Bitcoin Forum

UPDATE:
These services have now been shut down due to the cost of running them.

Here are instead the steps to create your own Azure gateway.

I'll show by example of how I would create westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net, port 8884 which connects to BTCGuild. My values will be within []'s. Substitute with your values when more appropriate.

1) Go to www.azure.com and create an account. You can get a free trial account
2) Enter the azure portal (on www.azure.com)
3) On the left of the portal, select 'Virtual Machines'
4) Click "+" at the bottom to create a new Virtual Machine
5a) Click through: Compute \ Virtual Machine \ Quick Create
5b) DNS Name = [westcoastbtc]
5c) Image = Windows Server 2012  (you can host on Linux as well if you're familiar with it. I'm not listing the instructions for that below.)
5d) Size = Extra Small (enough for 10 blades. You can upgrade later)
5e) User name = [shrek]
5f) Password = [donkey]
5g) Region = [West US]
6) Click 'Create a Virtual' machine and have a [beer] until it's done.

7) Click on your new server, and go to Endpoints
8) Click 'Add' to create a new endpoint
9) Add a Stand-Alone endpoint
10a) Name = [BTCGuild]
10b) Protocol = 'Tcp'
10c) Public Port = [8332]
10d) Private Port = same as 10c. [8332]
11) Click the checkmark to add it

12) Go to the DashPort
13) Click 'Connect'. There will be 2 popups, one from Azure, and one from your browser. Click 'Ok' on the azure one, and open your browser one (this is a Remote Desktop Client shortcut).
14) Enter 5e/5f from above for username & password

15) On the Server itself, go into 'Windows Firewall with Advanced Security'
16) Click 'Inbound Rules'
17) New Rule
18a) Port
18b) TCP
18c) Specific local ports = [8332]
19) Click Next
19a) Allow the connection.
20) Click Next
20a) Applies to 'Domain', 'Private', 'Public'
20b) Click Next
21) Name = 'BTCGuild Port'

It should now be set up. Create a batch file with a shortcut, and run the following:

start "BTCGuild Proxy" mining_proxy.exe -o eu-stratum.btcguild.com -p 3333 -gp 8332

(The 'start "BTCGuild Proxy"' part is just because I have dozens of these and I want to customize the title in the taskbar. You can leave it out).



I've set up a few Azure VM's and running mining_proxy.exe on it for Slush & BTCGuild.

The idea behind this is that if you run a ASICMINER blade or similar product that only supports Getwork and not Stratum, that you can connect it directly to this cloud-based mining proxy, instead of running your own proxy server somewhere on your premises. It thus should reduce your electrical usage.

This is a free Beta to test scalability. I reserve the right to cancel this service at any time. Leave me a message below or PM if you want me to PM you 3 days before I stop it/suspend it/take it offline for a significant period. You can also PM an email address to me if you want an email back. You're welcome to connect without letting me know, but I may yank the service out from underneath you and then you'll have a useless miner until you figure it out by yourself.

I got a performance increase from doing this. Please give feedback to tell me your experience. (Increase/Same/Decrease).

Some people have noticed a performance drop. I'd like to figure out why this happens - please don't just try and silently give up. Let me know your location so that I can see if I can get a server closer to you.


To connect, use one or more of the following servers.

All servers support both BTCGuild and Slush.

eastcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
westeuropebtc.cloudapp.net
northeuropebtc.cloudapp.net


They're located in Virginia, Washington (state), France and Spain respectively. Pick the one closest to you.


Ports:

BTC Guild: 8884, 8885, 8886
Slush: 8900, 8901, 8902
GHash.IO: 8904, 8905, 8906

The port choices are there to deal with the vardiff from Slush and BTC. If there are a lot of connections from the same port, due to multiple users, Slush & BTC Guild will increase your difficulty, which means you may have more rejects between blocks.

Unfortunately a bunch of slow miners is still considered fast... So let's say this. If you have one blade, just toss a dice to see which port to use. If you have multiple blades, spread them across servers and ports.


So e.g. in the ASICMINER blade config page, use the following:
Ports: 8884,8884
Server addresses: westeuropebtc.cloudapp.net,northeuropebtc.cloudapp.net
user:pass:  myname_worker:x,myname_worker:x


You can similarly also do a Slush primary/BTC Guild backup by setting it up like this:
Ports: 8900,8884
Server addresses: westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net,westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
user:pass: slushusername:password,btcusername:password

Alternatively, use your own proxy server as your backup, in case mine goes down. I do have monitoring though, but I may not be able to intervene immediately.


Stuff that I think you should know (which other people call FAQ, but really aren't all that frequently asked...)

Can't you steal my worker username/password by connecting through your proxy?

I probably could if I wanted. Do you really care if someone steals your password and sets up a miner on your behalf? Make sure your password for your miners aren't the same as your account password and you should be safe. The password for all my miners are 'x'.


Can't you intercept a winning block and take it for yourself?

I wish! But no. You can't intercept a winning block if you connect directly to one of the pools either. The block being solved contains the pool's Bitcoin wallet address, so even if you were to intercept and submit it, the 25 BTC will still go to the pool owner.


How do I know you're not siphoning of hashes for yourself?

Monitor your own Slush / BTCGuild accounts. Slush / BTCGuild throughput should correspond to what you saw locally before or more. Compare your worker speed charts before and after. (Nice timing BTCGUILD for resetting our stats today! Grrrr.).  Let me know if you see a discrepancy (it most likely has to do with latency to my servers), and stop using the service immediately.

Do keep in mind though, that if you reconfigure an ASICMINER it takes about an hour to get back to 100% speed.


Is there a performance win/penalty for running the proxy over the internet

That's what I like to find out! At first I suspected there might be a penalty, but the cloud-based proxy gave me better throughput than I was able to get locally myself. I'm sometimes seeing 13.5 gh/s max on my blades now and over 12 gh/s average, which I've never seen with a local proxy. I suspect it's because the Azure machines are connected to the internet via gigabit connections, where I was sharing a lowly 30 mbps between both the Getwork and Stratum parts of the proxy.


Why are you offering this for free?

I tried it for myself as an experiment, and I got saw a surprising performance increase. Because of this, I'm now inviting other people to see if you get a similar throughput increase. If this holds true in general, I can turn this into a more formal service. Haven't really thought about a revenue model.


How long do you plan to run the Beta for?

Around 90 days unless it's starting to cost me 100s of dollars per month, or if I start offering another service. I might also reduce the number of servers if I see the backups aren't needed, or if I scale out using TCP load balancing instead. Do remember to send me a PM if you don't want to be surprised by me taking something offline.



Where is the service located

Now in 4 locations: Western US, Eastern US, Western Europe, Northern Europe.   I can set up East Asia & Southern Asia as well if there is any interest. Let me know. (Maybe for Russia?)


Can you do this for another pool? / Set a server up in another geographic region?

Let's see if these 2 work first, but I'm open to suggestions.

Unfortunately you can't just connect multiple user accounts over a proxy to Eligius - it will hand out difficulty 1 to everybody. But if you're interested I'll set up one-off Eligius ports for your. Let me know which primary & backup location, and how many ports you need.


This doesn't work!

Oops. Sorry. Post on this thread and I'll look into it.


I hate you!

I know. I'm used to it. I also drive a Tesla. Not a day goes by that I don't have to fight off at least a dozen trolls before breakfast. Knock yourself out.

Cool idea.

You deserve a round of applause. That is some funny shit right there.
Is it the roadster? I have always wanted one!

No, it's a Model S.

However, I just saw this amazing device from some guy on eBay called a "BLOCK ERUPTER".  Looking at his projections I should be able to get one of those and then I can afford a Roadster by the end of the year!

erm. dont follow into the hype. The "BLOCK ERUPTER" is only 333mh.. most of everything is nowadays is Gigahas/Tarahash... BUT if you want to get into it it is a start. Just dont look into ROI. It can be a start if you want to get into it! :)

Great!!! I will try and use it  ;D

Thank you very much for helping the bitcoin community!

btw. very nice car! I want it so bad, but 110k euro is a bit too expensive........and that's without car tax! otherwise it would be over 150k euro. I hate you!

Just kidding  ;D  very nice car!

Very neat idea, but I'm curious:  Is this using a custom stratum proxy?  If not, how are you working around the vardiff settings of both slush & BTC Guild?

I will test the proxy

NOTICE: The servers will be restarting for updates today for about 3 minutes. I will restart them with 15 minute intervals, so if you have a backup set up, it should automatically switch over with almost no interruption.


It's not - it's just the one from Slush's site.

Interesting - looks like this is indeed affecting the proxy. I can see that my clients are now given a difficulty of 128. Ordinarily it used to be 16. Doesn't seem to affect my stats much with blades though, but it may suck if you run something slower.

It looks like the difficulty is adjusted to the difficulty of the fastest user on that proxy? How does this work? Does the Getwork proxy make a single stratum connection to the server and send everything across that? And then the server then decides the difficulty on the endpoint, rather than deciding on a per client basis? (I HOPE it decides on endpoint and not just IP Address! But it could be that as well I suppose...).

The Stratum proxy makes a single connection to the Stratum server.  Stratum defines difficulty on a per connection basis, so you would need to run one proxy per user to prevent the difficulty from being raised beyond the optimal vardiff levels.  In the long run it doesn't matter, you get paid proportionally more for higher difficulty.  However, like you said, it would suck for a slow user, and it would probably start to trigger idle worker warnings for very slow users due to the gaps between shares.

Thanks!

Makes sense. When I reboot the servers today I'll bring up additional ports for "slow", "medium" and "high-speed" users as an interim solution for now.

I'm learning the Stratum protocol now, and will eventually rewrite the proxy, but I'm not there yet.


This beta is a good learning experience for me... Also taught me to set up availability groups in Azure BEFORE announcing the service :).

I have completed the upgrade, and all machines are available again.

To deal with the vardiff from Slush and BTC, I've also created 3 more ports on each server:

8884
8885
8886
8332 is also still available.

Unfortunately a bunch of slow miners is still considered fast... So let's say this. If you have one blade, just pick a port at random. If you have multiple blades, spread them one per port on the one server (e.g. btcbuild1), then one per port on the other (e.g. btcguild2).

Of course, still have your backup as the opposite server (or different pool).


I see worker "SlushWrk1.SlushPI" connected to slush1 with a failover for slush2, but the miner didn't have correct failover credentials, so it didn't switch over correctly during the downtime.

In the ASICMINER UI, make sure to also duplicate the user:pass as well.

E.g.:
myuser.blade:x,myuser.blade:x

Thank you very much for the service, I can never get my mining proxy to run on any of my computers.

So far running well.

Cheers  :)

Tried every port and server that you have available and I only pull 55% efficiency with my blades on the default slush1.cloudapp.net:8332. Am I doing something wrong? Or is there any way I can improve this?

1) Where are you located? These servers are in the Western U.S. If you are from Europe, this may not be an ideal server for you to use, as all your traffic will have to effectively travel around the world twice.

2) What is your Slush minimum difficulty set to for your blade? For a Blade this should be set to 8. I see there is someone connected currently to slush1:8332 right now that has a difficulty set to 1. That will cause fairly low throughput on a high latency connection.

1.) East Coast, US

2.) I hope that isn't me... Apparently Slush's pool very recently removed the ability to switch difficulty manually. They said stratum should do it automatically. When I was using the original stratum proxy my difficulty was automatically switched to 8. So I take it the setting doesn't stay that way...

*Update*

My miners are 2 days old and were working at 110% efficiency up until the slush proxy messed up. So I know it isn't my miners.

*Update2*
Used the BTCguild proxy for my miner, set the difficulty to 8 and Im having the same issue. Also the BTCguild website is FAR off from matching my stats of my miner while its running. Is this typical for it to do since its being run through a proxy?

Ok, thanks. I'm generally on BTCGuild. I just tried Slush, and it seems to work fine for me. (It's not just a "well, it works fine for me under controlled circumstances when stars line up" - these servers are over the Internet even for me).

Couple of more questions:
a) What is your internet service speed?
b) What Operating System are you running?

Meanwhile, I'll bring up 2 more servers - US East Coast and Western Europe (since slush is in Amsterdam). It will take me a few hours. I'll appreciate if you can try it out after that. Will post here (and PM you) when they're ready.

From the UK and was getting efficiency of 53%, got a fiber connection ping time to either of the domains was 1256ms so pretty high, Hopefully once you get a more central server up and running in Europe that will speed up the ping, Cheers

First off, thanks for providing this. I am not trying any of my major rigs with this free cloud based proxy as i am running MinePeon at home on a RasPi that supports stratum. However, i decided to test this with a couple of mobile devices. Yes, i know its not ideal, just wanted to play around with it. DroidMiner is a mobile android cpu miner and it works in the khash range but it does not support stratum, so i decided to give your cloud based proxy a shot. For the most part this seems to work, however when i do get a few hashes they never show up on btcguild. i have racked up at least 20 from my N7 but btcguild had showed nothing. Nothing accepted or rejected. Not sure what the deal is. My mobile devices work if i am at my home network running the proxy on one of my machines though.

My guess:  The miner you're trying to use on the proxy only supports diff=1, but the stratum connection to BTC Guild is actually running at a higher difficulty.  When that happens, the Stratum proxy will send the "accepted" to your miner and not bother sending it to the pool unless it actually is enough to match the difficulty of the stratum connection.

Right. This took me quite a while to figure out by myself :). Baffled me there for a while.

Anyway, since I already typed this whole thing out while you posted - might as well also post...

What happens is that when you connect with a slow machine to one of these faster proxies, it will ignore all share submissions you have that's lower than the current setting on the proxy.

So e.g. in the example below, if the endpoint difficulty (VARDIFF set by the pool) is currently 16, only the 4th submission is accepted (even though BFGMINER think they're all 'Accepted').

Accepted 85a38f7f ICA 0  Diff 1/1
Accepted 6ec85868 ICA 0  Diff 2/1
Accepted c180534c ICA 0  Diff 1/1
Accepted 0f8bc425 ICA 0  Diff 16/1
Accepted c6854677 ICA 0  Diff 1/1

"Foul", you cry!

Well, not quite. What happens is that when your pool is running over difficulty 1, the pool will give you credit for x times as many shares as you are submitting over that difficulty (and ignore the rest). Since presumably 1/16th of the number of shares you'll find is at difficulty 16.

So in the case above, even though 4 of the 5 submissions are ignored, you get 16 shares. Note that the flip-side is also true. If the pool difficulty happens to be 1, and you find a 16/1 share, you'll only get 1 credit for it.

On a slow machine, you'll see that you won't get any shares for quite a while, and then it will suddenly jump by 16. This should in theory overall take the same time as finding 16 shares 1 at a time.

So your submissions can either be counted as:
0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,16,0,0,0,0 = 16 shares
-or-
1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1  = 16 shares

And it averages out to be the same.

On blades this kind of averaging out happens in seconds, on a smaller device it's very noticeable.

Very interesting! Thanks for the replies! I definitely wasnt setting out to try any real mining with mobile devices, just wanted play around with it. Thank you for the information!

Ok, I now have 4 new proxies open (the old ones are still there for now):


eastcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
westeuropebtc.cloudapp.net
northeuropebtc.cloudapp.net

They're located in Virginia, Washington, France and Spain (I think - I can't really tell for sure, but it's supposed to be East US, West US, West EU, North EU).


Pick the server that are closest to you as primary, and some other one as backup. The servers all support both BTC Guild & Slush. To select which pool you want, specify an appropriate port:

BTC Guild: 8884, 8885, 8886
Slush: 8900, 8901, 8902

Please toss a dice or something otherwise random to see which individual port to pick. Or if you have more than one blade, spread them across ports.


e.g. (for a BTCGuild setup):

Ports: 8884,8884
Server addresses: westeuropebtc.cloudapp.net,northeuropebtc.cloudapp.net
user:pass: myname_worker:x,myname_worker:x


PS: I'm now also using 5 block erupters to keep cycling through all of these ports to make sure they're alive. If one of them goes down I'll get a timeout message from BTC Guild. Finally Block Erupters are useful for something :)

+1 for doing this!         

brilliant idea!

could you do one for 50btc?  

much cheaper fees than btcguild

PPLNS on BTC Guild averages higher than 50BTC due to NMC and TxFees.

i'll give that a try...

I would, but I can't ever connect to 50BTC. I've come to believe 50BTC is a myth :P.

That's what drove me to Eligius in the first place. Also PPS, but with a 0% pool fee.


Seriously though, they just have very bad instructions on their web site in terms of which servers support which ports. If you can let me know the address & port of a 50BTC server that accepts stratum, I'll set up a proxy for you.

pool.50btc.com:8332    is what my block erupters mine on....      its stratum



this is what ive found online...


Hosts:
pool.50btc.com:8332 - main host
pool2.50btc.com:8332 - backup host
If you want to specify a pull-server to connect to, you can choose from:
pool-de.50btc.com:8332 - Host is located in Germany
pool-us.50btc.com:8332 - Host is located in the USA
pool-ru.50btc.com:8332 - Host is located in Russia
Port 80 mining (Long-Polling port is 443):
pool80.50btc.com
All pool-servers, except pool 80, have Stratum protocol support. All suitable miners would be automatically redirected to port 3333 on connection.


wish the Blade was as simple to use as the usb erupters

How is your individual worker name & password set up?

I have a worker that's displayed on the 50BTC site ( dbbitblade1 ). However, if I use it the proxy doesn't connect at all, and individual bfgminer using usb block erupters just states:

[2013-09-26 16:25:46] Probing for an alive pool
[2013-09-26 16:25:54] Pool 0 slow/down or URL or credentials invalid

This is with pool.50btc.com:8332

What is the exact bfgminer command line you're using for your USB erupters?

i use cgminer...


http://pool.50btc.com:8332     for the server



username :emailaddress@.com
pw: x


i just launch cgminer-nogpu.exe    and input the server    hit enter,   workername  hit enter       x hit enter,       


since im not mining with gpus,   it is just easier than making a .bat file  imo

Sorry for the late reply.

a.)Cable 10megabit up/5 down highest cable package in my area
b)The PC I'm using for general things(gaming, forum posting, etc) is windows 7. The netbook that I run proxies and do other bitcoin related things on is Linux. Debian Mint

Ok, so I tried your new servers. Here are my results:
1. Couldn't get anything going on any of the BTCguild ports with either west or east coast USA. My blade wouldn't start running and it would just flip between east and west. I tried all of the ports, and they came back with the same results.

2. Slush ports work! The blade is running on westcoast USA 8900 and it's almost at its optimum levels of 10gh. I'm going to keep my eye on it to see if there are any more hick ups. The only thing that I notice is slush's pool worker stats don't show the same mh as the blade is pulling. It seems to be slowly going up however, is this normal?

I'll keep my fingers crossed for there to be no problems. Unfortunately I can't seem to get a personal proxy going off my own network so in a way I am now relying on your services to keep my blades up and running. I really appreciate what your doing and I'll let you know if I find anything else out about my blade running on your network.

how do i edit the pool inside mining_proxy.exe
 ???

Run it with '-o <server> -p <port>'.  On Windows, this means either launching the proxy via command line with those arguments, or creating a shortcut and adding those arguments to the target.

ty,    how do i specify which port to use on the local computer?   Ive added stratum.btcguild.com:3333    and got miningproxy.exe going,    so when i point my miner to 192.168.1.106  for the computer its running on.... which port would i specify?

By default, the stratum proxy listens for your miners on port 8332.  You can change this using '-gp <port>'.

did something happen to the cloud stratum proxies?   

No, they're up. I'm connected to them right now.

Which ones are you trying?

Are you perhaps trying to connect to BTCGuild? Keep in mind there is a DDOS attack against BTCGuild right now.

yes was connecting to btcguild,   looking at the network hashrate it appears they are still being attacked.... 


mining ppcoins thru d7.lt getwork for the time being.....

So the first day my blade was running on here it was pulling 10 - 11gh. THe past couple days it's only been pulling 4gh and been bouncing between west and east coat US for slush's pool.

I'm really starting to dislike mining_proxy.exe....

I'm connected to the exact same 2 servers, and have been getting 12gh for 5 days straight. The CPU usage for those servers over the last week have both been below 18%.

Anyway, could you try connect to either of:

slush1.cloudapp.net
slush2.cloudapp.net

Port: 8884, 8885 or 8886

Both of these servers are only pulling around 4gh as well.

*Update*
They've been peeking at 6.5gh which is better than the westcoast , eastcoast US servers.

The original 4 servers (btcguild1, btcguild2, slush1 & slush2) will be decommissioned in 1 week.

Please switch over the 4 new servers:

eastcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
westeuropebtc.cloudapp.net
northeuropebtc.cloudapp.net

See the first post (updated) for port numbers.

Yup was just running the slush proxys like you said too in a previous post.

Got the blades running on the new servers and they are at 100%+ efficiency.

Trying DroidMiner on my tablet
connected on westcoastbtc on 8885 3 threads each ~350KH/s so total ~1MH/s gonna make mega coins now  :P

but don't see worker on btcguild .001GH/s not enough to show?

Correct. I've just looked at the log for your client, and you've not yet come up with a successful share yet.

I think BTCGuild doesn't accept anything less than difficulty=2 anymore.

I've just restarted that port to make sure, and before you even re-connected the difficulty bumped up to 2. This is controlled by BTCGuild.

I have one slow (16mh/s) client that I use for testing, and that one sometimes goes up to 10 minutes without finding any shares.

Switched to West eu server

@ around 10.11 there was a speeddrop. Look like it is running oke now.

Just wanted to say that if you do any changes please inform me. Also I have not noticed any performance changes as of late. My miners have been going strong for a long time now on your proxies  ;D

anyway to set one of these up for ghash.io

Same for me.

could you also let me know before you take these down?  i'm also using them.... works great on the blades 

I'm about to take down btcguild1, but there is a client connected to it (agozyen_2) for the last few weeks.

If this is your client, can you please move over to one of the newer servers.

Done.

Ports: 8904,8905,8906
All 4 servers.

+1,   i'll check it out in a little while

Thank you for this service. Are the east and west coast servers still up for btcguild?

West Coast was up & has lots of people connected to it.

East Coast was down, but I just brought it back up again.

How did you get it working with mining at GHASH? can i have the mining_proxy compiled for Ghash sent to me? sebuh@live.com

thanks.

It's unmodified.

Here's my script that connects to GHASH:

start "GH:1" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3344 -gp 8904
start "GH:2" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3345 -gp 8905
start "GH:3" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3346 -gp 8906

everytime ive tried to connect to the Ghash ones  it doesnt work for me....   the btcguild ones are working like champs tho!       :D

its working great for me currently but if your service goes down i cant mine to ghash anymore.

so i put this in my batch it should work if i point my blades back to my PC?

start "GH:1" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3344 -gp 8904
start "GH:2" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3345 -gp 8905
start "GH:3" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3346 -gp 8906

it runs just fine i see 3 windows pop up.

Now if i switch my miner back to my PC it wont mine.

should i change the port on the blades to

8904-8906

start "GH:1" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3344 -gp 8904
start "GH:2" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3345 -gp 8905
start "GH:3" mining_proxy.exe -o nl1.ghash.io -p 3333 -sp 3346 -gp 8906

okay i got it running thank you so much sir post your payment address for a tip. :D

That is odd... There are a few people connected to the GHash ones right now. I don't have a lot of experience with GHash. I know I can't offer an Eligius proxy because of the way they calculate miner difficulty when multiple miners use the same proxy. Not sure if GHash has similar issues. But yeah, I found btcguild to be the most reliable as well.



Thanks! Tip address is:
12d8bVisicE6if9xvyfTCoHAfp7RPvxrbv

Im going to test these out.

Thank you!

Kudo's Brother.

Got a LTC?BTC? address?


Please inform me before you shut it down

anyone else getting horrible speed on the eastcoast server?

Which pool and port? Some of my own blades are connected to eastcoastBTC, to GHash.IO pool, and getting 13ghz. No dip in the graph over last 24 hours.

was on port 8884,   its back to normal now.... maybe it was something on my end..... 

Yeah, keep in mind the data from the proxy to the blade is VERY chatty and inefficient (That's why pools want to use stratum and not GetWork anymore).  Those servers send out over 2 TB of data per month to the various users!

So if there is any internet glitches on the way between the blade and the proxy it will hit your perf much harder than if the proxy was right next to the blade and it talked Stratum over the wire.

For the most part it works out fine though, but it is something to consider.

Thanks, this is awesome!

I'm glad i found this because I've been having trouble running Stratum Proxy on my PC...

However, after about an hour of mining at 2 different pools I have only achieved about 50% hash rate.

Is that normal for using the cloud-based proxy? is it something i can fix on my end?

Thanks again!

Definitely not normal. I've been averaging > 99% for months.

How fast is your internet connection?

depends if hes looking at the stats on slushes pool. it takes along time for them to get upto your actual speed

id also be willing to add some server power to northern eu if they get to heavily loaded

My miners are suddenly not mining through the proxy. The logs show they stopped at 10:53pm est. All my other miners that don't use the proxy are running just fine. My blades ares just not going through for some reason.

Are you on GHash.IO by any chance?

Same for me. It seems to be a glitch with the pool. Not sure if there is anything I can do about it. All my proxies to GHash.IO are currently seeing this:

2013-11-30 04:10:24,381 INFO proxy mining_proxy.on_disconnect # Disconnected from Stratum pool at nl1.ghash.io:3333
2013-11-30 04:10:24,410 INFO stats stats.print_stats # 0 peers connected, state changed 1 times
2013-11-30 04:11:31,979 INFO stats stats.print_stats # 1 peers connected, state changed 1 times
2013-11-30 04:12:24,371 ERROR proxy client_service.on_timeout # Connection to upstream pool timed out
2013-11-30 04:12:24,388 INFO proxy mining_proxy.on_disconnect # Disconnected from Stratum pool at nl1.ghash.io:3333


And the GHash.IO pool speed for the last shift dropped by 300 TH. I think they have a problem with non-hosted miners right now.

Yup, I'm on Ghash, so it will probably be fixed by them I presume.

Starting to think it isn't ghash.io its hasn't worked for days and I contacted them about it. Is there anything that can be done on the proxies end?

I wanted to try this out on btcguild with 5 blades I'm using the eastcoast and 8884,8885,8886 on at least one to see what worked the best. It started out looking good but then just stayed between 4GH TO 6GH on all of them but the config page shows higher, I saw a few posted like that but no solution. Let me know what you think i could do? thanks

Ok, I'm upgrading eastcoastbtc with another processor. Let's see how it goes.

You'll notice a small service interruption in eastcoastbtc - if you have your blades correctly configured, they should fall over to another server automatically within a few seconds.

Done. I've upgraded eastcoastbtc, followed by upgrading westcoastbtc.

Please let me know if you're on that server if you're experiencing a difference in performance (either better or worse).

Hi dbbit,

I want to thank you for setting the up. I've had 10 Asicminer blades connecting to eastcoastbtc for a couple weeks now without any issues. Your cloud proxy is the only way I have been able to keep the blades connected for longer than a few minutes at a time. Using my own proxy with mining_proxy.exe or bfgminer on an HP Z220 workstation running Windows 7 and a HP DL380 G5 server running Server 2003, they start out fine but after 2-9 minutes they stop getting work and restart. Have been actively working on a solution but so far no luck. Power or heat dont seem to be the issue, I'm looking at the networking aspect and thought I was on to something when I realized all the desktop OS's have a max connections limit of 20max. So I setup the Windows server in my data center at work but no luck, same issue

So again, Thanks very much for your efforts. Do you have a time frame for shutting this down?

Awesome Job.

Well, if I can figure out a way to break even with my costs on this proxy, I can keep them running indefinitely. My costs at the moment is around $250 per month so far. I can carry it for a little while longer, but at some point it will be a bit much, since it keeps increasing per month.

However, would everybody be interested to keep connecting if I use a small portion of your blade power (let's say 1%, but maybe 0.5% will be sufficient) to mine under my own account? It will be like a pool fee. Just trying to recover costs - not looking to make money here.

I could also ask for donations, but I can't scale with that. With a %, if I get 100 times the number of clients connecting, I can easily just configure 100 times the amount of processing power to match (got to love Azure).

Any other ideas?

I think this is a great thing, and think it should defiantly be scale as time goes on, and i am open donating, or helping how i can here and there. Why dont you work something up, and i will help you make it public. A 1 page website (landing page) for donations. i could easily do that for you. so you can link to it and have people donate BTC through it direct to your address. or maybe a "pool fund" where a $ per month is set and we all chip in until it is met for the next month or it goes down. i am sure that there are a few hundred people using this now. even if each paid a dollar a month we could collectively cover the cost. and even maybe help fund a few more servers. i would love to see one pop up in the mid-west USA, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois or something like that, i have notice that however small it is, the distance to the server does have an impact i have tested it on all four servers to find my best speed.

Hello, is it possible to get GHash information from the proxy itself ?  How about per connected users?  Just curious.

-Magnito

I am having trouble with my ASICMINER blades.  I think I'm following everything from the OP. 
Can some one tell me where I'm going wrong?

IP  192.168.1.200   
Mask   255.255.255.0
Gateway  192.168.1.1
WEB Port  8000
Primary DNS   192.168.1.1   
Secondary DNS  211.148.192.141
Ports   8335,8335
Server addresses  westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net,eastcoastbtc.cloudapp.net   
user:pass     Swimmer63_xxxxxx.x,Swimmer63_xxxxxxx.x

2 things, first change the IP of your blade to 201 instead of 200, i would be willing to bet you have a belkin router if you are having issues. Next change your DNS's to 8.8.8.8 and secondary 8.8.4.4

99.99% chance that will resolve your issue. also use two ports not just the one repeated. so change one to 8336

Not as far as I know. I've been meaning to modify mining_proxy to give me those kind of stats, but haven't gotten to it yet.

No belkin router. Have had these running fine off a local proxy on another pool. But I can't get to work with btcguild 22 blades and recently 3 cubes.
Hopefully changing the DNS's will be the answer.
Thanks!

Gracias TerraHasher!

Up and running on all blades/cubes.  I also had the port wrong.  Too many numbers in my head.

It was running good for a while but now my speed is down to 2-3 Gh/s per blade.  Any suggestions?

Which server/port are you connecting to?

Check your internet speed at speedtest.net as well.

8885,8886

Called Centurylink and had them run diagnostic.  Says I'm getting full speed.  PC directly connected to the router are running fine.
Other miners running fine.  Very odd.

Since those are BTC Guild ports, have you tried resetting your stats on the dashboard?  BTC Guild's speed estimates are based on an hour if you've been mining that long.  If you had issues, it takes a full hour for those issues to stop affecting your average speed estimates.

Thanks guys.  I did not have time to mess anymore with it today.  I put the test blades back on proxy. 
I am wondering if using this cloud proxy method increases the bandwidth needed on my connection.  It seemed when I had 10 blades on the cloud proxy some of my miners slowed down.  Is that possible?

I'm now remembering something Luke-Jr mentioned.  Blades do not multitask, so when they submit a share/complete a getwork request, they are not hashing until a response is received.  This would likely cause a somewhat noticeable impact on overall performance (few percent at minimum) since blades also send back every diff=1 result.

So I was doing some calculations, and I don't have a way to make this service run much longer - it's now costing $300 per month and climbing. I will have to pull the plug.

As it stands now, I will have to take approximately 3% of blade computing power to break even. However, because of difficulty changes, in 1 month it will have to be 6% then a month after that 10% etc.  I don't think that's really worth it for anybody.


The thing that's a killer is the data transfer due to the GetWork protocol, which is several TB per month now.

I will post the setup instructions if you want to set up your own private Azure server for this. But as it is now, I'm planning to shut this service down on December 17th.

You may not be interested in continuing but there is a paid service I saw on the forum. Guys charging something like 8.50 a month. I can't remember exactly what that gets you.
I'm just saying I think some are willing to pay for this.

I never got it to work well. Not your fault. My bandwidth I think.
But thanks so much for hosting this.

Do you have a donation address? Im willing to donate.

Great work dbbit  ;D
       First test: I like it!  8)
http://i628.photobucket.com/albums/uu2/techjesse/MultiThreaded%20Mayhem/Bestsofar_zps11a6b849.png

The Free cloud-based stratum proxy's are dead  :(

Which server? I've been connected via westcoastbtc to Eligius, and has not have any service interruption in the last 7 days.

I've shut down NorthEuropeBTC though (just now), since nobody connected to that over the last 7 days, and in preparation of me decommissioning the farm.

These:
    westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
    BTC Guild: 8884, 8885, 8886
or did you end it? My worker said: offline. Now I changed workers, OnLine.

They're definitely up and running - tons of people connected to it.

With "tons of people connected" will it have an effect on performance? I'm at 74.90% on one cube and 78.13% on the other cube. My worker is only showing 6.57 Gh/s. I know it takes an hour for the full amount of Hash rate to be shown.

It's at 80% usage currently, so won't be a problem on the server side.

By FAR the biggest performance bottleneck is the speed of your internet between your cube and the server. GetWork is a horribly inefficient protocol (which is why it's not used by pools anymore), so if there is anything slow between you and the server, your performance will suffer. It's a lot better converting from GetWork to Stratum as close as possible to your Blades as possible.

I run my own blades on the proxies, but I have a 40mps connection to the internet. So that is almost as fast as a LAN connection, and I've never seen a slower speed on the cloud proxy vs. my lan proxy. But on a slower connection other people definitely do experience problems.

I'm running 50Mbps so speed should not affect my hash rate, here I just took a speed test  :)

http://i628.photobucket.com/albums/uu2/techjesse/MultiThreaded%20Mayhem/SpeedTest_zps0aaf20be.png

Yes, getWork is a horribly inefficient protocol, we need USB support for our cubes to mine stratum. jesse11

Interesting. 21m/s as well.

Let me switch some of my blades to BTCGuild and see if there is another issue.

My hash rate is going up now, I don't know what you did, but it was right. lol
 Thanks

I can confirm I see this behavior with BTCGuild. The difficulty on those mining proxies are all set to 1024 (by BTCGuild - I have no control), so your miners can sometimes have minutes and minutes without finding any blocks. This should in theory not cause problems over the long term, but because of the way PPLNS work, I can imagine it being an issue with statistic reporting.

PPS servers like Eligious work fine with that level of difficulty though.

Wow, Now I understand and that Difficulty is set for 1+TH/s and above. Thanks

I've not gotten around to decommissioning yet. I'll decommission on the 27th.

Here are the steps to create your own Azure gateway.

I'll show by example of how I would create westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net, port 8332 which connects to BTCGuild. My values will be within []'s. Substitute with your values when more appropriate.

1) Go to www.azure.com and create an account. You can get a free trial account
2) Enter the azure portal (on www.azure.com)
3) On the left of the portal, select 'Virtual Machines'
4) Click "+" at the bottom to create a new Virtual Machine
5a) Click through: Compute \ Virtual Machine \ Quick Create
5b) DNS Name = [westcoastbtc]
5c) Image = Windows Server 2012  (you can host on Linux as well if you're familiar with it. I'm not listing the instructions for that below.)
5d) Size = Extra Small (enough for 10 blades. You can upgrade later)
5e) User name = [shrek]
5f) Password = [donkey]
5g) Region = [West US]
6) Click 'Create a Virtual' machine and have a [beer] until it's done.

7) Click on your new server, and go to Endpoints
8) Click 'Add' to create a new endpoint
9) Add a Stand-Alone endpoint
10a) Name = [BTCGuild]
10b) Protocol = 'Tcp'
10c) Public Port = [8332]
10d) Private Port = same as 10c. [8332]
11) Click the checkmark to add it

12) Go back to the Dashboard
13) Click 'Connect'. There will be 2 popups, one from Azure, and one from your browser. Click 'Ok' on the azure one, and open your browser one (this is a Remote Desktop Client shortcut).
14) Enter 5e/5f from above for username & password

15) On the Server itself, go into 'Windows Firewall with Advanced Security'
16) Click 'Inbound Rules'
17) New Rule
18a) Port
18b) TCP
18c) Specific local ports = [8332]
19) Click Next
19a) Allow the connection.
20) Click Next
20a) Applies to 'Domain', 'Private', 'Public'
20b) Click Next
21) Name = 'BTCGuild Port'

It should now be set up. Create a batch file with a shortcut, and run the following:

start "BTCGuild Proxy" mining_proxy.exe -o eu-stratum.btcguild.com -p 3333 -gp 8332

(The 'start "BTCGuild Proxy"' part is just because I have dozens of these and I want to customize the title in the taskbar. You can leave it out).

Thank You dbbit and Merry Christmas  :)

This service has now been shut down.

How would you go about making the proxy listen on port 80, but transmitting the work it receives over stratum to a selected pool on whatever port stratum is working on the pool?

I have a large network behind corporate firewalls, which I could bypass only with using port 80.
If I can set up a proxy server listening for connections on port 80, I could redirect the mining power over to a necessary port and push it to the pool.

How would I go about that?

Take my steps above and change 8332 everywhere to 80.

I don't know if that will work for sure however (never tried) - a corporate firewall generally closely monitors port 80 traffic, if not just doing an HTTP proxy across it. So not sure what your firewall will think about the GetWork protocol.

But worth a try.

I am working on a solution on this. Keep an eye out . :o

Thank you so much for that Windows Azure tutorial! I'm having gut-wrenching trouble with my cube and blades restarting every few minutes, I heard some people got it fixed by using your cloud proxy so I'm excited about giving it a try on my own.