Bitcoin Forum

I'm setting up some dedicated miners at a friends place. I want to do it without leaving a monitor there. I'm going to be using a wireless adapter for the internet. What's the best OS to do this? Does linuxcoin allow full control of settings from a remote location?

As a headless miner with wireless, the best bet right now is probably a Ubuntu 11.04 install with CGminer run from a startup script.  If you can get a wired connection, use BAMT with CGminer.

If you have an extra wireless router, install DD-WRT and set it up as a wireless bridge with the rig connected by Ethernet. That will be a lot more stable than using a wireless adapter.

This.  Would you run a server off a wireless link?  A mining rig is a server.  It is on 24/7 and when it goes down you lose money.

BAMT 5.0 now supports wireless setups out of the box it seems.  Haven't tested it myself, yet.

Use something linux and learn SSH.  You will be glad you did.

You could get it to work with wireless before; it's just standard Debian. No matter what, though, wireless will be inherently much more unstable.

Wireless is actually pretty reliable, I don't think I've had any more trouble with it then my wired pc. Definitely not worth running ethernet cables all over the house.

I just got it working tonight with BAMT. Do you know how to get cgminer on BAMT? Or some alternative mining software that is fast with 5970s?

Of course there is little reason to assume a DD-WRT modded wireless bridge is any more reliable than a wireless card. Its still wireless you see :).

IMHO yes (marginally).  I have found DD-WRT to be pretty reliable.  The whole dedicated appliance vs general purpose computer concept.  I have found wireless drivers to be glitchy in both windows & linux.   Situations where my wife's laptop goes "down" and I get "Baby is the internet down" (then I have to bite my tongue to not make comments about nuclear war). My laptop fine, router fine, "internet" fine.  Her wifi driver/hardware/OS just decided to glitch out.  Plus who knows what the heat of mining rig is going to do to "relability" of the wifi radio.

Personally I wouldn't run miners on anything less than cat5.  Downtime = lost coins but if I had to I would pick a bridge over internal wifi.  Plus if you got 2 or 3 rigs it probably is cheaper.

Not all wireless is built equal, a nice router makes a big difference. I don't think it makes any performance difference if they all get a good signal. I have 8 miners at my house with only 2 on cat5 and I've never noticed anything. The wireless cards are only 13-15 bucks each. It would actually cost more for cat5 and another hub to hook them up. 

I have had the same experience. One of my miners runs off a DD-WRT wireless bridge; the bridge itself has been stable for over a month. Running off a wifi dongle was stable 24 hours at best.

It's probably just a signal issue. I've had them go months without issues and when they do crash its not the wireless. You don't want to be using a cheap brand like belkin. You need a 150 dollar cisco or netgear router.

I use an old $30 Belkin G router as a wireless bridge and it works perfectly.

I haven't been able to get cgminer to load at startup on BAMT 0.5 personally.  Not sure why.  So I'm sticking with 0.4 for a while until I figure it out.  But if you look in /opt/bamt/examples/  there will be another bamt.conf file that will show you what to change to use cgminer.

Thanks.  I just got another card and am playing with 0.5.  I'll look in /opt/bamt/examples for some help.

I used windows 7, with teamviewer. Works beautifully good for a headless rig, and I can control it fully from anywhere.