Bitcoin Forum

OK. Here's the situation. I recently took a help desk job weekend nights from 4 to midnight. There are about 30 workstations around me sitting idle. All of them are new i7 quad core/8 thread CPUs and all have an ATI Firepro v8700 video cards. I am there alone at that time and every night I work they stare at me, taunting me with their combined mining potential.

Here's the problem. The workstations are all Windows 7 Profession and are locked down by GPO to prevent installation of unauthorized software. The company firewall blocks port 8332. I can write to the hard drive, so it's possible to run a command line miner. I wouldn't be able to install ATI Streams SDK or update the drivers (if needed). I've considered a bootable Linux CD but I'm a novice when it comes to Linux. I've tried setting up a VPN to my home router to get around the firewall but I'm blocked from connecting. I've looked into Himachi portable but haven't really experimented with it yet.

So Gurus, any advice, suggestions, or hacks that you can think of???

My advice: forget about it. Unless you don't mind losing your job and/or being sued.

Stealing company resources is certainly something that can get your ass sued. I'd not recommend it, sounds like you have a capable IT guy watching.

This is not the ideal way to go, but you could always hop on bitcoinplus.com and just generate through the browser.  Pretty inefficient and you can't mine with any other pools outside of BitcoinPlus, but it's a pay per share model and you'll at least see some coins.  If you make an account, you can just open the other browsers to generate with a link and don't have to login.

Self-promoting example: http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate?for=272350 generates for my account and the @cc5alive Project.  If you want to set all those machines to my referral link for a night to test it out...  ;)

30 small thumb drives to boot off of?

Even if you could, the electricity bill would lead to an investigation

(i've thought about it seeing as I work in IT with a bunch of little desktops under my control lol)

web miners

DO NOT do this unless you want to risk losing your job. I mine with a small low power consumption card (XFX 4650) at my office. The difference here is that my workstation is actually MY property, and I have permission from the business owner to do what I'm doing. Do NOT try and pull something like this without permission. Not only is it wrong, it can get your ass canned.

Do it bro, use a bootable linux USB and your laughing..

v8700 run at about 80Mh/s, so you'd get about 2.4GH/s, which is about the same as you'd get from 4 HD6990s, but obviously with no investment. if you're going to do it (be prepared to lose your job), I'd say the way to go is a linux boot image. If you can customise it to auto run the miner and then just reset the machine and pull out the usb to set it back to how it was, you'd be laughing...

But how do I get around the firewall issue? I need to test Hamachi to see if I can get out or it's all pointless. Webpage mining would work but, to my knowledge, they are exclusively CPU miners. Even with 4/8 cores that's not a whole lot.

I don't think that power usage would give me away. This place is huge.

I think this is a bad idea.

If you are really bored, write up a proposal to use the machines. Of course, then your employer would get all the mining proceeds. It is their hardware anyway.

Bad idea ....

But if you really want to do it try running an SSH server at home, not on port 22 but on port 443. There is a very good chance that the firewall would just assume that it is outgoing SSL traffic (HTTPS) and allow it. Since SSH and SSL are both encrypted, it is not easy for the firewall to tell them apart. You can then run SSH clients on the machines and forward port 8332.

Are the workstations left on over night? I'm responsible for over 100 workstations across two states and multiple sites. We use the evenings to do OS updates, push antivirus DATs, and reprovision machines. If that's the case where you are, someones bound to realize machines aren't being updated. On the other hand, if it's company policy to shut down workstations at night, It's going tonbe obvious not only by the power spike on the bill, but will leave fingerprints across the network with things like DHCP requests, DNS requests, etc. Any admin worth his salt will quickly realize something is going on.

Unless you're already on your way out the door and want to make all you can for your last two weeks, have at it. Otherwise, I'd seriously ponder this. This is not the economy you want to be job hunting in.

Thats my two bitcents, anyway.

Good luck!

Cent

bitcoins.lc uses port 8080

Though I do believe it has been said already that this is ethically wrong.

Maybe you can talk to your supervisor/boss about research into virtual currencies via hashing?

Write a term paper or something on it. Sounds to me like you work at a college in the art/design lab.

They may let you use the lab or at least a few machines if you seriously do it.

In that case, the worst they can do is say no.