations!) I'm going to try and return to posting on a more regular basis as I have a lot of topics I'd like to cover. Though between running around trying to get that next epic level mine off the ground as well stay healthy you guys might have to be entertained with this one for a bit until I return.

'Goblin

Testing Out Tri-Mining & Double Checking Claymore's Honesty: (powered by Jinsang's Life Beat Tape, get your ears some today)

Hey what up everybody! Today I wanted to investigate the fun times had using Claymore's famous dual mining software. If you've never heard of this, basically it lets you mine a primary coin (ethereum) on your GPU then on the backend dual mine a secondary alt coin with whatever left over power you have. If you check out WhatToMine.com today for 1080Ti's (screenshot for post preservation) then you'll see the most profitable coin we could be putting work into is Verge (XVG) via the Lyra2REv2 algorithm. Ethereum is the sixteenth best option & Monero is the twenty-eighth most profitable coin to dig up as the market shakes down today. This means we could be trading Verge for Monero and getting more Monero then if we just mined it directly. If you check out CoinGecko then you'll see they rate Ethereum (ETH) overall to hold second place in the market, Monero (XMR) is fifth, and Verge (XVG) is ninth. (screenshot for post preservation) Now I burn my Team Red Vegas on Monero7 all day and night, same with my leftover CPU power. Though this Team Green rig is going to need to spend it's GPU time on something a little better then twenty-eighth place for it's conversion of electricity into crypto holla dolla.

Even though Verge has been going through some rocky times lately, it's still doing extremely well for day trading as of this post. You know what else is cool about this coin? You can mine it via the Blake2s algorithm as well! Which means I could fire up Claymore's dual software, hit Ethereum as my primary, Verge as my secondary, and Monero as my tertiary coin, all mining at the same time! Though one big difference is Claymore is closed source, charges a dev fee, and honestly has a bit of a bad reputation out there. Don't get me wrong he's very famous and does some cool things with code, though he's got a bit of a shadow rep that follows him around the net. Plenty of people think he's dipping his hand in the cookie jar a bit to far though there's been pretty poorly documented arguments made for this case. The thing is, I don't stand against dev fees, they keep things moving along and I appreciate that. I've spoken to vast parts of the Monero community, developers, etc. and I trust them. Their code is on GitHub, open for all to see, and if you want to take out the dev fee then you're more then welcome to recompile the software without it. Though Claymore does not take this stance and it's his way, pay the mystery man behind the curtains, or get bent. He's even developed a security system into his mining software to detect when people are trying to cheat it. At which it'll report the same speeds to the frontend and to the pool but take extra shares well beyond the dev fee for himself as punishment for those attempting to hack.

A couple months ago I dug up Demion's NoDevFee project on GitHub. He was trying various ways of interjecting replacement wallet codes into Claymore's programs to remove his developer fee. This ended up getting more advanced and turned from NoDevFee into Divert, which was a new way of getting around Claymore's protection schemes using the WinDivert driver by basil00 which is using the Windows Filtering Platform. You won't see any of this on the front page of the project, you need to go into the issues/comments section to see all this new version action. I've been running alot of tests (ex: 1,2,3,4) to try and help these guys along mainly because I was really interested in that bad rep and seeing if we couldn't shine any light on the situation through these guys hard work. Of which I'm happy to post today saying progress has been made and we can finally see what's going on through the mysterious Claymore fog!

The methodology here was pretty simple, test the various modes of Claymore's newest dual mining program (v11.6) and see if there was any of them that lacked the SSL developer connections integrated a couple versions back. This was funny enough put into the program right after a bunch of us reported success with rerouting his wallet addresses. One could speculate from this timing of events he watches the internet for anyone working a bit too hard on taking his earnings. Anyways, the encrypted protocol was first supported by ethermine.org ...and testing there clearly shows you're not going to redirect the dev fee anywhere. Though testing the ETH-Proxy mode (ESM 0) seemed a logical step because I could run Claymore's Eth-Proxy integration right up against the official opensource EthMiner client when ran in combination with Atrides Eth-Proxy for DwarfPool. I could compare free software vs. fee software then if I found things still worth going forward I could hopefully test the fee and make sure it was honest. Here's where I found something really interesting, given this mode is written directly for RPCv2 pools using asynchronous networking (aka: DwarfPool), the client won't connect out via an encrypted port/pool as DwarfPool doesn't currently support SSL. It won't relaunch the miner in a new mode just for the dev cycle as that would be a huge waste of time & shares. So what does it do? It calls out to loads of DwarfPool servers on tons of different wallet addresses and just accepts it's fate as unprotected data. This is really cool because now we can get the Divert program to intercept it's data, so finally we can log dev cycles, shares, all of the goodness without triggering his security system. The latest release notes & Readme!!!.txt file found inside the Claymore V11.6 package say "This miner is free-to-use, however, current developer fee is 1% for Ethereum-only mining mode (-mode 1) and 1.5% for dual mining mode (-mode 0)..." then goes on to defend his fees / antihacking measures.

So let's look at some pics of the process so everybody can come along for the ride. Here's a screenshot of Divert 3.6 working so you can all see it in greater detail. As expected, down to the second, every hour it calls to authorize a change in the Ethereum login & start working towards a different account. What we see Divert doing is grabbing these new account credentials and redirecting the process back to the primary account by literally swapping them. So it just relogs into your own account, gives the thumbs up everything is great, and keeps on working until it's time to swap out of the dev cycle and back into the normal work cycle. Now let's have a look at this occurring as detected by DwarfPool's side of things instead of my side of things. Here you can clearly see it waiting to login once an hour for both the clients used in the test runs. The machines where started shortly after each other so there's a bit of a delay between one logging into the dev cycle and the other logging into the dev cycle. Though clearly we can see Divert working and the shares being rerouted back to the same account. If you want to actually see the history of shares via DwarfPool's account graphs over the time period of the testing then, here it is as well! I like this image because you can see the various stages things went through including my own faults in testing which caused me to restart them completely, twice. First you can see the official open source combo ran, next you can see legitimate Claymore operation paying forward all the dev fees, then after two unexpected downtimes, you can finally see testing Claymore's dev fees via Divert 3.6. You can also see where I was attempting to test this during the unexpected downtime hours because the developer cycle was still consistently logging into the account and submitting valid shares. What's all this time spent leave us with for results? Check for yourself, here's what I ended up with!

Claymore's Dual Ethereum v11.6 Miner + NoDevFee Divert v3.6 Trial Results:
2.01%! That's not at all what he claims he's taking for a developer fee. Actually, that's another third on top of what he claims he's taking for the price of dual mining. I was hoping to shed some positive light on the subject after months of hanging out with the NoDevFee GitHub crew. Though taking more then the stated dev fee is a bit of a dark spot for me, doesn't really come off very GoodGuyGreg that's for sure. Makes me happy there's folks out there double checking things and even making the tools to do so in the first place. If you're willing to believe that he's just made a mistake in his program's dev cycle or that maybe I've botched my test results then that's certainly possible. I've not ran ten passes of each test then compared results, this is just the first fully completed without interruption results I've gathered so far on the new v11.6 release. Though it's certainly food for thought and look at those numbers, they worked out to be exactly 2.01% over the previous test. I'll let you all decide how you feel about that as I'm sure opinions differ. Even bringing up the use of a tool like Divert to redirect dev fee cycles is a pretty hot topic in any mining community. Anyway, here's to a new version dropping after this post goes live. LOL!

Moving on let's talk a little bit about the process of dual mining on your graphics cards. In my experiences, testing extensively on blake2s & pascal algorithms, it jacks up your juice pull & stress on your graphics card by about a third while giving you about a quarter to a third of a real card. Example: maxed out Ethereum mining at 36.6 MH/s on my EVGA 1080Ti FTW3 Hybrid Editions takes 225W of power. When I turn on and crank out a dual mine algorithm on top of this load it goes to 300W, increasing its consumption by 75w which is a third of its previous power consumption. So +33% power roughly delivers an extra 25-30% in results, it's not quite a 1:1 trade but it's a whole additional mining operation on top of equipment that's already mining. That's pretty cool if you ask me, this means that the beast Team Green Rig from the post above gains an additional three and a half 1080Ti cards worth of hashing power overall when dual mining. (just ran the blake2s conversion to double check) It also means it costs four additional cards worth of electricity, but once again, you just invented these cards out of no where sooooo still pretty cool. Depending on what you pay for power this may not be attractive to all people, though if you're looking to get your hands on results at the maximum possible rate your gear will produce then this is definitely an option.

The rig above when fired up Tri-Mining as the hipsters like to say, produces roughly: 439 MH/s ethash, 21.3 GH/s blake2s, & 175-225 H/s monero7. Here's some screenshots of the front end during operation: while testing legitimate Claymore v11.6 shares & while testing Claymore's developer fee with Divert. A worthy side note here is the power consumption per 1080Ti when the temps in the mine change over the course of the day. During the ball busting heat of the mid day if it's sunny it can go as high as 105%, which comes out to be 180 watts of extra power load!! (60 extra watts per power supply, 15 extra watts per card) Though in the middle of the night I've seen them drop as low as 93% during the dual mine which comes out to be 252 watts of savings! (now reducing the load by 84 watts per power supply or 21 watts per card) So as you can tell it's really important to over spec your machines so they can handle events like the natural day/night cycle of your mine. Winter is always going to be amazing but once it starts getting hot again... #roughbois. This means at peak so far, torture down in the mine when it's been 95+F, the machine itself is drawing 3,780 watts of juice to keep the dual-mine alive, let alone the tri-mine of the processor going max as well. There's 4,600 watts of available power, which when going through the hottest day recorded yet in it's system logs looks to have left around 200 watts of overhead per power supply. Brutal, even on really high end parts! If I lived in a hotter area or didn't have other options for temp control at my disposal then I'd consider capping the machines ability to draw more power so that it stayed groovy, even if it was at slightly lower speeds.

Anyways that'll do it for me today, hope you all enjoyed the post! As always comments and/or questions are more then welcome. Thanks for reading, /cheers!

'Goblin

lahwran said:

Hey, I'd like to PM you about using one of your images, but there doesn't seem to be a PM tool on this forum right now. Is there a way you'd be able to talk privately about that?

Click to expand...

Hello lahwran! You are always more than welcome to contact me via email, I apologize about the PM functions on this forum not being fully activated for new accounts. That'd be my user name no caps or spaces at gmail.com if you'd like to chat. I get an incredible amount of traffic through that box so I'll keep an eye out for you over the next couple days. Thanks for reaching out! /cheers

Goblin's Oops My OS Restarted Miner Recovery Script: (keeping the tri-mine alive, looking sexy pickaxe bois while doing it)

Well no matter how much I try to prevent system crashes by using high ends parts, putting things on batteries, and overall obsessing over their condition constantly things still happen outside of my control. There was a spike in downtime from my ISP, less then a minute, didn't have a failover in place yet and it occurred while I was sleeping. This is such a rare occasion I hardly ever have to deal with it or really become hassled by it. Honestly, a minute of downtime isn't the end of the world so who cares right? Well I'm still testing the Claymore developer fee and between it flipping through failover pools while attempting a reconnection it crashed. It occasionally happens, the system was up for over three days straight when this happen. I mean the man has built an impressive suite of features into his dual mining release so sometimes when things seem to fall apart it's forgivable. But this time, even though it was trying to restart the mining software, it just further crashed leaving the system useless until I found it while waking up to my email alerts going mad.

The rarity of this event is no reason not to do solid tech work so after grabbing some coffee I set out to find a solution. After a while spent playing around ...and remembering basic batch commands I came up with exactly what I was looking for. A quick'n'easy, slightly dirty, operating system has restarted emergency script! It has text to remind people not to screw with things if they saw it popup when I'm not around, while also taking care of everything I want in the background silently. It's pleb levels of simple to use and change to your own needs, don't expect anything to complicated, which honestly I think is the beauty of the whole thing. Kinda like my ultra simple iframe load out for stat screens I posted half a year ago, it gets the job done.

So first, let's look at the code then we'll talk about what happens and when it happens:
So what's going on here? Well first off it's changing explorer.exe (window's gui, well, technically I think it only controls the Start Menu, Taskbar, Desktop, and File Manager but I could be wrong who knows anymore) to High Priority. This is debated in the tech community going all the way back to Windows 95 (that I remember atleast) and it's not a topic I'm going to load this post down in coverage with. Do it, don't do it, doesn't really matter to me captain. Next it tells you the operating system is currently relaunching and lists a bunch of things going on in the background. This script doesn't actually do any of those things, those happen on their own after the machine reboots thanks to settings in their own programs.

For instance, MSI Afterburner has an option to load on startup and to apply profiles on startup, you don't need to script it. Same with all the virtual machines turning on in the background via hyper-v for the proxies that are running. Though they do all need time to run and time to run without interruption. The real time sink is Afterburner turning on while applying overclocks to twelve graphics cards, it seriously takes fifty-five to sixty seconds! I timed a couple boots and it's always done loading everything just around the minute mark, so to stay safe I give the script 75 seconds of pause time before moving forward. The text is literally just there so people who happen to be staring at the screen as the system turns off and on making all sorts of fan curve travel noise have something to read before they touch the system. It doesn't need touched, though that's never stopped anyone from touching the button labeled don't touch before.

After the system is up and ready it starts loading mining software. First it brings up NoDevFee Divert v3.6 so I can measure Claymore's Dev Fee. Then it sets this process to Above Normal priority as it's pretty important to catch the network traffic for redirection. (the mining software will shutoff if it can't connect to a dev cycle pool) Then after it's been given proper time (with a bit of overhead) to load up it launches Claymore's v11.6 Dual ETH miner. This uses a consider amount of processing power when setting up high eres miners on each graphics card so it's given an entire minute to power through all the work and get itself comfortably mining at ease again. Afterwards, it launches XMR-Stak for the tri-mine using the CPU to pull up some extra Monero7. Given there is alot going on for this machine outside of just mining on the CPU it's process is then set to Below Normal priority so that it's only eating up leftovers and not getting in the way to much.

Here's a picture of it running after it's just recovered a machine: (just before it's exit call)
Now when does this actually happen? Well there's the worse situation all together, random reboots. A problem often faced by low end and/or misconfigured rigs, certainly not a problem anyone should be facing or wants to be facing. If you can't track down exactly when an why a crash occurred then you're doing it wrong. While this will work for that situation entirely and get things back up and running, this whole script was actually created more to interact with Claymore's software directly. It has two features that are pretty neat and that we're using here today. One is the Watch Dog Mode (-wd 1), once enabled it'll shutdown the miner if any thread is not responding for a minute or if an OpenCL call failed. Though if you have the next setting on, Restart Miner Mode (-r 1) it closes the miner and executes the reboot.bat file if there is one inside the miners directory. Here I've created that file but placed "shutdown /r /t 15 /f" (without quotes) inside it. This actually shuts down Windows & restarts the computer after giving programs fifteen seconds to save their work and close up shop. Anything that's still running after that time period is forcibly shutdown. So let's take today's situation, the one that started this whole mess. Instead of trying to restart the mining from inside an already crashing piece of software, it would've just immediately restarted the machine. Then as it came back online, the script would kick in and get everything back up operating smoothly.

Now how do we get the script to come on with the computer inside Windows 10? Well that's done through "Task Scheduler" which you can just type into the Start Menu inside Windows 10 to find, or if you don't jive with those bananas then you can find it inside "Windows Administrative Tools" at the bottom of your Start Menu program scroll bar. Once opened you'll see in the right column under Actions, you can "Create Task..." which is what we'll be using. Click it and another window will open up, here you can specify a name, description, checkmark to "run with highest privileges" (important one, notice the bold), as well change the dropdown configuration option to Windows 10 instead of the default Vista / Server 2008. Pretty important screen so double check that. Next, a tab over, you'll see "Triggers" where you can create a new one that specifies on login or even startup to launch the event. Another tab over we see "Actions" which is where we tell it to actually run the script. Just point it towards where you saved the .bat script you've created from above. The next two tabs are just additional (see: optional) conditions and settings you can experiment with. A nice one is "run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed" as well "allow task to be run on demand", though really there's a ton of cool stuff you can do inside Task Scheduler so look around and have fun with it!

Additional advice for the smoothness of this operation is to go into "Windows Defender Security Center" then click "Virus & Threat Protection Settings" then click "Add or remove exclusions " where you'll finally add your "CMining" folder, or wherever you've dropped your software at, to the exclusions list. This way as long as you're sailing the ship and you know others aren't dicking around on your miner and have overall good security, you can save yourself a billion false flags and removal issues for your standard daily driver mining software. Actually having the machine scripted to this extent opens up another possibility, actually turning back on Windows Updates. Sure the downtime would bite when it does need to occur, but this is great for folks who happen to worry about needing all those security patches they tend to drop. Now the middle of the night random windows update reboots are your friends! It'll apply the updates, run the security scans, give you the thumbs up, and the script will keep your mining alive and well through the whole process. I actually tested this while writing the script today so I can confirm it works great on this principle. Wasn't really setting out to do this today but hey problems show up and we knock'em down. /crescent

'Goblin

Dreaming about Ethereum's Erectile Dysfunction Problem: (...and this isn't even a joke)

Here's one I think basically everybody goes through at some point.. you're laying in bed, trying to relax and get some restful sleep but your mind is on fire else where. Well ever since I read this post about an Ethereum boost for GDDR5X cards by Porina on the LinusTechTips forums it's never left my mind for longer then a few seconds, minutes at best. What's all this about? Well there's a user by the name of OhGodACompany on GitHub, who a couple days ago, released a program called "OhGodAnETHlargementPill" (GitHub & BitcoinTalk.org), it's also being called "ETHLargement: The Hashrate Harderner" as you can see in their BitcoinTalk thread. What's this suppose to do? Well they claim it tightens the memory timings on 1080/1080Ti cards and greatly improves their Ethereum hash rates.

What's the problem here? Well as many users have pointed out across the net, they've not posted any source code for this even though they posted the code for their previous projects. Some users are reporting security related issues after using the program, some people claim it's a sham, some people claim it's replacing the information locally but it's not reported or verified at all by the pool, and some people are saying it works great even going as far to saying it deserves a dev fee of it's own! Reading online it appears to be boosting the RRD & FAW values of the cards though once again with no source code it's a mystery at the moment as to the full scale of what's going on. There is also no uninstall script or way of turning it off outside of rebooting your machine. It's flagging in anti viral / mal scans but that's normal for mining software, though some people are reporting it's flagging pretty extreme. They offer the software in two doses, 50mg and 100mg, aka, one for Windows and one for Linux.

As of writing this very post I just found that 1stMiningRig.com is also reporting on this release and have found it very effective! Saying while there is compatibility issues with Claymore's newest 11.7 version it was tested successfully inside 11.6. They took a triple 1080Ti machine from a reported hashrate of 108 Mh/s with a active rate of 88.1 Mh/s and got it going bonkers with this all the way up to reported hashrate of 163.2 Mh/s with an active rate of 171.8 Mh/s. Which is freaking awesome!! They ended up consuming 15% more power themselves and people on the forums are reporting massive increased heat output but I think that's understandable given what's occurring. Can you dual mine with this? Does it work with a bunch of other mining software? I frankly don't know yet, still got alot of reading to do! I can also think of about a billion new tests to run now with this possibility. Since purchasing the 1080Ti's for the 12GPU rig in the posts above I've been waiting for a better understanding of the memory to come out for what I believed would be a freebie boost in performance for the extra cost of the parts upfront. And here, I'm hoping, that day has finally arrived. Will report back and let you all know what I find out myself a little bit later.

The 1080Ti Little Blue Pill Is Real, All Hail Phosphodiesterase Type 5 Inhibitors! (rock hard all night long... bow'chicka'bow'wow)

Well here we are about twelve hours after dosing 50mg of ETHLargement across a gaming rig with a single 1080Ti in it as well the full beast mode twelve 1080Ti rig. I've discovered quite a bit and had to change a number of my settings around to become compatible with this modification but at the end of the day it's been a huge gain. To start off, yes you do see a 15% power gain while using this, it does light up your entire card's heat output so be prepared! Though the gains are wonderful, the single 1080Ti plugged directly into a motherboard operating at 16x is chugging along at a reported hashrate of 55 MH/s with peaks above 79 MH/s! While the riser system running at 1x can't seem to be pushed as far, the memory overclocks have to come down to the weakest card in the bunch until individual per card hand dialing is achieved (just don't have the time currently) so I've only been able to stabilize them all at.. 53 MH/s! And yes, this is WHILE DUAL MINING inside Claymore v11.7. Bringing them together the machine reports 636 MH/s though the pool reports peaks above 818 MH/s!

As for things that needed change to get this to work, I really had to dial down my -dcri values SIGNIFICANTLY. If you're trying to max out production on your 1080Ti stack (using blake2s as your secondary algorithm) then I had to fall back an entire third in value to see the larger increase in Ethereum rates. Keeping my values the same (I use to run 150) I only saw an increase from 36.5 MH/s to 41 MH/s. Though when I dropped this down to 95-100 I saw the eth rates climb all the way up to 52 MH/s. It's through further overclocking of the memory that I've been able to get them all the way up to 55 @ 16x & 53 @ 1x. Once again, I firmly believe most the cards in the twelve stack could be pushed a bit further but blanketing one setting on launch so far has shown that to be the quickest to find highest stable hash rate. Depending on how far you're willing to push your power consumption beyond 100% you can actually keep your dual mine alive and well at the same speeds you where getting before! Though let's look at that, you had normal Ethereum mining taking roughly 65% power. You're now taking 15% more, so you're at 80% power. Dual mining blake2s in my experience likes to take about a third of the card, so now you're at 113% power consumption when your mine is running nice and smooth with no temp abnormalities.

I've technically got the power overhead on paper to run them all at 115% given they're rated for 1500 watt continuous power with peaks up to 1650 watt. Though that makes even me uneasy as we're wildly getting out of that beautiful efficiency curve I like to talk about so much. I've assigned a power limit at 110% for each card which I feel much comfortable with as the dual mining rate just drops as the heat rising throughout the day instead of it drawing more juice from the power supplies. This means when speaking power wise it runs what I consider to be safely "maxed out" twenty four seven now in this configuration. That's 330w per 1080Ti so 1320w per power supply, though there's also four vardar fans on each. These have a power draw of 5.64W at max so that's an additional 22.56W, leaving us at 1344.56 watts of draw or with roughly a 150w overhead. To push the cards the additional 5% to hit the "friendly safety power cap" alot of overclocking tools generally like to assign at 115% would only consume an additional 45W of power total. Though that's the line, you really are putting some juice through your rigs at that point and in all honesty it does make me slightly uncomfortable.

I'm sure there's ton of miners out there that would gladly push them right up to the very line of it, but we're already 10% over spec, that's considerable horsepower we've restored already. For anyone who's actually gone through the RMA process, (even though it's generally more of a paperwork thing at this point) you know the value of all that downtime. Couple weeks to entire months without a card is far worse then just simply cooling your jets by 5%, and actually, I just checked, the solo 1080Ti machine has lost 1.77% of it's blake2s hash rate by controlling it's last 5% of power that could be pushed. Though the twelve stack, since I can't push it as far is losing 5.63% of it's blake2s hash power by not giving it the extra juice. Big picture mode though, we're talking about 1.77-5.63% of loss on the secondary mine, while we're increasing our primary mine by 45.75% on the big boi and 51.23% on the solo machine. Reported Output Gains of +45.75-51.23%!!

Yeah we're going to see a devfee/private version of this for other algorithms I'm sure of it as they've clearly gotten our attention with this release focused solely on Ethereum. I've been testing a few other settings with the newer Claymore version so I'll be sure to come back and make an additional post about my updated scripts and software I'm using now. Though until then let's take a look at some pics! Everybody loves those screenies so here's some more!


Twelve 1080Ti Inside Claymore v11.7 Dual Mining Blake2s While On The Pill: (oh nvidia, you make me so fucking hard, I swear it's all you baby)
Single 1080Ti @ 16x Pounding Out 55 MH/s: (motion of the ocean, is the one better then twelve randoms?)
DwarfPool Server Side Results, 865 MH/s Broken Down & Explained: (throbbing out at the pool, looking large, feeling good while we do data analyst)
Keep it crescent everybody, I'll return with more soon!

'Goblin