Bitcoin Forum

Hello-

I am just trying to verify that I have guiminer set up correctly to mine through the bitcoin client.

Could someone please post a screen shot of solo mining through the GUIminer?

I want to see what it says on the bottom of guiminer/bitcion client exe.


Thank you so much for the help.

*yes i understand solo mining is not worth it.

Start GUIMiner.


Set Bitcoin client path
( Solo Utilites - Set Bitcoin client path)
Now GUIMiner aware of bitcoin client whereabouts.

If you never opened your bitcoin.conf and did not created user/password in it:
Set Bitcoin pass
( Solo Utilites - Create solo password)
Enter username and password.
GUIMiner will add them in bitcoin.conf

Now launch Bitcoin with server options
You cant launch it, if client already running.
If your client already running with -server flag, you can skip that step.

(Solo Utilites - Launch Bitcoin client as server)

Time to create new miner
(File - New Opencl miner  or New other miner)



Server - Chose Solo from dropbox.

Enter your username and pass, created in solo utilites section (or if you already have user\password  in bitcoin.conf - use them)

Choose device and fill Extra flags field with options if needed.



You set.

Click Start.

In left lower corner you will see:
Difficulty 1 hashes: 0 (number will rise - it replaces "shares" that used in pool mining and works as indicator that all normal).
In right lower corner you will see hashrate.
-----------------------------------------------
Recommended to have Solo miner as backup, in case of your pooled miner malfunction.
To do so, make sure that -f number in your Extra flags field, of solo miner is larger than in your main, pooled miner.
-f flag  related to Poclbm miner. Running Poclbm without -f flag, starts miner with -f30 by default. Poclbm is used if you create New OpenCL miner through File menu. For other miners consult on their main pages of the forum.
Both pooled (main) and solo miners should be started and running for that.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XFtmfXsyXN8/TeHoLdc0nQI/AAAAAAAAAEE/YBMhqG5BKdQ/s800/GUIMiner_SOLO_ok.JPG

^^GOOD STUFF! Very nice, should be pinned!

you are my hero!! thank you

Thanks for this!

How do I go about adding a 2nd GUIMiner PC on my LAN?  My main runs guiminer and bitcoin itself.  On the 2nd pc, I just need guiminer right?  If I try to connect to solo or other and specify the IP of the 1st machine I get RPC errors.

Are there flags I need to set?  or do I need to add another account in the bitcoin.conf?

Also - what if one wanted to add some miners from remote locations - assuming I can VPN/pass the IP traffic - is it theoretically possible to solo mine, using one minerd, with multiple miners both local and remote?

Anyone had any success with this?

edit 'Minderd'

Yes, this is actually quite easy.  You need to make some changes to the bitcoin.conf file that is located in your users directory.  In Win7 it's located here: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin

Then edit or add the following if it's not already there.

rpcuser=[Pickausername]
rpcpassword=[Pickapassword]
rpcallowip=[Pick the IP's you want to allow to connect to the server, wildcards like 192.168.1.* will work]
rpcport=[Pick your IP port number, default 8332]

One you have that setup, launch your bitcoin client in server mode (either launch bitcoind.exe for a headless version or launch the regular client with the -server switch).

Now just configure your clients to connect to the IP address where the bitcoin server is running with the username, password and port you set in the bitcoin.conf file.  Make sure you open up any firewalls on the server to allow traffic on that port through.

At that point, you can configure any miner/client to connect to that server to solo mine, assuming you can get it on the local subnet and connect to that machine.

The downside is that there is no status views of who or what is connected to your bitcoin server other than what you can see from the miner's side.

One additional note, if you want to make sure your miners aren't dead in the water if the local bitcoin server goes down, set your GPU's/CPU's up to also mine with a pool, but with lower priority.  Set both to autostart and start them up.

For example I have a 6950 mining solo and pointing to my local bitcoin server using GUIMiner and the following flags, -v -w 128 -f 1.

I also created another miner for the same GPU pointing to slush's pool with the flags, -v -w 128 -f 15

If I look in my status, the GPU is mining full bore solo (365 MH/s) and just a trickle towards Slush (45 khash/s), but if my local bitcoin server goes down and the local miner gets a connection problem, the slush miner ramps up to full speed until that server comes back.

Of course, if your internet connection goes down, neither will work, but there's not much you can do about that.

Great thread.

BTW, if done correctly, how long should it take before we see transactions appear in the list?

Really depends on what you're doing.  If your solo mining, it can be a long time.  Figure out how much your total hashrate is and pop it into this calculator.

http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

So, let's say you are currently mining with 500 MH/sec across all your miners, you're looking at making on average 1.16 BTC a day, but if you're solo mining you can only find a full block of 50 so you  have to extrapolate that out as to when you can expect to find one.  So, 50 / 1.16 =  43.1 Days, on _average_ until you find a block of 50.  That's assuming the difficulty level doesn't go up, which it's about to tomorrow and likely will every 2 weeks.

Of course, you could get lucky and find a block in your first hour of mining or you could mine for 12 months and not find a thing.  Every hash you throw out has an equal chance to be correct, so you never know when you are going to do it.  You also won't see anything in your Bitcoin server client window until you actually find a block and win the 50 coins, so the only way to check on things is to just check your miners and make sure they're running.

The other option is to look at some of the pools.  With those, you'll get a more regular stream of coins, but it'll be in smaller increments.  If it takes your pool 2 hours to find a block and you put in 1% of the total pool hashing power, you'll get 1% of the 50 coins, or .5.  Minus any fees the pool charges.  

Theoretically, over the long haul, if you spend a year solo mining and a year in a pool (that has no fees) you should end up with the exact same amount of coins.

Indeed.  The only real question is if I can presume a higher uptime myself then I can using the pools, which seem to have a regular cycle of up/down growing pains. 

And although they have been (collectively) getting better, my personal opinion is that the DDOS attack on Deepbit recently is but a taste of what's to come if the BTC/USD rate continues as high (or higher) than it's current $17/$18 range.  Pools are immense targets.

Thanks a ton for the response.  Can I assume that ALL my other miners can use the same rpcuser/rpcpassword?

Hypothetical: Say I have legitimate, approved, and sponsored access to a couple of schools over the summer, where the PCs are not in use.  (And yes I understand that CPU mining is generally unprofitable). Postulate that these schools have green/living roofs for cooling, wind and solar for electric, and are carbon neutral.  If I can run a cpu miner on 200-300 PCs, even if they only get 3-400khashs each, and I can guarantee (within reason) 99.999 uptime on my minerd/bitcoind process, I'm better off solo-mining with my own pool, neh? 

Although I'd only be able to do this during the summer months while school is out.  Say 3 months.  Pool or no? 

Excellent posts Meatball, its a shame that we still did not have "Like" button.

In that "abstract" case more intelligent solution is preferred, be it "push pool" (we can call it "solo" in that case) solution or "Flexible mining proxy" (pooled mining) solution.

EDIT: If computers will CPU mine, then of course pooled solution is better (200-300 CPU mining computers, ~ 300-400 Mh/sec total).

IMO this thread should be stickied....I actually got my solo miner working last night because of the details instructions in this thread though my PC crashed when I tried loading 2 instances of guiminer with Bitcoin v0.3.22..

Yes, you can use the same rpcuser/password for every client connecting to the server.  If anything, it just makes your life easier.

AS for pooling vs. solo, eh...really depends on the CPU's in the boxes.  Check out the Bitcoin Hardware Comparison Wiki (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison) and see if you can find the approximate CPU's your having so you can calculate out what you think you're max might.  Let's say theoretically you are getting 500 KH/sec each, that's about 150 MH/sec total.  With that, and current difficulty, you're looking at maybe 8-10 coins a month.  (IE, It'll take probably 5 months to find a block of 50).  I'd probably go pooled.

Finally as for your hypothetical situation.  Sounds great, but do you have legitimate, approved, and sponsored access to run their PC's at 100% during those three months?  That's really the key.  Can it be done, yes.  Do you want to risk your job/position if someone finds out as CPU's die earlier lives than normal?  Assume even a couple of CPU's will likely give up the ghost, will you make enough profit to replace those?

While it sounds awesome, just watch your keister so you don't get canned over it. I've seen people making 100K/year get fired for taking a ream of paper, so be careful.

And btw, I'm glad folks are getting help from the post, I'm happy to put up the info.  It's the least I can do after I got great information / answers from the forums as I've been figuring things out myself as well.

Perfect! Thanks.


You're concerns are valid.  Running at full speed the type of machines I'm dealing with get over 2,000khs, so my estimate of 3/400 khs (or even your 500 khs) is based on throttled usage, specifically so we don't burn them up.  This has been discussed.  The gist of the situation is, during the summer months they have tons of spare solar energy. The PCs (and the servers) are 90% idle.  While they don't want to burn them all up, they see potential return by mining. I take a % for getting it all up and keeping it running.  Everything out in the open. 
I operate in the sunshine brother, it makes life much easier!


Thanks again for your help and sage advice.  I'll quit hijacking a helpful thread with my hypothetical scenarios....   Say, if I had 25 spare 6990's lying around in a basement, would I make more if I ...

Hehe, happy to help, and best advice I can give you is to have fun.   BTC prices can crash, difficulty can go through the roof, but they can't take anything you learn from the project away from you. ;)

Has anyone else seen this error?

https://i.imgur.com/GBp1M.jpg

I tried it repeatedly - Bitcoin isn't running, the path is correct, everything is in place - yet I keep getting this error when going to Solo Utilities > Launch Bitcoin client as server.

Any insight is appreciated!

You positive you have the path for the bitcoin client set correctly in the GUIMiner UI (Solo Utilities -> Set Bitcoin Client Path).

Also, if you're doing pooled mining, you don't even need to worry about having the bitcoin client up and running, just GUIMiner works fine. 

Worst case, launch the bitcoin client with the -server flag.  (bitcoin.exe -server) which will do the same thing.

Thanks Meatball - I figured it out: it was my firewall that had GUIMiner sandboxed because it didn't recognize it. I added it to the trusted files and it's working now :)

I started up the Guiminer in solo and it has been running. In the bottom corner it still says Shares 0 accepted. In the other corner it says 32.2 Mhash/s. On the summary page it says  accepted 0(0) stale 0(0)

Is it even working? At least with a pool it looked like something is happening. I know I don't have a chance with a solo at 32.2 but its better then playing the lotto. Assuming its doing work.

I keep getting the "Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC" message, can anyone help? I've tried the solutions here to the best of my ability. The original Bitcoin client is still downloading blocks, but the message on guiminer showed "downloading blocks" until just a little bit ago.

This is just perfect! It's really hard to look through threads and this simplifies everything one needs to know about solo mining. I was able to make it work, however, I have one more thing, how do I connect let's say another computer outside my LAN network, say House B to my house. I'm not really sure about proxy's or servers. I think we should encourage solo mining!

Your going to need a pool to setup a machine that isn't on your LAN.

Therefore I'll need to setup a webserver then is that right? Thanks in advanced!

I got my solo miner working using Bitcoin 03.21

how do i know my client is working properly with my server? when i try bitcoind gethashespersec, it still outputs 0, although the guiminer says 400mhash/s. will i get some message when the guiminer generates a block? when it successfully generated one, will my getbalance immediately show 50?

The only way you can tell if your client is working correctly is that it should show you M/H in the bottom right hand corner, it will also say difficulty 1 Hashes: (number)

Those are the amount of hashes you have submitted.

When I first started mining this was the only question I could never seem to get answered. I am glad Folks like meatball have taken the time to explain this in full. Thanks guys.

so.. i wrote a thread in the newbie section - http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=17499.0

it's working properly now and i just have to wait for the first block to be generated, right?

Yeah, once it's running, you just need to let it chug away, sit back, and wait.  You could find a block in an hour, you could find a block in two months, you don't know.  What really matters is how much MH/s you're putting out.  Make sure you run it through the calculator and try to figure out about when you'll 'make' 50 coins.  You won't actually see anything till you find one, but that's the estimated time you need to run before you'll likely find a block.

Honestly, even though I think in the long run I'd be better off solo mining because I get about 10-20% more 'accepted' results per hour on my local server than I see on the pooled servers, but I still do pooled mining because it's disheartening to look at your Bitcoin client for days on end and see nothing.

i think this has something to do with the router not letting you through. i'm having the same problem.

Oofah, talk about a thread coming back from the dead.  At this point I can't imagine solo mining with anything less than 20-25 GH, and even then, I don't think I'd do it unless I was around 100 GH :p

lol sorry i just was wondering cuz im getting into mining. I want to tinker with it as much as i can before i spend any money on it. is my solution correct? is it a problem with the router not allowing access?

Ah, I don't remember ever using GUIMiner to solo, and it's been a while, so I'm not sure.  You might need to have the Bitcoin client running in server mode on that box, but I'm not positive.

What am I mining?

Created New Opencl miner

SERVER: Other

Website: n/a

Host: (left blank)

Port: 8332

Username: farmerblue

Password: the one I set using the set password under solo utilities

device: set to my apu first 2 cores only

extra flags: -v -w128

BUT bottom left is showing Shares: 70 accepted - last at 7:03:10 PM   (and climbing and time staying current)

bottom right  is showing my hash rate 83.5 mHash (I know is low doing this as education purposes)


*****btw I am running Bitcoin_QT v0.8.0-beta with the -server flag in the shortcut


and my conf file is:

rpcuser=farmerblue
rpcpassword=password
rpcallowip=*

OK, I'm having issues setting this up:

1. Do I have the right software open?
2. When I try to create solo password, I enter my username and pw - nothing happens
3. No config file?  How do I create it?
4. I opened guiminer.exe.log, this is what it says: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "guiminer.py", line 2251, in create_solo_password
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\Nick\\AppData\\Roaming\\Bitcoin\\bitcoin.conf'

Here's a screen dump:

http://www.imagesup.net/dm-914003665204.png (http://www.imagesup.net/pm-914003665204.png)

If someone could help, that would be great.  I just want to set up solo mining.  I'll get into a pool, don't worry.

Lastly, should I just use another mining software?  I just chose GUIMiner because it seemed easy to set up... :)

Thanks in advance.

Ok, I figured out how to get a conf file, I had to create a directory and bam, all good

Now, still can't mine though - am I selecting the wrong file location for "set bitcoin data directory"?  What should that be?

Ok, I'm up and running now, still need some help ...

 I think my hash rate is way low - it's like 500 khash/s when it should be like 400 Mhash/s?  Is there a list of flags somewhere?  I have dual 5870's.

Also, how do I know I solved something? Where do the bitcoin go?

Thank you very much, you said that the very detailed.

OK!  I finally got up and running!  Yay!  Not that I'm going to make any BTC, but I'm good to go now.  Just for people who want to know, I'm running dual 5870's.

I used the below flags and got some good results.  I originally didn't have the -f flag and was running in the khash/s... switching to -f 1 got me in the Mhash/s

Last question: should I be using this power to mine something else like Litecoin?

http://www.imagesup.net/dm-314005424083.png (http://www.imagesup.net/pm-314005424083.png)

http://www.imagesup.net/dm-1214005424087.png (http://www.imagesup.net/pm-1214005424087.png)

Hope this helps someone.  All feedback welcomed!

Thanks,
Nick