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Hey there! Just as the title says. Keep in mind there are other, faster ways to go about this - this guide is geared toward being accessible rather than efficient.

Before we begin, two very important things:

1) YOU are responsible for making sure this is a profitable venture. Don't spend money you can't afford to lose. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. Etc etc etc.

2) This guide involves executing a bash script that I wrote to set up the instances in one easy step. DO NOT EXECUTE THIS FILE WITHOUT MAKING SURE IT'S SAFE WITH A TEXT FILE EDITOR FIRST (nano, vim, etc). You don't know what kind of nasty things I could have put in there, and you can never be too safe.

Ok, let's get started!

First, go to Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com), open an account, and set up a payment method. If you can't figure this out, you probably shouldn't be running servers  ;)

Once that's done, go to the AWS Management Console. You should see this:

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-071950am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-071950am.php)

Click the EC2 link. You'll see something like this, although you may be in a different region and you won't have key pairs/placement groups/security groups yet:

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-072303am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-072303am.php)

Now, click Spot Requests on the left sidebar, and click the "request spot instances" button. Select Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS for Cluster Instances (Ubuntu for servers should work fine also).

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-072705am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-072705am.php)

I'm going to do this demo with a cc2.8xlarge instance, which has 88 ECU (a measure of computing power) and makes about 750kh/s. You should do your own cost analysis and choose the cheapest type of instance. You may also want to get more than one instance.

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-073355am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-073355am.php)

One of the most important fields here is the maximum dollars you are willing to pay per hour. I entered 0.35. Again, do your own analysis. Keep in mind - if the market rate exceeds this amount, your instance will be terminated and any YAC you haven't withdrawn from the wallet on your server will go along with it. Click continue. If you're launching more than one server, make sure to create a placement group on the next page. Otherwise, just click continue again. Click continue on the Storage Device Configuration page.

The Key Pair page is important. You want your servers to be secure - create a new keypair, give it a name, and download it somewhere you won't lose it. Click continue.

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-073847am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-073847am.php)

This next step requires you to know your local IP. Type "my IP" into Google. Make it look like the image below (make sure you select SSH), then click "add rule" and click continue.

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-074404am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-074404am.php)

There will be a confirmation screen. Make sure everything is correct, then click continue.

You should now see a screen like this (without the terminated instances, of course):

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-074712am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-074712am.php)

Wait until the instance is confirmed (circle turns from yellow to green). You will have to click the refresh arrow a few times, and it might take a couple minutes. Then go to the Instances page (link in the left bar). You'll see the following:

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-074940am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-074940am.php)

Wait for "initializing" to disappear under "status checks" and be replaced by "2/2 checks passed". Then, right click the instance, and click "connect". You'll get a dialog like the one below. Follow the instructions - an SSH session will appear. It will tell you it can't verify authenticity - type "yes" and press enter. You will not need to do this the next time you connect.

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-075207am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-075207am.php)

You should see this once you're logged in:

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-075430am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-075430am.php)

Enter the following lines of code into the console.


You'll see this:

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-075810am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-075810am.php)

It may appear that you didn't get the prompt back. Don't worry, just enter the next line in.


You'll see this:

http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-075848am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-075848am.php)

Just one more step between you and mining! Enter the following, then sit on your hands and wait for your terminal to look like the image below. DO NOT CLOSE THE SSH SESSION!


http://www.zimagez.com/miniature/screenshot-05112013-080357am.php (http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-05112013-080357am.php)

Okay, you're off! The server will download the blockchain (it's short, won't take too long), then start mining. Here's 3 commands you'll need:

- gets the balance of your miner account

- use this often to get the YAC out of your server's wallet. Remember this is a spot instance, so it can be closed at any time if the market rate goes above your maximum rate, and you'll lose any YAC currently in the wallet. You can write a script to empty it periodically, but I can't help you with that.

Make sure the amount you send is at least 0.01 YAC less than the getbalance amount to allow for the transaction fee.

Keep in mind the blockchain has to be downloaded before any blocks can be found. This won't take long, since it's still quite short. You can check the estimated hashrate with



If this guide helped you, maybe kick some of the YAC you mine over to me at Y2JcwhZu9m6cqPZ3Jv8iKspcJYNY5wa5zc   ;)

Reserved.

Nice guide! If only I had the money  ::)

if only this were posted a couple days ago!
thanks for sharing

I think with today's diff it's better to use EC2 for pool mining. Just compile your minerd (you can try this info: http://cryptocointalk.com/topic/25-cpuminer-for-yacoin-on-ubuntu-12/) and put this command:

with the one-year free program can I mine at all? @ what kh/s level?

this free-program will give you only one micro instance - it's equivalent of one core in shared environment, I guess max. 10-15 kh/s. I used this to mine Litecoins in 2011 because it was completely free trial; now those LTCs are worth something :)

i get compile errors very early on after the setup script is running make


Im on a slightly different OS version than you mention above i think

Can't offer support for any OS other than Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTC. I tested the walkthrough as I wrote it so I know 12.04.1 LTC works fine...

yeah, understood.. no worries  ;D 

You get 3.5 kH/s on average

Nice guide, I'm guessing you're one of the guys that had 14,000 KH/s?

How long do you usually wait for a spot request to go live, i've put one in and it's been in pending-review for 2 and a half hours now. the price was 0.350 per h as well.

A good way to increase price - make people use expensive Amazon services for mining...

be careful out there kids.. bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=202047.0

Seems to become quite annoying as a Non-US-Citizen since they require a US tax ID, no? :(

30 MH/s. Wishing now I'd started earlier (I was busy the day the YAC post went up), I'd be getting myself a new car...


That's an unusually long time... Not sure what's up there.

Quick update for anyone still thinking about getting in on this:

cc2.8xlarge are still $0.253/hr each in Oregon and $0.270/hr in N. Virginia. That's 750 kh/s each.

Vycid, love u man :)

How many yacoin does 750 kh/s get you per day?

looking at the pool, about 80yac/day at current diff (4.558)
diff is increasing quite often though, it could be 6 in 24 hours, likely higher

my rough math... probably 80 or so at current diff.

Depends completely on the difficulty, which is changing rapidly. One way to tell the relationship between kh/s and yacoins/hr is to go to a yacoin pool and divide the hashrate by the average number of blocks found per hour, then multiply by the block reward.

I haven't got data for it right now, maybe someone else can help you.

EDIT: sounds like the number is 80/day  ;)

CreditCard requirement prevents me, buying instances -.-
quite unusual in Germany

tried some VPS with getting 30-70 khashes 100% stales -.- (got money refunded :) )

Around 78.4243872 yac/day by my estimates.

That's not profitable anymore unless you can get it for free.. current biggest hash power on dontmineme pool is 100 000 KH and it's estimation is 10 000 coins per day.

You would need to pay approx 6000$ in 24 hours to run that farm (windows servers, linux is bit cheaper) and you would have to sell those 10 000 at 150 LTC/1k to break even

Thanks for the interesting read. Very cool!

LOL Amazon is expensive! Getting 300kH out of my shitty VPS running 10 of 12 cores... and it only costs 15€ per month (which IS an amazing deal, i know). So for 100,000 kH i'd have to rent 300 of those for 4500€ per month.
1 day Amazon or one month noname?  ::)
edit: Ofcourse i know it's all about flexibility. But if you plan on mining for a bit longer, go for the real thing imo.

What host, if you don't mind me asking? I'm so far satisfied with http://ramhost.us, which has some cheap plans but is nearly always sold out for new customers.

Using cc2.8xlarge (750 kh/s each) from West Virginia that would require about 133 instances to get 100,000 kh/s:

 at 0.27/hr * 24 * 133 = $861/day for 100,000 KH/s, nowhere near $6000.

So it is still profitable by my calculations.

http://host-unlimited.de/vserver
Their "support" sucks, express setup is a lie (takes up to 4 days to get VPS), sometimes i get downtimes. But very strong VPS for a great price.
Edit: Hoping the host machines now don't get raped by (more  ;D) miners. But i got some days left if the company is as slow as always.  ;)

On that price it is though not for long, I haven't found it though but may be because I was not interested in linux, don't have a clue about it.

1 cc2 got 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670, eight-core so u claiming each of them got 100,000/133/2 375khas interesting :) also amazon limits to 20 such large instances per region ;) plus orphans, plus can you even post exact calculations then to show how 100,000 KH produde 10K at current diff :P or hey if thats the case well done man you are makings tons of yacs :) hehe

how many threads are those ? <--- stupid me didn't see the post about minerd earlier.... lol

if you wanna take the pooled mining approach, run these off a fresh install

You're right, I was limited to 40 instances total (2 regions). But I was really making 750kh/s each - if you don't believe me, look at my sales history on the google docs exchange.

to use this script on regular ubuntu just add install of libssl-dev

Hey man, you are brilliant for creating this.

One thing, I did all the steps, it says mining has begun, but when I put ./yacoind gethashespersec it shows 0. What do you think?

It needs to download the blockchain before it can start mining. Give it a minute or two and check again.

It'll also tend to vary each time you check the hashrate, so take the average of several measurements.

If you're really concerned it's actually not working, do the following:

Ok it's working, you sir are a legend!  8)

Here is a script to automatically send the YAC to you from the AWS Instance.
I have created this as an executable file named "schedule.sh"

(If you like this script... don't donate to me... use/improve the script!)


#!/bin/bash

# Set the threshold to the minimum amount you want to have sent to you.  Make sure it's more than 0.01000000
# Set the address to your address, or I will get all your YAC!

threshold="0.20000000"
address="Y4B3S6dVVAFwex6Fio6JprFQkWgwU5E3uf"

#########################################################################
# Don't edit below this line unless you REALLY know what you're doing
#########################################################################
yac=`./yacoind getbalance`
if echo $yac $threshold | awk '{exit !( $1 > $2)}'; then
   ./yacoind sendtoaddress $address $yac
else
   echo "Not enough YAC to send yet!"
fi                                                                                                                         fi                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Just to jump in late.

If you stick your or a wallet.dat on each of the servers (the same wallet.dat on every server) won't they all generate coins directly to the wallet preventing you from having to transfer funds out?

Be careful guys, this is NOT profitable at current difficulty and price of running a cluster.

This guy obviously must have profited from this method and now that it's no longer profitable he is happy to share it with the forum for some rep.

If you think the price of YAC is going to go up 10 fold in the next 10 weeks (very unlikely) then by all means invest your money in the knowledge you will be making a loss at current prices.

I for one would not want to take the risk, especially now there are so many alts. If alts were reliable then FTC would not be trading as low as it is right now.

Maybe some people (creator?) have been dumping all their FTC over time to keep the price this low. Just makes me suspicious about trusting the price of other alt coins including YACoin.

That is correct. It would be quite a bit easier to do it this way - this guide was just written to be as easy as possible. Anyone that can import the wallet.dat to all their servers already knows what they're doing.


Whoa! Hold on, when I released this guide it was DEFINITELY still profitable. I'm not accountable for the inevitable increase in difficulty!

It IS true that I did quite a bit of mining before releasing the guide, but it really wasn't the first thing on my mind to write a guide as soon as I got my servers running - I've got a life, and this guide represented a significant time investment.

I'll come clean: my primary motivation for writing the guide was that I might get a few tips for helping people out. Haven't gotten any yet  :(

There you go. A present. Its a small amount but that takes me 3 days at the difficulty to mine on my  xeon and Q6600

Aw, thanks. I appreciate the gesture regardless of the quantity.

Oh I have every intention of tipping, haven't gotten any coins yet, hopefully will have some by morning.  :)

How can I shoot these servers over to a pool?  Or are they better off solo mining?

I haven't done the math recently, but based on market rate and difficulty it's my suspicion this is no longer profitable. You should double-check.


You could use minerd. I never did, but then again I had enough servers that I didn't really need a pool.

I want to do it just for a few day and see.  I have 4 servers now, but they all have 0 coins.  I'd like to try them at the pool, I have the minerd avx script that another user put together on here.  Is there by chance a quick easy way to get it doing this?  :)  I just don't know how.

Try this:


You should get about 790kh/s with an cc2.8xlarge instance.

edit:
If you use 'screen' you don't have to keep the terminal window open:
(use the following command instead of the last line above)


To detach the session press 'Ctrl'+'A' then 'D'.

Afterwards you can re-attach the session if needed:

Where does that code go though? 

You have to enter (copy/paste) it line by line into your terminal window, in the last line you have to enter your mining pool url & user.

You guys are awesome, it's working :D  I was entering the code all at once and that's why it wasn't working before.  I know I know :)  Many many thanks and you both will be getting tips tomorrow from me.  :D

You're welcome, enjoy your minig :)
(... and you have to leave the terminal window open)

Thanks for both the guide and the minerd command sequence! :)

Interestingly, the hashrate appears to fluctuate quite a bit - when viewed directly, all instances report a very solid ~730 Kh/s, and when I went to bed 9 hours ago, the pool consistently reported around this figure for all instances. Then after 11 hours of runtime, the estimated average hashrate seems to have dropped down to about 330, or slightly less than half. So that's interesting, but still a pretty fun experiment!

Not necessarily: you can start the minderd process with nohup command and disconnect from terminal, something like this:


then you can login at any time and check if it's still running:

Even better, start it with the screen command..

You can then logon and enter screen -ls to see the screen number and screen -r to get it back to your terminal.

Also, you can convert to the key to a putty key with puttygen and open the session in putty

Great work! Thanks for the contribution. ;)

100 YACs on your way :)

Amazing guide and although not profitable now ... I see how it can be profitable long term

SUP

Thanks!  ;D

Just incase anyone runs in to problems with this command :


Run this first :


Try again :)

Kept getting 403 Forbidden errors .


Also this gets the highest hashrate :


dont add -t argument

Hello, I just order 4 servers, and followed the guide precisely. How do I know if they are running, They are all in the same security and placement group, I connected to solo mining using one of the instances, does this mean all the 4 servers are connected and mining?

Or in other words, when ive started mining on one SSH session can I close it down, or do I need to have 4 SSH clients running?

Just to add to this guide, if anyone tried this, you would have noticed that when you are mining , if you close the ssh session, when you ssh back in, u realise that the mining stops, the solution :

Use tmux, it allows you to continue mining even if ssh is off.

Before you type in the mining code type this


You should see a windows with a green line at the bottom of your ssh window

Proceed to type your normal mining code

If you want to close your ssh session, press the following keyboard keys

CRTL-B followed by D

You should see the green bottom bar disappear, do not worry, your mining is still running in the back end

now close your ssh session

When you ssh back in, type the following to reopen the tmux window that is still running your mining


RUNNING MINING EVEN WHEN YOU ARE NOT SSHing IN WILL EAT UP ALOT OF "COMPUTE HOURS", if YOU GET CHARGED ALOT BY AMAZON,  I BEAR NO RESPONSIBILITIES.

Aye, make sure you understand how AWS works.
Could end up costing a you a LOT of $$ if you are not careful.

I was experimenting a fair bit over the weekend and ended up with 800 spot instances running the miner spread out over the 8 data centers.
Now this was just an experiment and I knew it was going to cost me a fair whack..

End result : Around 500 yac.
End cost : $234.

Only ran it for 2 hours.

Now I could have done it a lot cheaper, but I really just wanted to play around with it. Fun fun fun :)

Everything is working great, thanks for the help! Just one last question if I decide to stop mining and terminate these servers completely(so I dont have to pay hourly) Do I just right click on the instance and terminate? or can I pause it somehow. And can I also turn off my computer while these instances are running using the tmux method?

I ran 10 instances for 2 hours on saturday but wasnt getting anything. Blocks per day should have been 40 at that time.

Is there any way to check if its working as it should? I had the impression that while it was compliling i saw some error messages.

right now it seems 750kh/s will yield 1.875 yacs/hr.  or roughly $0.15 /hr.  If you're paying more than that, then no.

As promised, 100 YAC Sent your way :D  I initially planned to send more but I only got 25% for the estimated rewards from that pool since it was dropping connections constantly.  I should have solo mined! :D

Also Joee I owe you some coins if you post your addy.  :)

Now we just need to figure out how to get them deposited automatically to our wallets.

How does one kill all screen sessions?  I accidently started a few sessions per server and they all have different numbers, I want to kill them all in one swoop and start over

killall screen

ctrl+c?

anyone still have AWS mining YAC?

my ubuntu instance only got 99kh/s, even that it got 750kh/s before, i stopped mining for few week ago  :'(

i amazon increase the CPU perfomance to prevent this?

the N factor is higher.  ;)

oph, that's why  ;D

What mean 'capacity-oversubscribed' in status? What I need to do?

Wow, this is an amazing, talk about step by step. Good Going, wish I would have found it, months ago, going to go and try it out, after I go and get some sleep. Thanks again