Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Mining support => Topic started by: CrazyGuy on September 03, 2011, 07:22:18 AM



Title: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: CrazyGuy on September 03, 2011, 07:22:18 AM
I would like to turn my Windows 7 box on and have it automatically tune my cards and start mining. Anyone doing this already and have a good list of tools to get started with or some ideas? I would need a command line windows application for clocking my 2 6970s at 960/330 and setting fans to 100%. I would also need a method for automatically starting phoenix miner with access to the desktop.


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: deslok on September 03, 2011, 12:58:30 PM
Trixx can auto set clocks and if you drop a guiminer shortcut into the startup folder it can be set to auto mine as soon add it launches. I have 3 machines setup that way with dummy plugs as well as a program I found called launch later (if you change clocks while mining things can lock up) to delay guiminer 30s or so. I installed log me in free for any changes I need to make.


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: echo2 on September 03, 2011, 09:43:37 PM
you can also remotely monitor your mining using ssh


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: bitcool on September 03, 2011, 09:52:46 PM
You will need dummy plugs if your monitor is not connected


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: lucita777 on September 04, 2011, 06:35:11 AM
I'm not sure why anyone would need dummy plugs on Windows 7...

You need to do 3 steps to configure headless miner on w7:
1) Autlogin: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/auto-logon-windows-7.htm
2) Add your miner to autostart. Gui-miner allows to specify what miners run on start up, so you only need to add gui-miner shortcut to windows startup. Phoenix miner can be started from .cmd file which would call it with proper args. Ofc, shortcut to .cmd file needs to be added to windows startup.
3) Configure overclocking: seems like GUI-based OC software actually cares about card being plugged to something, but ClockTweak app ( http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9982 ) is a command line tool and works very nicely from Startup shortcut and can change core clock, memory clock, fan speed etc... for any GPU without a need for dummies - however it costs 0.2BTC - cheaper than making dummy. Note: OC will not work when Remote Desktopping, but works fine from autostart.


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: Jack of Diamonds on September 05, 2011, 07:24:27 AM
You will need dummy plugs if your monitor is not connected

Maybe on age old drivers. 11.7 preview already includes support for multi-gpu setups without dummies or cables.

AMD Catalyst 11.7 and 11.8 natively support headless multi-gpu rigs.


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: RyNinDaCleM on September 06, 2011, 01:53:04 AM
You can use Team viewer to manage from your smart phone! I run 3 machines from my phone using it!
The ONLY thing it can't do, is cold boot the computer! At least I haven't figured out how, if you can!


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: CrazyGuy on September 06, 2011, 04:55:15 AM
You can use Team viewer to manage from your smart phone! I run 3 machines from my phone using it!
The ONLY thing it can't do, is cold boot the computer! At least I haven't figured out how, if you can!

Wake on LAN. Just need to send the magic packet.

Little background here, originally, I was having some stability issues with my box and losing display/contol after about 8 to 12 hours of mining. I was going to write a script to reboot after a couple minutes of idle miners but went a different route. I did a little digging and noticed that the windows snmp service has a serious memory leaking problem when I'm mining. I wrote a script to restart snmp and my miners every 3 hours and I haven't had trouble since.

I still want my machine to go straight to mining after a reboot so I'll probably use the autologin application brought up here. I was kind of hoping there was a way to provide an application access to the desktop on startup, without logging in.


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: Bitcraft on September 07, 2011, 02:10:36 AM
Currently running a headless setup using trixx and logmein. Works great.


Title: Re: Headless Windows Mining?
Post by: Departure on September 09, 2011, 07:38:23 AM
When I was running Windows I was using BarelyClocked to OC the cards and cgminer to do the mining, loaded these from a batch script by using a timeout and then changed clocks with barelyclocked, then finally running cgminer with arguments, Also got my self a dyndns account and installed vnc server for remote administration...

Current cgminer does OC'ing for you so you only need a batch script to run cgminer with your clock values and thats all you need, no dummy plugs needed are needed as of 11.7 drivers.....

I just switched over to linux the other day but too much work setting up vnc to auto start on reboot, along with all the other crap configs needed... yeah I know Windows miner has the "N00b" label stuck on it, but in real life its faster and easyer to setup, if that makes me a n00b for not wanting to deal with the bullshit configs you need to do with linux then so be it, I'll be back on windows by tomorrow :)

P.s
 If you need a hand with the batch scripts give me a yell and i'll show an example how to do it, you can also sett affinity using batch script :)