1) http://eligius.st
2) 86C?!  Scares me.  Search the forums.
3) Search the forums.

I don't mean to be a bit of a buzzkill, but all of those questions have easily accessible answers throughout the forums.  There's also the Bitcoin.org links to the Forum, Wiki and FAQ.

Sounds like you have quite the plan!

I forgot about PowerShell.  A lot of our systems still use XP and policy doesn't install PowerShell by default.

You can still set interactive tasks - but you need to include a user.  If you RDP to set up a session, then the task launches, it will launch to the first session it finds for the user specified in the task.  At least, I'm pretty sure it does.  Not sure if it takes priority on Console over RDP or... ?  Or if it's random?  Who knows - but I do know it will go into the RDP session desktop.

Since you're using VS - you could also build in a context switch to a privileged user from any of the methods above and still get the GUI into an established session.

Take the opportunity to study and understand the impact on a project like BitCoin?

The purpose of a decentralized authority is to prevent control (including destroying) that centralized authority.

If you all want to create a synthetic centralized authority in BitCoin - keep your priority in mining pools and profit rather than the fundamentals of the project.  It's an easy target for DDoS.

Ya, good suggestion.

I can't add VNC to the machines I remote into.  It's RDP or bust if I want a GUI.

Telnet is quick and dirty - it's part of XP.

You also have overhead and waste with VNC and it can play hell with DirectX.  I wouldn't use a graphical interface just for the waste and risk.  VNC is a screen-scraper - it literally takes "pictures" of the screen at a constant interval with compression.  Bandwidth and clocks go out the door on slower machines.

Certainly better than RDP, though.

My telnet session takes a couple of bytes.

If you can install software, look for psexec from Sysinternals.  That would make it even easier (all commands are seamlessly local) and you could grab stats all in a very streamlined method with little waste.

Mouses are evil.  Keyboards fo' life!

I am under the impression it just pools for slush and deepbit - so whatever their fees are.

You can find a whole thread about how it works if you search for a user on the forums named donny

Here are a couple of solutions I have used.  Please keep in mind that these solutions are the result of many restrictions (I'm in a completely different state than the PCs) and also limited remote access... If you have physical access, I would highly suggest a bootable CD/thumbie.  If you want a limited Windows environment you can check out Windows PE.  Revisor images from Redhat are easy to create and it produces USB images with little effort.

If you have a copy of Visual Studio Express, you can easily make a service that will constantly restart a miner.  Services in XP run "headless" and as SYSTEM.

If you're using XP machines (or add the optional software in Vista/7) for a telnet server (ya - telnet sucks.  It's quick and dirty - feel free to go set up ssh) and you use start.exe you can set affinity (in Vista and above) and priority (all versions) for a miner from a command line session.

I can remote launch poclbm from telnet and it has no issues recognizing GPUs.

Another option is a scheduled task - these can run as any user you choose and be interactive (have a desktop) or non-interactive (no window).

If your desktops are set to auto-logon (most home versions of Windows are) you could simply throw something in the Startup folder and be done with it.  There are also registry keys that will automatically launch processes, but no need to over-complicate.

Finally, someone mentioned PXE boots.  I'd love to try this, but don't have the infrastructure requirements.

Over night for 3 computers generating 0.01BTC is scalable if you could cut down some of the waste in the process.  For example, if you made a good revisor image and could quickly boot all of the computers, that scales to 0.4BTC per 10 to 12 hour period (depending on campus hours).  That's possibly 0.4BTC per night for 7 nights = 2.8BTC x 4 (month) = ~8BTC.

If you could reduce the waste (setting up PCs, etc) and streamline it or include other individuals to assist (maybe you could split with one of the IT admins?) you would have a constant trickle of coins.

Even better - if your IT staff is as "interesting" as you say, perhaps you could set up your own individual pool or convince them to upgrade GPUs.  In most cases, I'm sure the students would be particularly enthused to see cards capable of faster rendering (you said you had students using the machines to render, right?).

And for whoever said I was delusional about whatever...  If any of you believe that BTC is an officially usable and measurable asset *at this point in time*.... I'm not the delusional one.   You could very well use the project in purely academia and never exchange the coins.

For an analogy - is the school entitled to coins someone earns playing WoW on their personal laptop that is connected to the schools WiFi?  Some schools sponsor a "game night" where users can install and play games on the PCs - what if they play WoW on the network on a school owned PC?  Are you stealing resources for an asset that *might be* exchanged for cash?  What government agency/school/university is going to attempt to sue all of the WoW players because that entity is entitled to a virtual currency the player earned in-game as a result of using that entity's resources?

Surely WoW assets have an extremely larger liquidity market.

See this thread -
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=11506.0

Before you get bumrushed by loonies.

The bandwidth usage is exceptionally low.  You may want to check for outbound firewall rules or prioritizing or use a pool that allows port 80 (like eligius!:))

This forum needs multiquote...

Conveniently, as of right now, BitCoins aren't a recognized currency.  Nothing is being purchased or sold in the mining operation - he's not producing currency nor transferring currency nor "selling" anything commercially.

The Student Agreements of most campuses include patentable items - you can't patent a produced BitCoin.

You also can't claim production royalties or ownership on electronically produced assets on commercial applications such as Ebay auctions, Craigslist, PGP keys, Dwolla and Paypal.

So, again, people are jumping to wild conclusions.

The only legitimate concern, as expressed several times, is even if you used 40 machines it's still not very efficient.

"Recently," eh? 

Again, the guy can go ask if he can borrow a lab.  As he's already said, students use the machines for over-night 3D processing.  There is no difference.

The "Jump to Conclusions" crew can argue amongst themselves now - "it's theft," "you'll get fired," "you'll be expelled," "power bills will spike," "playing violins is fun," "I are teh savior by telling you a $300 investment is better than free resources!"

None of these are even valid if, as a student, those resources are a shared resource that he has privilege to and permission to use overnight.

A few points to consider:
- Large Uni's will often pay a bulk power charge and NOT pay by the Kwh.  Why?  Lights, heating, X-ray machines, etc would cause wild fluctuations in billing cycles.  An extra 3000W is a joke (40 computers @ 75W) to most institutions.

- If power was even a concern.... don't you think most Uni's would be putting exceptional effort into power efficient machines that properly standby, hibernate, rigidly Power-On-LAN/shutdown around a schedule, etc?

- Power shmower, see above.

- You can't steal what you've been given permission to use.

- Your campus Admins are probably already trying it.

- He could potentially use his experience mining at a low hashrate to collect data about cryptography, P2P infrastructures, economics, pools, returns, ROI, etc, etc and actually use BitCoin for a pretty awesome report/thesis.

I think you missed the "Make a USB image" part.

There are better ways - a bit of finesse could set up a PXE server and off you go.

You *will* find SETI/Folding@home already present at most institutions on at least a few machines.  Institutions that use nonsense like DeepFreeze or SteadyState.... even sillier things present....

For relatively decently sized schools the power fluctuation isn't noticeable and I doubt they would care as long as the machines remain usable.

edit -

Oh, also, don't forget to take the most obvious path:  Just ask the lab admins if you can "borrow" a lab over the weekend for an experiment with cryptography.  If you are a student there's no reason they should say no.  Morals, ethics, yadda yadda taken care of.

.... there's nothing wrong with a 64 bit kernel because an obscure program that has missing parts of a 64 bit implementation design doesn't work on it.

It's a bit analogous to "Eff blue-ray players - my Sony MiniDiscs are useless now!"

You can download the source and you are completely free to shim up the assembly.

If you look through the source, you'll see quite a few instances where 64 bit "stuff" was added but never completed.  For example, the language definition not existing for 64 but being present for 32.

I would recommend grabbing revisor (Fedora LiveCD creator) and creating a 32 bit image with the NVIDIA drivers on it.  If you can't figure out how to install them properly on the image.... just copy the package over and install it manually.

Make a USB image.

Boot the USB image and start a good miner - on old NVIDIA machines you should be able to get at least 5 MHs out of the GPU and up to 8 MHs out of the CPU.  That's 13 x 20 ~ 260 MHs "for free."

You can use at/cron to set a reboot at a certain hour.  Say the lab opens at 8A - reboot at 7:45A.

Move to the next machine, repeat.

If you manage to do it right, no one will ever know you were there....

I'm still sticking with $650 for the described system in the opening post.  The pricing of the video cards is pretty optimistic and doesn't seem a reliable price.  It would've been much better if MSRP was used rather than "... I saw this part on NewEgg, and this other part on Ebay.... TigerDirect sold these last year for $30..."  Granted, your amateur miner isn't going to go pay MSRP for everything - but using MSRP further validates the point.  Even a weighted average price from retailers ($109 is not it....) would be more accurate and supportive.

Also, I hate it when people try to claim cases increase heat (or by proxy no case makes the system run cooler).  With no circulation (extractors/fans/etc), you only have ambient thermal transfer and a liquid cooler wasn't in the original description.  Not to mention you have the "oops" risk of damage.  It's just silly a silly myth and a simple hack that people enjoy doing.

PXE boot is a great idea - for one of my arrays, I don't have that ability because of restrictions on the network.

As other people are constantly reminded - the mining machine is a resellable asset.  Not to mention most of the items required to make a decent mining commitment (300MHs) are already available in most peoples homes in the form of a gaming PC.  FPGAs are a much more extreme investment and resale isn't nearly as accessible.  PC mining is nearly "idiot proof" now.  Building and managing FPGA arrays.... not so much....

Ya.... what's the harddrive for?

I use a revisor image on a thumb drive for 20+ PCs.....

I'm pretty sure I can boot it in < 256M of RAM.

In my opinion, $500 is a bit optimistic.  I would say $650 just based on the cost of the mainboard with legitimate (not hacked, not cabled) PCIe slots, PSU and whatever crappy case you can find.  A DVD-ROM or permanent storage would be nice..... it sucks booting 20+ machines at a time with a thumbie.

Has anyone tried to build arrays of ITX boards?  Some of the newer ones have at least one PCIe slot and don't cost more than $100.  No idea what hell you would have to play powering the video card.....

poclbm and ufasoft's miner for 32 bit systems.

linuxcoin has sshd on it, doesn't it?

Is it possible you can get him to do whatever forwarding he needs to do so you can get a shell and double check?

In my experience, the amount of time and gas you spend to go out of your way to help someone is directly inversely proportional to the complexity of the problem....

... that is, if you drive 400 miles, it will turn out they didn't plug in the cat5.

... if you only have to drive 15 minutes, it will be an undiscovered bug in the instruction set of a specific CPU.
 

Can't help you with that - I've never even looked at GUIMiner.

Woo, block discovery a few minutes ago on US!

I'd also like to take a moment to say thanks - this pool is simple and elegant to set up and monitor.  No webpage clutter to bugger with and everything is very simple to find - just stick in an address and start mining.  Check your progress the same way by sticking your address after eligius.st/~artefact2/.  Can't be easier.

The rrdtool graphs give me some nostalgia to the days I was a slave to Cacti.

The charts may seem confusing at first, but they're pretty easy to get the gist of.  I don't have any major concerns with the payout amounts and it seems fair.

It would be nice to see the payout threshold much lower, but it makes perfect sense on why it's set where it is for right now.  I also find the threshold automatically paying out after 2 weeks of inactivity very nice and refreshing - I've always wondered where the microcoins went at some of the other pools.... 

Use the getinfo command (bitcoind getinfo or bitcoin getinfo)

You can see the total size of the blockchain here:

http://blockexplorer.com/q/getblockcount

No problem - keep your coins.