Pay your bills first.

Windfalls, even predictable ones, should be used to pay down any debt you have first.

Yes, go to the Options, Profit switching tab... then enable the Profit switching threshold.  Set a percentage that you are comfortable with.  If you set it to 15% for example, then the spiking algo/coin has to be 15% more profitable than what you are mining now.

It's page 56...

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1271137/Gigabyte-X299-Aorus-Ultra-Gaming.html?page=56#manual

Cloud mining operations will buy them in bulk like that.  They make incredible profits off of their customers, and have to keep expanding.

Are you going to be using a WinPE environment to install Windows?  Driver support can be spotty for storage and network drivers in a WinPE environment.  I've managed SCCM and MDT before... it can be challenging to support some random motherboard that doesn't have NIC drivers.

What about the other motherboard drivers like Intel Chipset drivers that don't come out of the box in Windows 10?

If you are running Windows, then putting the PCIe slots on Gen 1 is usually a good idea if you plan on expanding beyond 2-3 GPUs.  For Linux, they tend to prefer the "auto" setting on PCIe slots.

These aren't universal truths, as it really depends on the motherboard... but it's a good place to start.

Congratulations on your choice to start mining!  You will not be able to use a regular computer to mine bitcoin anymore.  You will need an ASIC to mine bitcoin.  If you meant altcoins, then assuming you posted in the correct thread, we have to assume you have an nVidia 1080ti GPU.  There are plenty of options for altcoins in this thread and throughout this forum sub-section.  I ask that you spend some time reading them, and start grasping some of the lingo, the problems that people have, the types of equipment they use, and start mining.  If you run into any troubles, let us know.

Hello everyone,

I wanted to take a moment and provide some information on a recent order I did through Bittawm's https://bittawmart.com/ storefront.  It's rare that you find an online store that gives excellent customer service like you would expect.  Pleasing the customer (or rather just providing lip-service to the idea) has been a lost art in today's business world.

On Jan 1st, I purchased two Baikal A2000 ASICs from bittawmart.com, in two separate orders.  One of the orders I had sent too low of a BTC fee, and had to scramble to find someone to fast-track the transaction.  Once done, the two orders were sent immediately, and I received them a couple of days later.

I promptly set them up and out of the box everything worked fine... until something strange started to happen.  It started with my Awesome Miner telling me that the ASICs were down.  I couldn't access the web interface of the ASICs and there was no response to pings.  I rebooted them, and everything seemed fine again.  Then about 30 minutes later, the same thing would happen.  I started some basic troubleshooting, all the typical stuff.  Re-seating all the cables, trying new ethernet cables, LAN ports etc... but anywhere from 15-45 minutes... usually averaging around 30 minutes the ASICs would go offline.

Now, this is a perplexing situation, and my fears were that maybe something happened to the devices in shipping.  I reached out to Bittawm via email, who was very prompt to respond and quickly helped me go through some other troubleshooting steps.  I have an old Baikal A900, so I was familiar with their devices.  We tried linking the two units together, using one Orange Pi Zero then the other, re-flashing both SD cards, and trying them in all the possible configurations.  Still the same thing kept happening... they would go offline around 30 minutes after booting.

I tried reaching out the Baikal support through email and skype, but they are hard to catch online.  The strange thing was that both Orange PI Zeros seemed to have the exact same problem.  You could expect that one might go bad, but two?

Bittawm was very attentive to this situation, and apologized for the inconvenience.  He offered to send me two new Orange Pi Zeros free of charge from his USA contact.  I'll leave the USA contact nameless unless he wants to be known.

The two new Orange PI Zeros came in a couple of days and I tried them again... only to find the exact same problem.  Now it was getting frustrating.  The USA contact figured out that it was me who was having the problem and reached out to me via PM here.  We then hooked up on WhatsApp to delve a little more into the problem.

The USA contact wanted me to try different configurations again, some new... I cycled through all four Orange PI Zeros, running in single board configurations, dual, quadruple... you name it.  Tried reflashing all 4 SD cards, new power supplies, you name it.  We spent a whole day troubleshooting.  The USA contact was patient and just as engaged as Bittawm.  If nothing else, I was pleased at the outstanding customer service that was happening.

Bittawm was great during all this troubleshooting as well and offered to send me back a refund equivalent to the revenue I was losing for all the days the miners were not working.  That's classy, but I really just wanted to get the ASICs working.


At this point, we had nothing else to try, and suspected maybe all four ASIC boards may have some problem.  The USA contact offered to send me two replacement A2000 units.  Even further, as it was a weekend and they wouldn't ship until Monday... he setup two A2000s from his personal collection and mine to my account for a couple of days to prove that they would work.  I monitored my pool account, and they worked as advertised.

The USA contact shipped these new A2000's out and I got them a couple of days later.  The USA contact also sent me a pre-paid mailer to send the old units back and the spare Orange PI Zeros he had sent.

When the new units arrived, I set them up and again... the same issue.  None of this made any sense at this point.  The PI would just stop responding after about 30 minutes.  This was kind of dismaying... thinking I had made a $4200 mistake.

On a whim, I logged into the pool, and saw that the hashrate had not dropped to zero.  This was confusing, because the PI does not respond to pings, the web interface was inaccessible... but there it was.  The hashrate was going just expected otherwise.  I let it run overnight, and in the morning checked the pool again.  Still no issue, but of course I couldn't ping the PI or access the web interface.


I reached out to the USA contact to give them the news, and to let them know I'm fine with the results of the tremendous effort in troubleshooting, all the anxiety that the potential bad ASICs had caused.  There must be something in my network that is causing the issue.  No other device has any problem, so it was easy to overlook the basics.  I still don't have a solution to my networking issue.  I'm looking through some Orange PI Zero forums to see if there is some configuration change I can do on the OS to resolve the problem.

I want to again thank Bittawm and the USA contact for their incredible attention to this strange situation.  The stupendous customer service is not one that I will easily forget.  When I do interviews in my day job, one of the questions I ask potential candidates is "Give me an example where someone has given you incredible customer service and how did that affect how you do it?"  If I ever get asked that question in an interview myself, I will point to this experience as the best possible answer.


Thank you for reading if you made it this far.

;TLDR
I would have no hesitation in ordering from or recommending that others order from https://bittawmart.com/ in the future.  The customer service is what sets them apart.

Thanks Bittawm and the USA contact!

Now this is an excellent development!  I've never heard of this exchange before... need to go check it out.  I wonder how that works when they are based in Argentina.

I'm assuming this exchange will also have more typical DNR/BTC pairiings as well?

Awesome Miner already does most of this except for the flashing of a BIOS.  There's way too many variables in that space to automate.  Also, I'm assuming by provisioning, you mean that the Windows 10 OS already has to exist, right?  What about drivers, C++ redistributables?  What about power settings, turning off Windows Updates, etc?



Ah, so this is looking to be AMD only, it appears.



From these points it sounds like you are developing a powershell script to adjust Windows settings and install applications.  Ok, sounds good.



Nothing out of place here.



I think this basic provisioning part could be very beneficial to many.  Are you looking to charge for any portion of this?

Tell us more about the monitor and control mechanisms after the provisioning has finished?  Will there be any profit-switching capabilities?

Modern off-the-shelf routers are generally equivalent in their WAN performance... just get one with a 1Gb/s WAN interface.  If you are worried about how these routers will affect your wired mining performance... then don't.  Your only deciding factor will be wireless performance, which you shouldn't be mining on a wireless connection anyway.

So, the short answer is pick the router that works best for your desired wireless performance.  If you must have dd-wrt or tomato compatibility, those distros have some suggested hardware lists.

I run my own linux distro as a router/firewall on a virtual machine.  I'm partial to IPFire.  Then I have a decent wireless router downstream with the DHCP server turned off to provide wireless to the home.  This effectively makes the wireless appliance a wireless switch.

Awesome Miner can give you daily, monthly projections from ahashpool, nicehash, miningpoolhub, zpool, hashrefinery, or your own custom group of pools for individual coins (or services).  It can even profit-switch for you on those services.

There are no profit switching triggers for rules currently in AM.  It has been a requested feature.

You can setup the scripts to manually switch as an action though.  You'd need to setup the SSH scripting through putty or plink as in this guide:  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39361444/automating-command-script-execution-using-putty

So, in theory, you could use AM to manually run your user-defined actions to call putty so that it can execute some commands (as per nvoc's documentation https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1854250.msg19503300#msg19503300).  When you are in your miner view, there is quick access to these Actions in the bar at the top.  If nothing else, you will be prepared with all of your Actions defined if some profit switching triggers get added in AM later, or someone offers a plugin to do so.

There is a C# script interface for the trigger where you could define your own profit switching trigger, but that functionality would have to come outside of AM.



Patrike has mentioned that is could be a possibility, but I think that's going to take a bit of time... mostly because no two linux distros are the same.  I don't envision that a remote agent for a "roll your own" linux system would be supportable.  Patrike would have to offer his own linux distro that he knows and can program around to incorporate the remote agent and known paths for the mining software and settings.  Can you imagine all the posts here with "I can't figure out how to set firewall settings in Linux to allow remote agent communication", or "how do you overclock in linux"... all of which would have nothing to do with AM.



Not all mining software will expose those values through their API.

There's no right or wrong answer here, only what your priorities are.  The Current setting will make AM check the current values at Whattomine, and the 24 hour setting will make AM check the 24 hour values at Whattomine.  AM is agnostic in this decision... it's yours to make.

Why would you choose one over the other?  Using the current values will attempt to keep you on the most profitable coin... at that point in time.  This can and will cause peaks and valleys in your overall profits because coins don't stay "most profitable" for very long.  The 24 hour values will help smooth out those peaks and valleys to keep you mining a "mostly" profitable coin longer.  I've written extensively about profit switching in this thread, I ask that you go back or search this thread for my musings and opinions on the matter.

Remember though, the Current and 24 hour setting would only apply to individual coins that you are mining, not to Online services like zpool, MPH, and the like.  If you setup a dozen of your favorite coins as individual pools and put them in a pool group then AM can profit switch on that pool group and will use the Whattomine statistics including your Current/24 setting to help AM decide when to switch.

Using the Offline trigger is probably a better one to use for this situation.

Most mining software is going to throw AV warnings these days.  Please follow this guide to make the exceptions on the AM folder to ignore them:  http://awesomeminer.com/help/defender.aspx

Why do you want to set a password on your monitoring port in Claymore?  Isn't your rig behind a firewall?

When you are setting up your rule, when you are setting up the Action: Run Executable section... there is a note at the bottom of the page that says to use the [Host] in the parameters.  That should launch it on the remote system.

Please upgrade your Awesome Miner, which will include a newer version of Claymore Etherium miner to version 10.6.  Try that version to see if it helps your situation.

As was mentioned by Mr. Spider most of the SP-Mod modified miners require you to pay him for it.  Once you have your new mining software follow this guide:

http://awesomeminer.com/help/uploadsoftware.aspx