Bitcoin Forum

Hi everybody,

There are many guides on how to setup azure-servers for mining cryptocurrency. However, this one is different. If you follow this guide, you'll get these features:

• 5 minutes to setup
• After setup, it will run indefinitely - no need to even log in to azure after the initial setup (you'll need a MSDN-subscription with monthly free credits, though)
• Attractive hashrate - currently i get sustained 8 kH/s for my 150$ monthly free credits (check whattomine.com (http://whattomine.com) to see the potential payoff - note that this will change with the market-conditions, though)

So how is this possible? Well, first of all we'll be using the low-priority batch service to keep the cost down. Like this we can have several servers running for the complete month. After one month, your new monthly credits will arrive, leaving your servers and the complete setup running indefinitely.
 
The setup of the azure severs is so easy and fast because i already did the hard work for you: On my website (link see below) i have created some handy javascript which takes your wallet as input and spits out your personal customized startup-script for the azure-batch-service.

Lastly, the hashrate is so high because the script has a clever self-tuning feature which will adapt itself to the load of the physical server azure places your virtual machines on. If you are lucky, you'll have lots of idling neighboring VMs, and then the mining-software will be able to employ more of the precious L3-Cache of the Server.

Here's the link to the complete guide for mining Monero:
https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html)
Everything is hosted on github. Check out the code if you have any doubts about the function of the script!

If you are interested in other Cryptonight or Cryptonight-Heavy-Coins, see this link: https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html)

I have been mining like this since the beginning of 2018. So far, the azure-VMs have been running smoothly without any problem (unlike the VMs from google's or amazon's cloud-service, which apparently get automatically shutdown once they detect that you are mining cryptocurrency).

If you have any questions or problems feel free to PM me or reply in this thread.

---

Extra info: How to add a worker-ID. The procedure depends on the used pool (check the pool's documentation to find out more). If your pool is already running, you'll have to restart the nodes in your pool for the changes to take effect.
1. supportXMR.com (or similar pools expecting the worker-ID in the password-field)
The detailed script-generator has a field which will be passed on to the pool as the password. You can enter your worker-ID there.
2. xmrpool.eu (or similar pool expecting the ID as part of the wallet)
The pool expects the worker-ID as a suffix to the wallet. Check the pool's documentation to find out the exact format. xmrpool.eu expects a "+"-sign. This can be directly entered into the wallet-field in the html-form on my website. So instead of just putting e.g.

into the form, you would enter the string
into the form. With the generated startup-script you'll have the worker-ID "superhash".
3. Using the Azure-Pool-Name as worker-id: There are some pre-defined variables that you can also use:

• ${AZ_BATCH_POOL_ID}    : The name of the azure-pool used
• ${AZ_BATCH_ACCOUNT_NAME}    : The name of the azure-batch-account used
• ${AZ_BATCH_NODE_ID}   : The name of the azure-pool-node. Typically this is a complicated name with some special characters. Use at your own risk!

Have look at the script generated by the quickstart-guide for an example how to use the  variable ${AZ_BATCH_POOL_ID}.

---

Extra Info: Troubleshooting
Most problems can be diagnosed by looking at the output of the mining-software (xmrig). To see the output, go to your pool, then click on "Nodes" on the left pane (Note that it's normal that all nodes have the state "waiting for start-task" - that's due to the way the script works). The list of the nodes in your pool should appear, click on the node that is making trouble (or any of them if e.g. you have a hashrate of 0). At the bottom of the page you can see a list of the files on your node. The following files are interesting (enter the name into the search-box to filter the list)

• startup/wd/xmrig/build/logfile.txt  (output of xmrig)
• startup/stdout.txt   (output of the control-script)
• startup/stderr.txt   (output of the control-script)

Some problems (like connection-problems to your pool) will be obvious when reading the output of xmrig. Otherwise you can post the relevant parts here and i will try to help you.

---

Full disclosure: The donation-level of the mining-software used is set to 4%. Half of this (2%) is going to the developers of the mining-software (xmrig), the other half is going to my pocket. You can view this as a convenience-fee for getting a tested and streamlined mining-script.

P.S.: Be aware that you need Azure-credits from a legitimate source, otherwise you will get banned.

Edit: added info about Sumokoin
Edit2: added info about workerid
Edit3: some more info about workerid: pre-defined variables
Edit4: added info about troubleshooting
Edit5: update info about troubleshooting, add link to NIM-script
Edit6: updated info about potential hashrate after the October-2018-fork
Edit7: some minor edits
Edit8: some minor edits
Edit9: removed option for mining NIM

Just read the 3d over you :

it says:
Cloud services doesn't belong here!

Its pinned by the admin so you know what's going to happen

:)

I assume that "Cloud services doesn't belong here!" refers to services like hashflare... Note that what i am describing in this post is very different. Also i have seen several guides for setting up azure in this very subforum, so i honestly believe i am not breaking any rules here.

Agree, The rules referring to the 3rd party cloud mining services, what OP want to point out is your own cloud mining and totally different

@OP, how does it differ if we could use other mining app out there compared to yours? 4% is a bit high for the fees

This is how to setup own mining pool based azure.Youtube have many instruction and free.

Yes, there are some other guides on the web and on youtube. However, so far i have not seen a guide which gives you the following features:

• Super-easy setup: other guides are much more complicated. Also, because the batch-service is used, you can easily adjust the number of desired VMs to the amount of free credits you have (no need to setup individual VMs)
• Zero maintenance effort: Since the other guides are not so cost-effective they expect you to restart your VMs every month (or they only talk about one-time signup-credit, not about monthly free credits from an MSDN-subscription). I believe this is the first guide which will produce a steady mining-income with zero-maintenance after the initial setup
• Last but not least you'll get a great hashrate. The script on my site has a auto-tune feature, which will adapt itself to the load present on the physical server. This is also something i have not seen anywhere else.

doesn't mean its worth 4 percent fee roflamo, unless your a super lazy cat and you've got money to toss around. 2 percent fee sure as that's the going rate for devs around here, but your requesting 4 percent indefinitely. there isn't any amount of work you could do that would be worth it at 4 percent. nothing more than a greedy prick like the rest and danm does it show


tbh you should have kept it to yourself, now you've let the word out so maybe Microsoft azure will pick up the ball quick and realize people like are doing and follow suite like google and others. people like yourself give crypto a bad name just for the sake of a few extra bucks at everyone else's expense, like the people actually paying for azure services and using them for a legit purpose without affecting other people on a server in which other vm's are running. this is why google and others don't deal with crypto, straight up abuse of there shit

Just to be clear: this includes the 2% dev-fee going to the developers. I definitely don't want to rip off the developers.
Also, i try to be very upfront about the increased fee. Nobody is forcing you to do this. If you are already making full use of your azure-account then my guide probably is not for you.

And about keeping it to myself: mining in azure has been going on for some years now. I'm pretty sure Microsoft is fully aware of the situation. If they wanted to change things, they would have done so long ago.

I am going to try this and if it really gives anything close to 1600 H/s then the 4% fee is well worth it!

OK, great. Just remember that there are some options to tweak your setup at the end of the guide. The main tip is to create multiple azure-batch-pools with fewer nodes instead of a single azure-batch-pool with many nodes. You'll have to click a bit more to setup everything but in my experience the increase in hashrate is worth it.
 

Good job!
Setup done and has been running for about 45 minutes.
No tweaking has been done and running 10 nodes in one pool.
Currently doing around 1.8 KH/s which is great.
Will report back with hashrate after a few hours.

1 Hour Avg. Hash Rate = 1.66 KH/s

;D Thanks for taking the time to try it out. I'm happy to hear that it's working for you.

Hi Everybody,

I'm thinking of adding support for Sumokoin to my script-generator (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html)).
I'm interested in Sumokoin because it has good privacy features like Monero, but due to the current low price the chances of a huge speculative gain seem to be much higher than with Monero (this is my personal opinion and not a investment advice).

What do you think? Is anybody here interested in mining Sumokoin with my scripts?

I think it would be great if you add support for other Cryptonight coins.

i used up my azure trial and do not have the free monthly credits... can this be done on aws or any other free cloud services?

I have seen that many people are selling MSDN-accounts with free credits very cheap (50$ or even less) right here in this forum (see  Bitcoin Forum > Economy > Marketplace > Goods > Digital goods. Search for "MSDN invite"). If it works out then you'll earn back the 50$ after just one month (i have no experience with azure-accounts acquired this way - there is always a chance that you get scammed or that azure will shut you down).

Otherwise the script should work on any Ubuntu 16.04-Server (later versions will probably work as well). If there's no option to pass a startup-script to the VM while you are creating it you would need to connect to the server through ssh and start the script this way (of course that's a bit cumbersome if you want to run multiple servers).
However, from what i have heard AWS and other providers are very quick to shut down the servers once they detect that they are used for mining.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll make a post here when i add the feature.

Just a hint if one of you is having trouble setting up the VMs in the azure-portal: apparently the azure-portal does not like firefox and will give strange errors when setting up the pools. I recommend using chrome for logging in to the azure-portal.

Update: I have updated the script and the script-generator to support Sumokoin (SUMO) as well. The additional option is available on the website intended for advanced users:
https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html)

(My other site https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html) has the quickstart-instructions, but has set Monero as default-currency.)

Other currencies based on Cryptonight-V7 or Cryptonight-Heavy should also work.  jdoi made a nice overview:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3129218.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3129218.0). I have personally only tested Sumokoin, though. I'm getting around 55H/s per Core for Cryptonight-Heavy. This would result in 1100 H/s if one would use the free credits from an MSDN-Enterprise-subscription to mine Sumokoin.

I did not bother making an option for the original cryptonight-algo because the profitability is a joke since the asics are available.

If you have any problems getting it to work feel free to PM me or write a reply in this thread. 

Great update thanks!

One person asked me about using nicehash by email, so i thought i'll share the information here.

The good news is that mining to a nicehash-pool is as easy as pasting your nicehash-wallet and the nicehash-server cryptonightv7.usa.nicehash.com:3363 into the advanced script-generator at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html) and then following the rest of the guide as normal. Nicehash will pay you in bitcoin, which might be an advantage if that's the cryptocurrency you're interested in. (Technical information: the script-generator will detect if you enter a nicehash-server and it will then automatically set the nicehash-flag in XMR-Stak's configuration).

The bad news is the high difficulty of the nicehash-servers. Unless you configure a node-size of 8 or even 16 cores, you won't be able to consistently submit a new share before nicehash bans you for being inactive. Unfortunately, using bigger nodes will net you a much smaller hashrate (compared to setting up a bigger number of small nodes. Running a single 16-core-VM has almost the same price as running 16 VMs with one core each). So in the end i think it is more profitable to just mine Monero and then exchange the mined coins to bitcoin on cryptopia.

 

Hi everybody,

github tells me that 4 people have forked my github repository with the mining scripts... wow, i've never felt so popular ;D

But seriously people: if you feel you really need to set the donation-level to 0%, at least have the decency to make your one-off donation to the authors of xmr-stak. Their donation-wallet is at the bottom of their github-page: https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak  (https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak)

I can only mine for several days and got my subscription disabled, both on my free trial account and pay as you go

salt and recompile XMR-stak.   Change it enough, they won't have a detection vector.

I bet running xmr-stak throws up a huge red flag.

Hi VaynardW,
that's strange. I've been running my VMs without break for several months now, and so far there was no problem. I have also signed up for a free trial account (independent from the azure-account linked to my MSDN-subscription) and i could use up the 200$ free credits without any problem.

You write you "got your subscription disabled". Are you talking about a MSDN-subscription or about the azure-account? And what do you mean by "disabled"? Is your account gone completely (i.e. you can't login anymore) or did MS just stop all running VMs?

Yeah, if they really wanted they could have some spyware running in each VM to detect blacklisted processes. However, as a customer i would find this a bit invasive (even if i don't intend to run any of the blacklisted programs). So i am not really convinced that their detection works like that. Azure could also do some checks along the lines of "IF the cpu-load is 100% AND there are tcp-connections to known mining-pools THEN assume that the VM is used for mining". For this kind of detection no internal access to the VM would be necessary (and changing the miner-binary would not help at all).

Do you have experience with changing the binary in such a case? Did it actually help?

My keep IDLE status all the time.

Follow all the step.

Not sure anything wrong ...

I guess that you mean to say that in the azure-portal you can see that all nodes are in the state "IDLE". This is normal. The idea of the batch-service is that the users have tasks that get passed on to the nodes. "IDLE" means that the nodes have booted up and are ready to accept such a task. However, we are using the batch-service a little different. For mining, all we have is the startup-task, which will do the actual mining and will run indefinitely.
So instead of checking the node-state you should check your pool's dashboard. If you can see in the dashboard that your miners are active and submitting shares then everything is OK.

After try to SSH to one node and run "top" I could see the miner running, but nothing on pool side.

Need to investigate more tmr.

I have many of Azure account which running NH with NV6 VM now, how could 10 nodes with 20 cores total just use 150$ for a month ? Very interesting ...

If you connect to the VM through ssh, you can use the command
to have a look at the file /mnt/batch/tasks/startup/stdout.txt (you'll have to scroll down quite a bit to get to the interesting part).  If the miner is actually doing something, then you should see the periodic hashrate-report. Otherwise there should be some error-message visible there.

Please post here again if that does not fix the problem.

And the low price is really true! With the batch-service 20 low-priority cores will cost you just a little less than 150$!

After delete all old ResoureGroups and do it again, thing done well now !

http://prntscr.com/jhs21p

I will looking at the bill to see if it really cost lest than 150$ ;)

If possible please add some options to the script : wokername and email to notify.

Thank you for the script.

I'm glad to hear that it's working for you. Thanks for the suggestion about the workername. I'll write up the options for adding a workername in a later post.

So far so good !!!

http://prntscr.com/ji6sfi

Running 3 subscriptions now.

If you look at this :

http://prntscr.com/ji70ng

M60 can run ZEC at 320H/s or lyra2v2 at 26MH/s, plus 6 CPU

May be we can get something better than 20 CPU core to mine XMR ?

When i started setting up the scripts i experimented with the GPU-VMs from Azure. The GPU of course is capable of a higher hashrate, but it is also more expensive. I found that in the end the profit is approximately the same, but setting it up is by far more difficult. For the GPU to work i have to install some external NVIDIA CUDA-packages and reboot the VM a few times. Setting it up was a fight even with the official guide from azure.
I checked the hashrates you gave at whattomine.com and it did not show a higher profit than Monero (assuming 1600H/S), even if you take into account the extra 6 CPUs. I know profit-calculators are not really exact... do you think that the numbers are so far off that in the end using the GPU would yield a better result than CPU-mining?

Are you talking about actual MSDN-subscriptions with free monthly azure-credit, not just one-off Azure-accounts? May i ask you how you got the 3 subscriptions?

anyone know of a good, reputable source to get the MSDN accounts? All the peeps selling accounts on BCT seem like fraudsters...

I'm trying to find a decent seller, but I can't find a good one to buy an account, I tried everything

With this tut, no-one will sell sub at that cheap rate !!!



I have some free account (about 150 but MS has blocked a lot of them)
Yes I use NV6 for more than a year (~2$-3$/day from ZEC and XZC/ZOI but will out of credit after 6days )
Now it hard to get NV6 with new AZ Sub, this tut should make me rich again ;)

http://prntscr.com/ji9mcz

Will change all to XMR this weekend.

what happens when there is no more monero to mine?

XZC, ZOI ....

Many CPU coin still there ;)

just an after thought;  if you are worried about them monitoring your traffic to known mining sites;  just use a VPN service for any of its connections ;)

I was talking about the azure account, the VMs defintely stopped, I can still login, the batch service is still there, but it displays "No Access" when i try to access Pools menu, I also cant add a new pools. and with the subscription disabled, i cant choose any subscription to create a new group

I'll try the support today

Thanks for the update. When you get a reply from the support, please share it here.

Yes, that's a good idea. I'm putting this on my to-do-list...

Hi,

Any update about WokerName yet ?

It's hard to know which account is running low hash.

http://prntscr.com/jigxn1

http://prntscr.com/jigxn1

I added a paragraph about the worker-ID in the initial post. As always: if you have trouble getting it to work just post a message here.

It's impossible to find how to obtain an Azure account with 150 usd credits

workername... try adding ".worker" after your wallet address in config script
e.g. 4999aeniCU9Ug67vs7yvyJTSkxVUZRirUYUerT66fqzoYMhiShFLBqZHmFxmPD6oABafM5cVKc77yyy yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.worker

or change password.

Thanks for trying to help, but in this case it works a little different. Have a look at the first post in this thread, i already put a description how to set the worker-ID there.

Great work !

Is it possible to get workername as same as pool name or subscription ID/name ?

Or even set a name same as vm name like this :

Initially i also thought of doing something with the VM-name. But would that really be useful? Sometimes the nodes get switched off (cheap low-priority-nodes), azure might assign a new name to the node when it comes back. Also, the names do not seem to indicate the pool the node belongs to.
Using the pool-name sounds like a better idea. I'll have to research whether the script can actually somehow get access to the name of the pool. I'll have a look at it (it might take some more time until i can implement this).

Update: After reading this post (https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/8jbaqd/psa_use_backup_pools_in_your_mining_config/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/8jbaqd/psa_use_backup_pools_in_your_mining_config/)) i added a backup-server for supportXMR in my script-generator at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html)
In order to take advantage of the backup-server you'll have to re-generate your startup-script, replace the old startup-script in the azure-settings and re-start your pool. Existing startup-scripts will of course continue to work. There is no immediate need to act, this is just a precautionary measure.

If you want to use a different pool than supportXMR.com you can use my advanced script-generator at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html). There you can manually define your backup-server.

A weird coincidence... apparently supportXMR.com is under a DDoS-Attack right now:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/8kksag/whats_up_with_supportxmr/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/8kksag/whats_up_with_supportxmr/)
However, as far as i can tell really only the dashboard of the pool is affected, the mining is still going on normally. This also means that adding a backup-server as suggested in my previous post will not change anything (from the point of view of the mining-software everything is ok since the shares get accepted and it will continue just working with the primary server).

Ok, the attack on supportXMR seems to be over. As far as i can see things work normally again.

How many hash did you get already ? ;)

I'm moving to MPH, seem better luck ...

I am satisfied with the performance of supportXMR. Since i am just burning my free credits from azure i don't need to optimize for the last few %.
But then... how much better is Mining Pool Hub? Is it really worthwhile switching?

(MPH = Mining Pool Hub ?)

I think it's about 2-3% better, enough to cover the script fee, LOL, ;)

I'm also use MPH with XZC and ETC, so auto-exchange support with MPH work great in some cases ...

Update: There is now an option to use the pool-name as the worker-ID. I have updated the quickstart-instructions to do this automatically, i.e. if you create a new startup-script with the quickstart-instructions your miner will use the azure-pool's name as the worker-id.
 
If you are using my detailed-script, there are some variables which let you configure the worker-id any way you want:

• ${AZ_BATCH_POOL_ID}    : The name of the azure-pool used
• ${AZ_BATCH_ACCOUNT_NAME}    : The name of the azure-batch-account used
• ${AZ_BATCH_NODE_ID}   : The name of the azure-pool-node. Typically this is a complicated name with some special characters. Use at your own risk!

Just place one of these variables where you would normally put the worker-id, and when the miner is started it will get replaced with the corresponding content. You can have a look at the script generated by the quickstart-instructions to see an example for using the variable ${AZ_BATCH_POOL_ID}.

Info about SUMO:
In case you haven't already heard it, the SUMO-devs have decided to rebrand their coin. The new name will be RYO. See here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sumokoin/comments/8kgzpf/sumokoins_new_branding_introducing_ryo/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/sumokoin/comments/8kgzpf/sumokoins_new_branding_introducing_ryo/)
https://www.reddit.com/r/sumokoin/comments/8ltt57/rebranding_update_1/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/sumokoin/comments/8ltt57/rebranding_update_1/)
 ???
What do i think of RYO? Well, for me at least RYO will always be that guy from Street Fighter...

FYI: I have added some information about connecting to a node of your pool in the original post. After connecting, you can view the output of the mining-software (xmr-stak). This is useful when diagnosing problems.

I ended up getting about 13 sumo coins after about 4 days of mining.  hashrate was around 2000 h/s and I think I also used close to $100 of the $200 free credits.

And then.... Banned!  Yep, I totally got banned for violating terms of service.  Hope this doesn't mess with my MCSE certification!  lol

Did azure give you some more details what behavior exactly they didn't like?

Nope, not at all.  I just got an email that said I violated the terms of service.  And they even sent me two separate emails about it.  One for the announcement and then a second email to tell me the exact date they would cancel.  From the email:

We’ve disabled your subscription

We detected a violation of our service terms, so we’ve disabled your subscription and services.

If you think this is in error, please contact Azure Support for assistance.

all you have to do is:

re-encode your application/miner to give zero output.  only return flags with program closure is an optimal config.  Be sure to build a single binary.  Incorporate all libraries.

Have it bitstream logs with your mining data to a FTP text file for monitoring if that's your thing.

obfuscate the miner app heavily. 
and most importantly:  Add the salt.    [you know what im talking about.... things like pages 13-69 of encyclopedia written in code form, encase the program in this nested code, but allow them to interact with junk variables.  simple intergers, add or subtract.... KISS]

have all data traffic from the machine salted with more traffic to a proxy that you control via a SSL tunnel;  do NOT let them decipher your data in any way..  Have that traffic be ~30x the normal traffic as mining would be.

Have the balls to generate an rsa key >8000 for this communication.... but 4096 personally generated keys can suffice if you up the salt.   Even the government would be scratching their heads trying to decipher your data in any reasonable amount of time.   The altered datastream to the proxy could be infinitely clever.

Unless "utilizing what you pay for" is violation of terms... they have ZERO to hold against you.....


And the steps are all pretty much trivial if you know what you are doing.




I remember when people were doing the free amazon AWS 'free' trial bots that would replicate infinitely......

I was looking for the azure-ToS, and on the website this chat-windows pops up. So i start chatting:


After reading the ToS i come to the same conclusion as the chat-agent: mining (or having 100% CPU-load for any other purpose) is not specifically forbidden.

To the people who actually got banned from azure: Are you sure that the supposed breach of the ToS was not related to the way you have created your account? Maybe you had multiple accounts, phoney credit-card-numbers, obvious fake names, etc?

All i can say is that so far i never had this kind of problem, and i've been mining non-stop for over 6 months now. However, when signing up i also made a point to only use legit information (real name, real address, etc. ). Maybe that is the difference?

My Azure credits has run out last month and I now need to start the script again.
How and where do I start it manually?

Once your free credits run out azure will delete your pools. To restart you'll have to setup everything again, just follow the guide at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html) from the point where the creation of the pools is described.
Note that this only happens if you create too many nodes in your pool... if you set the number of nodes according to the table in my guide your azure-credits will last the whole month and it will just keep on running forever.

Understood thanks

So the "official" Sumo-team has decided to stop the rebranding to RYO and change the algo back to normal CN (i.e. support ASIC):
https://www.reddit.com/r/sumokoin/comments/8npdvf/official_announcement_hardfork_happening_update/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/sumokoin/comments/8npdvf/official_announcement_hardfork_happening_update/)
The algo-change is scheduled for monday (4th of June 2018).

If you are currently mining SUMO with my script, i advise you to switch to some other currency as soon as possible! Your miners won't be able to mine SUMO after monday!

If you don't mine SUMO (e.g. if you mine Monero), then you are not affected by this change and you don't have to change anything.
I am currently working on updating the scripts to the new situation (i won't support the old CN-algo, though... profitability just won't be worthwhile due to the asics).

I have updated the scripts and the script-generator. Now there are 3 options on the site https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html):

• Monero (CryptonightV7): Use this option for mining Monero. I will always update the scripts/xmr-stak so that there will be uninterrupted Monero-mining with this setting (updates are required because Monero is planning to keep on changing the PoW to fight off ASICs)
• Generic CryptonightV7: Use this options for other CNv7-Coins. Or for multi-coin-pools like moneroocean.stream or miningpoolhub.com(?)
• Generic Cryptonight-Heavy: Use this options for other CN-Heavy-Coins

Personally, right now i am trying out moneroocean.com (multi-coin for increased profitability) and LOKI (just to test the CN-Heavy-performance). I'll report my experience in a later post.

If you have a previously generated startup-script it will of course continue to work.

I have been mining with 10 VMs each at supportXMR and MoneroOcean. While after ca. 2 days MoneroOcean was ahead by almost 50%, by now (after 4 days) the difference has shrunk to around 15%:

• supportXMR: 0.034 XMR
• MoneroOcean: 0.039 XMR

MoneroOcean automatically switches to the cryptonight-coin with the highest profitability. The mined coins are then converted to XMR and payed to the miners (i.e. for the miners it works like a normal XMR-pool).

If you want to try MoneroOcean, you'll have to select the option "Generic CryptonightV7"-Option before creating the startup-script at  https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html).

Note that Monero is planning to do frequent PoW-changes to fight off the Asics - if you are mining at MoneroOcean an update of the startup-script might be required when the PoW changes (if you are mining at supportXMR it is guaranteed that the startup-script will keep on working even if the PoW changes).  

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with MoneroOcean in any way, i have just started trying it out for myself.

Update with the latest number from my supportXMR/MoneroOcean-comparision after around 10 days of mining:

• supportXMR: 0.079 XMR
• MoneroOcean: 0.084 XMR

My conclusion: using MoneroOcean seems to be in fact more profitable, but only very slightly. It's hard to say in how far other factors like pool-luck play a role here. Anyway, For now I'll keep mining at both pools.

I have been mining with azure for 10 days, haven't received the ban hammer yet.  But they did limit my hashrate down to 10% speed, after just 30mins of mining.  

Understood thanks

I'm curious now... as far as i know azure has no way of throttling VMs. Are you sure that you selected the F2-type VM? Could you go to the azure-portal and there check the status-page of your azure-pool? Maybe your VMs where pre-empted (i.e. they are not running, but you won't get charged for them either). The VMs should go back online as soon as azure has free capacity again, but maybe something went wrong and your nodes somehow got stuck in the pre-empted state. Maybe you could try resetting your pool: set the number of low-prio-nodes to 0, click save (it will take a minute or so until the pool is actually sized to 0). Then you can again set you desired number of low-prio-nodes (e.g. 10 if you have an enterprise subscription).

I have been connecting to the VM via putty 24/7 since I created them, together with the other 5 vms on other services provider, all of them are hashing.  I can see it is running but I might try restarting just to see.  None of them is throttling except the azure one and I am running " Standard F4s (4 vcpus, 8 GB memory) "

That's very odd, because so far azure has never restricted their service to me, no matter how badly i abuse the VMs...
How do you know that the VM is throttled? From the stats on the mining-pool's dashboard? Or from the output of xmr-stak (periodic hashrate-report)? Or from the cpu-load indicated by top?
Maybe i can develop a workaround if you give me more information.

I am mining NIM with it,  I can see from their dashboard that I am still using 70-80% cpu.  But for the first 0.5 - 1 hour my hashrate was 3-4 kh/s and after that it dropped significantly to 0.35kh (from putty and pool report).  Another reason I think it is throttled is because my orcale vms are 1 core 7.5gb ram, and they are hashing from 3.5 to 7 khs.  I will restart now and take a closer look .

I think I mixed up :P
Azure stopped my mining app after 1 hour, the reported low hashrate is from aws and I mixed up the two of them haha.  So it seems GCS and Oracle are the better ones I think, for miners.

From what i can google NIM does not seem to use CryptonightV7. So you didn't use my guide and setup the mining with azure yourself, right? If this is the case, may i suggest that you try my guide at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html)?

It seems going your route with monero is much more profitable.  So in my case I should delete my current F4, and set up a batch account.
I have to stated that I am also using Orcale and Amazon and so far no problem with the ban hammer.  And GCS too which I used up all the credit already.

updated, followed your script, been running for 5 mins only, hashrate so far 400 h/s but rising.  I will let it run for a few hours and report back.

I am getting roughly 300-400h/s in average, from your github page it seems that I should run 1 pool with 3 cores only (because of the credit limit)?  And how do you get 1600 h/s with that?  My free account is valid for 1 month and it has $150 credit, it seems that if I upgrade to pay as you go , I will be able to hold my free credit to next month.  I think I will upgrade and create 1, or 2 more pools to boost up hashrate, or am I doing something wrong with my setup?

During the extreme price-spike beginning of this year there was a short time-window where mining on your credit-card was actually profitable. Right now (as far as i know) you'll need free azure-credits in order to earn money. There are two main ways how to get free credits to spend on azure:

• If you have a MSDN-subscription (from your day-time-job, i.e. it is paid by the company you work for). Depending on the subscription-type you'll get up to 150$ monthly credit (with that you can afford a pool with 10 F2-VMs which will get you 1600H/s).
• If you open a new azure-account. Then you'll get 150$ credit (but once that's used up, it's gone...).

Obviously, getting the monthly free credits from a MSDN-subscription is much better than just getting the one-off-credit from opening the azure-account. And the more free credits you have, the more VMs can mine for you.

From what you have written it seems that you have just opened a "normal" azure-account with a one-off balance of 150$ azure-credit (i.e. you don't have an MSDN-subscription). I think i read somewhere that the free credits are valid only for the first month... so i would suggest you try to use up your credits within the first month. For your case the table with the suggested number of nodes on my website is not applicable (you just want to spend your credits as fast as possible instead of staying within a monthly budget). Instead you should create as many pools with as many nodes as possible. If you hit the low-priority-quota, you can start creating pools in other regions.
If you have already activated pay-as-you-go of course you should keep an eye on the accumulated cost. Once you reach the 150$, you want to disable all pools and basically shut down your azure-account.

You can also try buying a MSDN-subscription, there are some guys in this forum selling logins for cheap... but i don't know  whether that really works. You might get scammed or azure might ban your account.

Thanks for clarifying.  I think I have the one time only, will look into buying msdn (need further due diligence on this so maybe later).  But for now, I have set up 2 pools Total 10 cores as this is the limit in server location.  I have tried deleting and setting up 2nd pool for couple of time but it never show up on mining pool.   https://www.supportxmr.com  Only showing my initial pool with 3 cores, so I am currently only mining with 3xx h/s.  I even tried setting new pool on another location but that doesn't work either, supportxmr never show more than one miner operating.

Did you check the pool-status in the azure-portal? Maybe you have reached the quota for the low-priority-cores. Otherwise all running cores should be mining, and this in turn should be visible on the dashboard of your mining-pool. There could also be a problem with your startup-script, but since you can see that at least one of your pools is running well, i assume that that is ok.

The script is good I think, like you said the first one is running and I am using the same script on second pool.  When I set both of the pool to 3 nodes Azure will give me warning on reaching limit, I am setting it to 3 nodes and 2 nodes, using 10 cores in total and no warning with this setup.  Still only one miner on mining pool.

And you really can't see a increase in the hashrate? You can connect to the nodes to find out what is wrong (see also my very first post in this thread):

---

Extra Info: Troubleshooting
Most problems can be diagnosed by looking at the output of the mining-software (xmr-stak). To see the output, you first have to connect to the node. In the azure-portal, go to your pool, then click on "Nodes" on the left pane. The list of the nodes in your pool should appear, click on the node that is making trouble (or any of them if  e.g. you have a hashrate of 0). Then, on the top pane, click "Connect". Fill a username and password and enable admin-rights (the default-value of the expiry-time never works for me - i always just put this a few days in the future).Then click on "OK".
If you are running linux on your desktop actually connecting is really simple: just copy the displayed ssh-commandline to a terminal. If you are running windows you'll have to use putty (you'll just have to fill the displayed server-details. Post in this thread if you need help with this).
Once your ssh-connection is running, type
You'll have to scroll down a bit get to the log from xmr-stak. Some problems (like connection-problems to your pool) will be obvious when reading the log. Otherwise you can post the relevant parts here and i will try to help you.

---

Your previous post indicates that you know how to use PuTTY for the SSH-connection... otherwise please post here and i'll try to help you.

Hi everybody,
As i have posted here before, besides XMR i am also mining smaller coins. The idea is that for small coins there's a potential for huge gains in the exchange rate if the small coin introduces interesting new features or has clever marketing.
However, i am always suspicious of the different wallet-software offered by the projects. The coin itself might be a scam or their repo might get hacked and the wallet-software might get infected with a trojan. Naturally, it's not feasible for me to do a through code-audit for this type of software.

So this is my solution to the problem of keeping many different wallet-software on my computer:
You'll need:

• a big harddrive, 1TB or more. (This is only relevant if your computer only has a small SSD... if that's the case, you'll need to upgrade)
• a fast internet-connection. For downloading the blockchains of the coins a faster connection is always better

As a basic mechanism to separate the wallet-software from each other and from the rest of my system i use virtual machines. For this purpose the free version of virtualbox (https://www.virtualbox.org/ (https://www.virtualbox.org/)) is working well enough. As a operating system i use fedora linux (https://getfedora.org/ (https://getfedora.org/)... it's very fashionable to complain about windows 10, but unless people stop using it MS will just continue with this shit). Setup the VM to use 4 CPU-cores. Create a virtual HDD with at least 150GB (dynamically allocated, i.e. it actually won't use that much space on your physical harddrive). Don't make the virtual HDD too small, increasing the space later is complicated. After installing fedora, i then take a snapshot of the virtual machine. Then i'll clone a new virtual machine from this snapshot for each wallet software.
This way, even if one wallet-software is infected with a trojan, the trojan cannot access my other wallets in the other virtual machines.

Anyone else having issues?
On SupportXMR my hashrate is 0 and no workers are active for the last 24 hours or so.

I checked on my Azure portal and I have not run out of credits.

Under pools:

Pool usage
1/20 (5%)

Job and job schedule usage
0/100 (0%)

Dedicated cores usage
0/20 (0%)

Low priority cores usage
16/20 (80%)


Any ideas?

Strange. Without me doing anything it started working again.

Good to hear that the problem has disappeared. Anyway, in situations like this you can log in to one of your nodes and have a look at the log-file to find out more. I have described the procedure to do this in the first post in this thread.

Hi everybody,
FYI: after my azure-account was deactivated before the end of the month, i have found out that the batch-service in the "West US" and the "West US 2"-regions do in fact have different pricing... :o
Conclusion: If you are experimenting with the region-settings, make sure that you are checking the pricing of the exact region you are testing first.

Hi everybody,

FYI: I have updated the used xmr-stak-code to the latest version. I will probably update the next time in october in preparation for the next Monero network update.

Thanks AzureCloudMiningScript.
I am still mining strong on my Azure account :D

You're welcome  ;D

Actually we all have to thank Microsoft for being so generous with the free credits...

Yeah, i've been thinking of testing other coins besides XMR in order to find the most profitable thing.
Do you have personal experience mining NIM, especially with azure? What Hashrate can i expect on a server-class CPU? Which mining-software is your favorite?

How about Verus?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4070404.0

System requirements:
Mining and staking wallets are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Currently, you will require an Intel or AMD processor with AES and AVX instructions. Most Intel or AMD CPUs made within the past 5 or 6 years support these instructions. You can check yours specifically by running this free utility: https://www.cpuid.com/ or using the "lscpu" command on Linux.

CPU Mineable
Verus uses VerusHash, the fastest cryptographic hash algorithm in the world on x64 CPUs, equalizing GPUs and offering a credible ASIC solution.

Thanks for info. I am currently trying it out and will make a prototype for a azure-script-generator for NIM. Stay tuned!

The first version of the mining-script-generator for NIM is ready: check out https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_NIMIQ.html

Yes, it's still working. At the current exchange-rate you'll get around 50$ worth of cryptocurrency for 200$ in azure credits. You'll have to create two batch-pools in different regions in order to consume your 200$ free credits within one month.

Don't worry. Just start following the guide, after that the words will make sense to you. Then  you can create your second pool.

I believe the 200$ starting credit is valid only for the first month. Maybe you could double-check the conditions. Anyway, the amount of generated cryptocurrency will be the same, whether you spend 200$ in a single month or over a longer time-period.

yup, 200$ is only for 1st month, than you will need to pay, if you want to continue.

In my experience F2 will give the best hashrate per core (this is due to the way cryptonight works with the CPU-Cache - read my initial post to find out more about the autotune-feature of the script). In your case i would suggest setting up two pools (in different regions, e.g. "East" and "East 2") and using 10 instances of F2 each. Since you are just using the initial credit of 200$ you don't really care about the monthly cost, you just want to use it up within one month.

I’m having an issue getting the hash rate I want.

Am I suppose to have more than 1 batch? I currently have 2 batches on us west and us west central.

I have 5 pool IDs. Each one using only 1 node as I can only use a max of 10 cores. 1 node = 2 cores

What am I messing up??

I emailed you as well.

Hi impynick,

apparently azure has changed the default-quotas for new accounts.
Anyway, the number of batch-accounts and pools is not important, as long as the total number of instances adds up to your desired value (and you'll thus get the desired hashrate).
Basically, if azure does not let you increase the number of instances in a pool, just create an additional batch-account in another region and create the additional pool there (if i understand correctly you have already started doing this).
Typically maintaining everything is easier if you have fewer pools with many nodes instead of having lots of pools with fewer nodes, but the hashrate will be the same.

So to use up the starting credits you could use the following configuration:
Batch account "batch1" with pool "pool1" in region "East US" with 5 Nodes.
Batch account "batch2" with pool "pool2" in region "East US2" with 5 Nodes
Batch account "batch3" with pool "pool3" in region "West US2" with 5 Nodes.
This should give you a total of 30 cores, which should consume the 200$ within one month.

(you could also try creating an additional batch-account in North Central US, but i think there's also a limit of 3 batch-accounts. Anyway, even though this would increase your hashrate, you'll consume your credits faster - in the end the profit will be the same)

I can't find this info anywhere, can someone clue me in as to what type of hardware mines Nimiq the best?  I know its obviously a CPU, but is cache a factor?  Does having a processor with sha-512 increase hashrate?

I don't know the details, but i can tell you that at least for mining Nimiq in Azure the Fv2-type (skylake) will give a lot more performance than the F-type (Haswell). On the other hand, mining Monero works better on the F-type -> That's why i think i think it's less a question of the cache, it probably has to do with the instruction set.

Hello I saw your azure cloud mining bash script. Can you provide the xmr stak bash script for aws cloud mining too ?

I have not personally used my script with AWS, but one nice person has actually got it to work. He gave me these instructions:
Apparently there's some subtle difference in the way AWS and azure call the startup-scripts. So for now my script-generator won't work with AWS. However, you can use the template linked above to manually create your own script.

Note that i don't have a AWS-account (yet), so i can't really help you if you run into problems. But you can write a post here anyway, i'll do my best...

edit: added more detailed instructions and added information on how to use the startup-script

FYI: i have updated the previous post on how to work with AWS.

PSA: Monero will change its PoW on 18th of october (see https://np.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/9lcdme/preliminary_information_thread_regarding_the/)

The good news: for most configurations you don't have to do anything, i will update everything so things will just continue running.

However, if you are mining some coin other than Monero but you chose the setting "Monero (cryptonightv7)" instead of "generic cryptonight" when creating the script you should re-create the script with the option "generic cryptonight". This is because after the fork the setting "Monero" will actually mean "cryptonightv8, which will probably not work with you altcoin.
Also, if you are using MoneroOcean you will probably have to do something (as far as i know Monero is the only coin to change to cryptonightv8 so far - MoneroOcean's concept of coin-switching obviously only works if there are multiple coins with the same algo available).

(So far i have not yet updated the script because i am still waiting for the official release of the new version of xmr-stak.)

Hi everybody,

so looking at things post-fork i can say that everything went mostly well.
However, If you are using moneroOcean, your miners probably stopped working... as it turned out, in order to keep mining at MoneroOcean you have to use the setting "cryptonight_v8" -> just exchange the string "export currency=cryptonight_v7" with "export currency=cryptonight_v8" in your startup-script (currently you'll have to make the change manually... i will update the script-generator at the weekend). After restarting your pool (i.e. scale to 0 and then scale to the number of desired instances) it will work again.

Otherwise, is any of you having trouble after the fork? Please post here (or contact me via PM or email) and i'll help you.

Are you able to create an AWS script for this?

Have you tried the instructions from my earlier post?
Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3444898.msg46166083#msg46166083 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3444898.msg46166083#msg46166083)

Would I be able to create another account once my free one expires? I used up my 30 day credit but would love to get it back running agaain

I'm sorry, but as far as i know the only sustainable way of doing this is if you have a legit MSDN-account with free credits.

I have multiple hotmail accounts and office accounts?

Don't you have to enter a credit-card number at some point to upgrade to a paid-for-account? In my experience there's a high chance that your account will get banned if you are mining with a free account.

It's only reach 600-700H/acc now.
Any one have same issue ? after XMR fork.

Have you tried changing to a different region? I.E. if you are using East US, try East US2 instead. Also, make sure that you are really using the "F2"-Type instance (the similar-looking "F2s V2"-instances will give you a lower hashrate),

Yes, I've tried many location.
Max 1.3KH now but most of them is less than 800H.
Used to 1.8 - 2KH before fork.

http://prntscr.com/lgomsl

very good.

From what i have seen with my miners i suspect that this issue is region-specific, i.e. some regions just don't work so well anymore. Can you confirm this? (unfortunately the regions you are using are not visible from your screenshot)

Yes, I can confirm that some regions are bad now ie. West US 2
But hash also drop a lot for other regions. Seem not optimize good for CPU yet.

One tip for you, set huge-page enable to your script that also get more hash.
http://prntscr.com/lguowu

Literally starting fresh with mining today, and fancied. Basically I get like £120 per month free Azure credits through my company


mining monero btc faucet claim
https://love4youworld.blogspot.com
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaAv6fZkpJz2tvS0vtcaNoQ/videos
https://i.imgur.com/Z61V4Gh.png

So there was a bug in my autotune-feature for the thread-configuration. Apparently somehow this didn't have a noticeable effect with the pre-fork-algo, but since the fork the resulting hashrate is much worse.
So after fixing the bug the hashrate for 10 instances of F2 is back to around 1.4kH-1.6kH, and it does not seem to be dependent on the region so much anymore.

In order to activate the fix for your miners you can either restart your pool (scale to 0, then scale back to e.g. 10 instances) or you just wait for ca. 3 days (after running for 3 days the miners will fetch the latest version of the script from github).

Your new script seem good but may be need some more tune to get better hash.

Can you try to add this to the script :

"sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=128"


[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : Mining coin: monero
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : Starting 2x thread, affinity: 0.
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : hwloc: memory pinned
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : Starting 2x thread, affinity: 1.
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : MEMORY ALLOC FAILED: mmap failed, check attribute 'use_slow_memory' in 'config.txt'
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : MEMORY ALLOC FAILED: mmap failed, check attribute 'use_slow_memory' in 'config.txt'
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : hwloc: memory pinned
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : MEMORY ALLOC FAILED: mmap failed, check attribute 'use_slow_memory' in 'config.txt'
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : MEMORY ALLOC FAILED: mmap failed, check attribute 'use_slow_memory' in 'config.txt'
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : Fast-connecting to pool.supportxmr.com:5555 pool ...
[2018-11-12 01:41:41] : Fast-connecting to pool-ca.supportxmr.com:5555 pool ...

Yeah, i know about this issue. Actually, when i originally setup the script i did a lot of benchmarking to find out the optimal settings for the VMs in the azure-cloud. This hugepages-setting did not make any noticeable difference, so i did not bother including it in the script. I think this setting is mostly useful if you are mining on a real machine (maybe then you get that +20% hashrate that is mentioned on some mining-guides). Since with azure we are always inside a VM the effect is not there.
But you are right, the messages in the log from xmr-stak do not look good... since the setting also did not have a negative effect, i will include it in the script.
Thanks for your suggestion!

is there any script for google cloud?

Hashrate 1600 H/s according to whattomine.com calculator now gives 28 dollars a month without electricity during Monero mining. If a monthly subscription to the Azure service costs less, then this is a net benefit. I’ll probably try your way of mining.

here's a very rough guide how to set it up with the google cloud:

Create the instance template:
Settings:
Machine-type: 2vCPUs, 1.8Gb RAM  (i think 2vCPUs per Instance gives the best performance, but i have not yet tested it thoroughly)
Click on "Management, security, disks, networking, sole tenancy"   to open additional options
Preemptibility : On  (for less cost)

startup-script: -> insert here the generated script from my guide at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html

Leave the other options at the default.


Create Instance group
Settings:
instance.template: select the previously generated template
Autoscaling: off
Number of instances: enter the number of desired instances

Conclusion
For the "number of instances" i chose 10, but apparently there's some quota relating to IP-addresses, so it would only create 8 instances for me.
* Choose "Multi-Zone" when creating the instance-group -> this should make it easier for google to find free resources for your VMs
* From my testing ivy-bridge and broadwell get the best hashrate. I recommend using the region asia-east1, because that has the ivy-bridge-cpu-type as the default.
* I heard that google will ban you very fast if you are using a free account. For my personal testing-account, i have upgraded right away to the paid-version (this won't make your free credits expire, so it's no problem). After some weeks of mining i have not been banned yet.

For 8 instances with 2 cores (i.e. 16 cores total) i get around 700 H/s.

Actually it can not reach 1600H for almost account.
May be need some change from the dev xmr-stak.

Yes, the new algo after the fork apparently is a bit more difficult to calculate. From what i have read also the GPU-Miners experienced some drop in hashrate (and also the hashrate of the whole network went down).
I will update the information in the first post in this thread accordingly.
 

One more important thing that xmr-stak was recognized virus by MS when xmrig didn't ;)
It could be a reason that MS would block the account after some days running.

CPU v3 get better than v4.

http://prntscr.com/lk2gtk

http://prntscr.com/lk2hzh

Yeah, the F-instances (which are E5-2673 v3) indeed work better than the FsV2-instances, at least for monero.

(That's not true for all algos, btw. Nimiq-mining for example has better performance with the FsV2-type).

Some location have v4 CPU even with F2 Series.

Please add this to your scripts.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5086106.0

Conceal - Cryptonight-Fast

If i understand this correctly, this coin should work with the setting "Generic cryptonight_superfast" (use the extended script-generator at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html) ).
Did you already try that?

Hi,

I have tried your suggestion but it does not work.
Maybe because Conceal is cryptonight fast and your script is for cryptonight superfast?

Pool used: conceal.herominers.com
On the pool side only invalid shares:

Current Hash Rate: 0.00 H/sec
Last Share Submitted: Never
Total Hashes Submitted: 0
Shares:
0 Valid
103 Invalid

Please check if you can fix this?

Thanks

Ok, could you try again with the setting "Masari"?
I just tried it myself. Somehow herominers.com's dashboard just gives me a blank page, but at least i get the messages "Result accepted by the pool" in the console of the VM -> so i am pretty sure that it should work with the setting "Masari".

That worked thank you :)
The Herominers dashboard does not load on Chrome but loads on FF and Edge for me.

You're welcome  ;D

Hi everybody,

FYI: In preparation for the upcoming monero-fork i have updated the script to use the latest XMR-Stak. (the VMs will automatically get the updated script, there is no need for you to do anything).

There will probably be another optimized release of xmr-stak, i will update the script as soon as that will get available (again, you won't have to do anything - the VMs will automatically get the updated script).

Conceal has forked.
Please add support for Cryptonight Conceal.

https://medium.com/@ConcealNetwork/new-cn-conceal-pow-algorithm-f68e2159cab0

Thanks

I made a new start-page with pre-filled forms for certain coins. You'll just  have to enter your wallet-id. I have added conceal (new PoW post-Fork) there:https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/ (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/)

You can also use this direct link:
https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html#pool1=conceal.herominers.com:10361&currency=cryptonight_conceal (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html#pool1=conceal.herominers.com:10361&currency=cryptonight_conceal)

Of course you can change the default-value for the pool to something else.
If you have trouble getting it to work you can post here and ask me.

Conceal is working fine thank you!

You're welcome  ;D

after tonights fork im unable to get it running on moneroocean , no matter what i put as export currency=xxx

any hints ?

You'll have to select "Generic Cryptonight_R". I have added the new option to the script-generator at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html). I just tried it, it works for me - if you can't get it to work please post here again.

FYI: I have updated the script to use XMR-Stak 2.10.0. This version has much better optimized CPU-Mining. You don't have to do anything to get the better hashrate (just wait - every few days the script will refresh itself, giving you the better hashrate).
If you want to get the better hashrate straight away, you can also restart your pools (scale to 0 and then scale back to e.g. 10 low priority nodes).

FYI: Another update, now the script is running with XMR-Stak 2.10.1. As described above, your VMs will get the update automatically after some time (or you can restart your pools - there does not seem to be much of a change in the hashrate, though).

Please implement merged mining :)

https://lokiturtle.herominers.com/#getting-started
Double profits!

Yes, that looks interesting... thanks for the hint.
I will see how to get this running.

I have added the option "Generic cryptonight_turtle" to my script-generator at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html). You can add the Loki-wallet as normal in the wallet-field, however, for now you'll have to enter your turtle-wallet manually into the script - just replace the phrase "export pool_pass1=x" with "export pool_pass1=TRTLxxxxxxx" (where TRTLxxxxxxx is your turtle-wallet) in the generated script.
I just tested it and in the pool's dashboard i can see both the loki and the turtle-balance increasing.

I'll add a field to directly edit the password later to the script-generator.

Edit:  Note: when manually adding your wallet, take care not to add any spaces to the generated script.

The difficulty levels have fallen for monero due to the hard fork so it's possible to get more coin right now. I'm sure that will change as the miners switch over or new monero fans join in

Awesome thanks! Will try it out

Hi everybody,

FYI: I have updated the used xmr-stak to version 2.10.4.

Also, i have added a password-field to the detailed script-generator at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html (https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency_detailed.html). This makes it easier to add custom worker-IDs (for pools that expect the ID in the password-field) or to setup merged-mining as requested by mk111.

Thank you very much for the script, i will definitely try with nimiq ;)

Hi everybody,

FYI: apparently azure has increased the price for the F-instances. If you have a MSDN Enterprise subscription, your free credits will only be enough to run 9 instances (for a total of 18 cores) instead of the previously 10 instances. For MSDN Professional still 3 instances are possible.

If you have run out of free credits, azure will delete your pools. You'll have to re-setup your pools (just use 9 instances instead of previously 10).

i have a problem, i not have subscription.
if i want to start mining.

East US
Linux
Ubuntu
D2 V3 2 vCPU  8 GB Ram 50GB storage ----> 0.019 USD/hour

10 virtual machine X 730 hours  ----> 138.70 USD

Standar HDD S4 32 Gib 1.536 USD/Month

Storage transactions 100 x $0.0005 ----> $0.05

TOTAL -->  $138.75

if i purchase this.

how much hash i made to pay and get some gain?

Will the current configuration of script monero give good results?

Sorry, mining with azure is only profitable if you have free credits from e.g. a MSDN-subscription. If you have to pay for the VMs you will lose money. With the current market situation, you'll make maybe 20$ in cryptocurrency if you spend 100$ for azure-vms (the exact numbers depend on the current exchange-rates and which coin you mine).


 

Thank you so much for script.
I just wanted to ask that I'm getting less than 10$ for 100 azure credits. Is it normal? Following your guide f2, us east, xmr mining.
What coins do you suggest for best payout?
Thanks.

Unfortunately altcoin-prices are very low right now, so profitability is very bad.
You can check https://www.cryptunit.com for other coins...
Personally, I mine xmr, even if sometimes other coins would yield a higher dollar-value (after all, xmr is one of the top-altcoins).
Otherwise, I am also mining banano - profitability is equally bad, but I find mining it is more fun than xmr :)
See https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Run_Folding_At_Home_in_the_Azure_Cloud.html for more info about mining banano.

thanks for the script op

i just run you script on gcloud (this i my first day on mining world so i am a total newbie) with 2 instance (24cores+8cores) and get 600h/s+250h/s is this normal

and for azure what is your average h/s on 20 cores (1 pool) because after 10 hours mine is between 750h/s and 900h/s

sorry for my bad english

For best results you should use instances with less cores, e.g. 2 or 4 cores per instance.


900 h\s is at the lower range... But there's always some fluctuation. Did you use the settings described in the guide?

By the way, it sounds like you're using trial accounts - please don't do that, it's just  not worthwhile. You really need a msdn account if you want to use the script.

- but why it's not worthwhile ,i mean both have similer profits (if you have 9 free trial or 18 student accounts) ,or there is other problems ?
- for the settings i use the (f2/2 cores/4GB) and today i get :
  west us 2 around 600h/s (24h average) with different combination of pool cores (2,2,2,2,2/4,4,2/5,5/10)
  north central us , north europe , east us around 800h/s (24h average )
- for the gcloud they quickly torn off my instances

If your instances get shut down, it's a good sign that you are violating the ToS and you should probably stop what you are doing.
About the trial-accounts: of course you could keep on creating new trial accounts with fake identities. But is this really the way you want to do it? If you think about it a little you also must come to the conclusion that this is bad for your karma.

And about the hashrate: Azure has different types of CPUs in different regions. Also the actual performance depends on the cpu-usage of the VMs of other customers running on the same CPU (the script has a function to recalibrate itself to get the best hashrate). So there are some reasons for the fluctuation. When i created the script i did some experiments and got best results with the "east us"-region and f2 instances. Of course, it would be nice if you can post here if you find better settings.

are you prepared for the RandomX fork?

Yeah, i'm aware of the fork and i am currently working on finding the optimal settings for mining with azure.

Is monero the most profitable thing to mine with azure right now or are there more profitable alternatives?

Profitability right now is generally bad... if the past is any indication for the future then things will change with the next altcoin-season after the upcoming bitcoin-halving.
Otherwise my favorite profit-calculator is https://www.cryptunit.com/, you can have a look at the numbers there.

I was able to start running mine with no issues. But my buddy got shut down in 4 hrs into it and be basically followed the same steps I did.

Is there any other ways to prevent MS from seeing these batches as violations?

Thank you for this, I just stumbled my way thru it a few hours ago. So far so good, I decided on 16 instances - averaging 108h.

I don't recommend mining with free credits from trial-accounts.
With that being said: If you enter your credit-card details and deactivate the spending-limit your VMs won't get shut down. You just have to remember to switch off everything before your free credits run out (your free credits will still work after deactivating the spending-limit).

You're welcome  ;D

Azure has blocked this feature....

Is there anyway to make it work on AWS or google cloud?

Even in AWS or Google Cloud, you'll face issues like suspended account due to violation of terms.
I did try it on AWS for a week with some free credit during promotion a while back and the account was suspended just after a few hours and requiring a mail to re-activate the account but I was sure they won't reactivate it.
Moreover, migration to RandomX algorithm will bring a wave of CPU miners to XMR network and we will see many users trying to use on-demand computing platforms for it and their accounts getting suspended in no time.

You can have a look here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3444898.msg47841140#msg47841140
However, as MATHReX already said: if you are using trial-accounts you will get banned with google and AWS, too.

Hi everybody,

I have almost completed the preparation for the Monero RandomX-fork. The good news: you probably won't have to do anything (if you mine something else than monero your action may be required - see the technical details below).

Technical details:
* I am still running some tests, but i will activate my changes 1-2 days after this post (i will make another post here then).
* I have changed the scripts to use xmrig instead of xmr-stak. xmrig makes a smooth change to randomX much easier and i hardly found any difference in the hashrate.
* Unfortunately, however, xmrig manages the different cryptonight-variants differently than xmr-stak. The script will try to adapt the settings to make things work, though. If you are mining something else than Monero: please check your hashrate and tell me if there is any problem after the change in the scripts (like i said i will post here again in 1-2 days when i make the change).
* In my tests i have found that the F2-type of VMs are the most  cost-effective for running randomX. This means that there will be no need to change the pool-settings for the fork (currently F2 is also the most cost-effective for mining monero). You can expect a hashrate of ca. 400H/s per used core. If you have a MSDN-Enterprise subscription this should net you 7-8KH/s (whether this is a lot or not we'll only know after the fork).

Hi everybody,

i have activated the changes. If you experience any problems please contact me (post here or send me a pm).

The monero-RandomX-fork has gone live... everything went smoothly as far as i can tell.
Still, it's probably a good idea to check the output of your azure-pools - please write here or pm me if you are having any problems.

What's the profit like?

Seem we can not create a new pool any more. Always get the error say reach CPU core limit even on new account.

In my account all newly created batch-accounts/Pools now have a quota of 0 - probably that's why you got the message about the CPU core limit.

My existing batch-accounts/pools still have their original quotas - If you have a working batch-account it's probably a good idea to keep re-using that account for now.

I will contact the azure-support and check if they increase the quota on request.

Yes, you right.
I do some mistake by del all the resources group. If you just del the pool then create a new one then you should be ok.
For now all new active Azure account can not create batch job anymore, seem they found this ^^
 

It's probably too early to say, but it seems the profit has increased a bit - according to cryptunit 8kH/s will net you ca. 1$ per day in XMR.

FYI: I requested an increase of the quota for low-priority cores (20)  for one of my batch-accounts. It took some days, but then the quota was increased without any problem.
Requesting the quota-increase is very easy. If you go to your batch-account, there's the item "quotas" on the left pane. After clicking it it will show you your current quota-settings, and there is also a button "Request quota increase". You can just click it and fill the following form to get the increased quota (processing the request will likely take some time, though). For most cases 20 low-priority cores should be enough. I haven't tried it, but i guess if you are asking for a much higher quota azure might actually ask what you are planning to do...

Do they send any email to confirm or you just request and the "system" automatic increase ^^?

You'll get an email saying that they made the change (internally this is handled as a support-request). From the replies i got i have to say that azure takes the support-requests quite seriously and they are dedicated to resolve them in a timely manner.

FYI: I have updated the scripts to use version 5.2.1 of XMRig. There's no need to do anything, the script will automatically use the new version after some time.

FYI: another update: the scripts will now use XMRig version 5.5.0. There's no need to do anything, the script will automatically use the new version after some time.

I can’t make the script run in aws ec2, do you have any advice/tutorial how to make it work?

Sorry, i don't have anything for AWS. This is mainly because as far as i know there is no legitimate source of free credits for AWS... May i ask you where you get your AWS-credit from? Or are you using a trial-account?

And another update. the scripts will now use XMRig version 5.5.3. As always, the script will automatically update itself after some time.

it looks like South Korea and Korea Central are the cheapest datacentres for F series VMs at the moment

Thanks for the info. But where did you get the prices from? If i check the pricing i get the following numbers:
F2s VM, low priority batch

Central Korea:
$0.0204/hour

East US
$0.0199/hour

(note that there'll be some cost for the storage on top of that).

how many hash you got for $150

With the 150$ monthly credit from a MSDN-Enterprise-subscription you'll get around 8kH/s mining Monero, which will net you (at the time of writing) around 15$ in crypto-currency per Month.
I like to view this as my retirement fund. I'm doing this long-term, so even a little amount will accumulate to a sizable sum after some time. Also, i expect the exchange-rate for crypto to be _way_ higher by the time i retire...

thanks dude. it worked very well for me.

do you think it would be wise to run randomx or veruscoin on these? Could you do a script for those?

Basically since i started doing this some years ago Monero (i.e. randomX) has been the best option for mining with azure. I just skimmed over the homepage of veruscoin and it seems to focus on similar qualities like monero (privacy, cpu-friendliness). However, Monero is matured and much bigger than veruscoin - so until that changes i will recommend mining Monero (and i will mine it myself, too).

I searched a bit on the internet and i found this post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5210557.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5210557.0)
-> This guy assumes that the FPGA-people will also try to create a FPGA-miner for Verushash 2.1, which will make CPU-mining unprofitable again - do you have any more information about this?

i think verus is on 2.2 already and they have been keen on staying asic resistant, even gpu resistant

Ok,  but is there any reason to think that verus will surpass e.g. Monero anytime soon in popularity? I'm sorry for asking like this - when i started out i tried to adapt my script to different currencies. Looking back, i feel that the effort was in vain because in fact only mining monero is worthwhile.

First off: please don't use the free credits from trial accounts. You'll need a MSDN-subscription to do any reasonable mining.
My script includes a autotune-feature: if the VM is instantiated on a physical CPU where a lot of neighboring VMs are idle, the script can use the CPU's cache more intensively, resulting in a better hashrate. If you use a VM with many cores, your chances of having neighboring, idle VMs is less (since there are less cores for neighboring VMs available). That's why the F2-type works best (if you get different results, of course i'd love to hear more about it).

The difference between dedicated and low priority-nodes is that the low-priority-nodes are a lot cheaper (low-priority-nodes may be restarted by azure at any time, however, for our mining-application this does not matter).

Since you want to burn your 200$ as fast as possible (i assume you are using a trial account), you should create as many vms as possible. A pool with 10 low priority F2 VMs (20 cores) will consume about 150$ per month, so you'll need more than that. You'll probably have to request a quota increase from the azure-support.

 whoaa i think free credit from trial beside MSDN-subs is the same way to do that.. but is still work?

ok ill try to set a 10 low priority

Yes, in principle it works the same. However, azure is very quick to ban people who are using the free credits from trial-accounts. Also, what will you do after the trial runs out? There's just no long term perspective.
What i mean to say is: Just having fun with a single trial account is probably OK. But if you find yourself planning to sign up for more and more trial-accounts just to abuse the free credits, you are going too far.

yes, i think thats the point. thanks dude

XMRig v6.3.0 added support for Intel's cache allocation technology. So i think this is good thing. Do I need to do anything as someone using this script?

Are you talking about this?
RandomX: added cache QoS support #1774
https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/pull/1774 (https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/pull/1774)
XMRig v6.3.0 added new experimental feature (cache QoS)
https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/hsscux/xmrig_v630_added_new_experimental_feature_cache/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/hsscux/xmrig_v630_added_new_experimental_feature_cache/)

I'm currently testing the new version. So far i could not see any significant change - I'll post here when i update the script for the new version. The change will be automatic, i.e. you won't have to do anything (but like i said, don't expect a higher hashrate).

Yep. But nothing remarkable. Thanks for your interest.

Low priority cores are deprecated, and will totally disappear soon.
Spot VMs will replace them, but are not available for batch ATM.

oh no! Will this script cease to exist when this happens?

I also got the same. I am only getting around 30% of the XMR I normally get. I suspect more people are mining Monero now

Anything cloud mining isn't genuine, if any still pays today the profit will be in pennies anyway, also there are scam cloud mining out there be careful, it's safer to spend the money on mining rigs and start making money yourself

I get around 0.1 XMR using $50 Azure Credit. It adds up

can you share your setup?
I can only get around 0.1 XMR using the $150 Azure credit.

I use the instructions on the 1st post. However, I have a limit of 100 low priority cores and I use all my credit up in about 2/3 days. I remember I earned a lot less when I tried to make the credit stretch over 30 days (it was a while ago)

Thx @mafia.
Let me try that too .. MS did not give you a hard time when you requested 100 low priority cores?

No, not really. It does take 24 / 48 hours

Hey all!

I have a bunch of Azure credit expiring in about 3 months and just saw this script.

Looking at it more, I realized its a bit old.

Does it still make sense to run it? If as a poster said above, he's getting approximately 0.1 XMR for every $50 spent, is that figure sustainable? And since I have a decent amount of credit, can I run multiple scripts or run  x10 or even x30 amount of nodes listed in the script to burn through the credits faster?

Thank you!

Edit: Actually, I have 0 nodes available. There is no option to increase it either. As mentioned above, I think Azure is now taking away this option.

No, you just increase the nodes on the last step. I think it says use 2 nodes / 4 cores if you have $50 MSDN credit to make it last a month. You just increase that part to the max CPU's on your account.

I don't get 0.1 XMR at the moment, most likely due to the current increase crypto interest and miners.

If I have a large amount of credit to use within 50-60 days, can I run on F16 VM's?

Or should I just use 30-40 nodes?

I requested increases in 4 regions and they gave me 100 low priority cores per region.

Does this still work? I think MSFT Azure bans all cryptocurrency mining activities.

Can't seem to get Ubuntu 16 anymore

I agree

oh no, looks like the github has been deleted?

I wonder why. The script still works. Any alternatives?

It still works. Luckily I made a backup copy of it long time ago, so now I run it from my copy like this:


POOL:PORT, WALLET_ADDRESS, POOL2:PORT2, WALLET2_ADDRESS you obviously replace with your details.
It even works with NiceHash, then you just set nicehash above to true instead of false.
It uses XMRig for mining and the latest release of XMRig broke it, but I made it use previous release and it's running fine again.