Laptop for headless miners???

[squall1066]

Hiya everyone, Here is my situation, I have a few headless miners dotted around a large area, I need a central place to manage them all, I have looked into various program's for doing this, But that isn't my question here, I thought about a basic P.C. with a monitor, to watch everything on, But It needs to be on constantly, and they still draw up to 150w and are large/bulky with keyboard/mouse leads, So I thought laptop, Some 19v laptops still draw around 70-90w, Then I looked at atom/linux based notebooks Drawing 21w under load, Small, No keyboard/mouse wires.
Perfect I thought, But are these little things powerful enough to do remote management program's? Also I have a bfl single I need to plug in, and would like it to run a wallet too. can this be done? Or any other thoughts on what to do?

Re-cap, I need a small compact machine, that can handle remote management program's, handle a bfl on a usb port (with software), Hold a wallet with blockchain. I need it to be Linux based and run with a lowest wattage possible as it needs to be on constantly.

thanks

[Lethos]

I run two FPGA's through an intel atom (D525), so don't worry what it runs on.

[matthewh3]

Yeah you could use an Atom Nettop (don't think laptops/netbooks are made for 24/7 usage) or even a RaspberryPi.

[Desolator]

Everyone universally hates netbooks now.  Gee, it only took like 2 years for them to get a clue, lol.  So there are A LOT of them in pawn shops at the moment.  I got a dual atom Acer Aspire One for $100 I measured it with an actual meter and it indeed drew 29.5W.  They're vastly cheaper and lower power but keep in mind, they have a 30% higher failure rate than laptops.

[Borzoi]

Remember current laptop has memory and computing power bigger than large servers of 1999.  Those were capable of this management.  Management software bloats today but can be trimmed or unneeded plugins not installed.

1GHz CPU and 1 or 2 GB RAM sufficient at monitoring dozens of miners.

[arklan]

perfect timing, this thread. i was just thinking of asking the same for future planning. running my main rig 24/7 works fine for now (hey, it's mining while it's on...) but when the gpu isn't profitable anymore running it constantly will just be inefficient, so i was wonderng about other options.

so, to be sure i'm right: a rasberry pi could, as far as can be understood without product in hand, handle running several asics?

[Desolator]

Remember current laptop has memory and computing power bigger than large servers of 1999.  Those were capable of this management.  Management software bloats today but can be trimmed or unneeded plugins not installed.

1GHz CPU and 1 or 2 GB RAM sufficient at monitoring dozens of miners.

Yeah, VNC for example gets pretty big.  The control PC at least would need some serious RAM to interpret and render all the incoming data.  I would assume it's compressed so you'd need a lot of cores/thread processors to keep that going.

Btw, our new $670 photoshop PC at my work is faster than all 4 of our servers lol.  i3-2100 vs single HT Xeons from 2003. 8GB of DDR3-1333 CL7 vs four 32-bit servers at 4GB, 4GB, 2GB, and 4GB I say the DDR3 wins anyway And the SSD is definitely faster than all 5 SCSI RAID arrays lol.

[segabtc]

cheap laptop/netbook/rasberry Pi what have you, Install OS of choice, make sure OS has SSH. connect to headless miner, adjust screen size to fit multiple ssh sessions on one screen so I can monitor ALL headless machines by simply looking at screen. Want to get fancier, log in thru ssh, get to root,
"apt-get install xrdp " once that finishes installing, kill ssh window. start>searchbox in win7 type mstsc.exe enter, ask for ip of headless machine, login to headless thru remote desktop protocol and you will actually have the screen for each headless miner. Do what you will then.

[Borzoi]

Remember current laptop has memory and computing power bigger than large servers of 1999.  Those were capable of this management.  Management software bloats today but can be trimmed or unneeded plugins not installed.

1GHz CPU and 1 or 2 GB RAM sufficient at monitoring dozens of miners.

Yeah, VNC for example gets pretty big.  The control PC at least would need some serious RAM to interpret and render all the incoming data.  I would assume it's compressed so you'd need a lot of cores/thread processors to keep that going.

Don't think we talk about VNC.  Monitoring programs such as Munin, Nagios, mgpumon, etc. are more appropriate for not requiring "human" monitor.  Not efficient to monitor many machines by eye.  Eyes close for sleep.

[Desolator]

Don't think we talk about VNC.  Monitoring programs such as Munin, Nagios, mgpumon, etc. are more appropriate for not requiring "human" monitor.  Not efficient to monitor many machines by eye.  Eyes close for sleep.

You mean you don't automatically wake up at 3:00 in the morning if, 3 rooms away, your GPU fans spin down because your rig crashed?  And you call yourself a miner lol.

[Borzoi]

Don't think we talk about VNC.  Monitoring programs such as Munin, Nagios, mgpumon, etc. are more appropriate for not requiring "human" monitor.  Not efficient to monitor many machines by eye.  Eyes close for sleep.

You mean you don't automatically wake up at 3:00 in the morning if, 3 rooms away, your GPU fans spin down because your rig crashed?  And you call yourself a miner lol.

Water cooling!  I find out when I take cold shower in morning! 

[segabtc]

water cooling, lol  set up bamt to send emails to my phone. Something goes down I get mail and then go to screen  to see what happened and if it restarted or not. pretty simply to me.

[dooferorg]

I have an Intel D525 system that I use as a DSL gateway and Wifi access point. It has a small SSD for the OS. It only takes 26watts. So, since someone said that they run FPGAs on them then that would probably make a very good 'head node' for the miners attached to it.

Although I'm not mining via that system, they certainly very good little computers. (MiniITX is so cute)

[Lethos]

I have an Intel D525 system that I use as a DSL gateway and Wifi access point. It has a small SSD for the OS. It only takes 26watts. So, since someone said that they run FPGAs on them then that would probably make a very good 'head node' for the miners attached to it.

Although I'm not mining via that system, they certainly very good little computers. (MiniITX is so cute)

I also use my atom D525 (ION) as a HTPC with XBMC on ubuntu. So yes it's a good little mini-pc.
When mining it's CPU happy hovers at around 1%, it's barely noticeable that it's needing any processing power.
I use cgminer 2.7.5 if it makes any difference.

[squall1066]

Hearing a lot of pluses for the Atom's, Low power and cheep is right down my street, But with a high failure rate would probably have to get 2 and dupe .img so if one went down I could swop straight away allowing time to repair the other one, This in turn is still cheaper than most basic P.C's


So I am thinking of 2 of these,    
Acer Aspire one AOA150-Ab 8.9" (120 GB, Intel Atom, 1.6 GHz, 1.5 GB)



I can pick up for £75 GBP each (very cheep) Chuck in a 32GB SSD load on Linux (not decided what is best)
Running USB hub with up to 10 FPGA's, Bitcoin-qt, Tor and some remote software for miners I have elsewhere.

Basically Will this do the job? or for all that is it best to use a basic P.C. @100-200w

[Desolator]

Keep in mind, I think those have 1.8" hard drives so finding an SSD that fits isn't easy.  Also, mining and especially wallet hosting causes a very high amount of write-IO which would kill a drive.  I've heard about people modding these but I think what they do is remove the internal wireless card from the mini PCI-E then get a mini PCI-E SSD like this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227746

and that's 280/255 read/write speed which is perfect.

Some laptops have 2-3 of these ports but netbooks pretty much don't have 2 of anything you're lucky if they have 1 of something, lol. Btw they have a 20-30% higher failure rate than laptops but I think that's partially due to their over-portability and careless, irresponsible owners.  Letting it idle and cool properly will usually result in them not failing.  Btw run it lid open with the screen off via power settings and "stilt" the rubber feet (glue something on to make em taller) and you're good.

[crazyates]

Keep in mind, I think those have 1.8" hard drives so finding an SSD that fits isn't easy.  Also, mining and especially wallet hosting causes a very high amount of write-IO which would kill a drive.  I've heard about people modding these but I think what they do is remove the internal wireless card from the mini PCI-E then get a mini PCI-E SSD like this one:

You're right, those 1.8" HD's are a pain. Just find something cheap with a 2.5".

Umm care to explain why you need a 200MBps SSD just to mine? Downloading a new block from the network every 10 minutes is not what I call "IO intensive".

Also, I had an early Netbook, an Asus EeePc 900. Those mPCIe SSDs don't work in just any slot. The motherboard has to be able to accept mSATA daughtercards.

[bobitza]

I have an Acer Aspire One ZG5 with a 8GB SSD and Win XP installed that I would like to use as the "command center".

Two questions:
- anyone has an idea how much wattage will it consume? (assuming display is off and only a software miner running) I remember reading something about 20 W ...
- should I install Linux on it? if yes, which distro?

[crazyates]

I have an Acer Aspire One ZG5 with a 8GB SSD and Win XP installed that I would like to use as the "command center".

Two questions:
- anyone has an idea how much wattage will it consume? (assuming display is off and only a software miner running) I remember reading something about 20 W ...
- should I install Linux on it? if yes, which distro?

1) My Eee idles ~12W. I'd say expect between 15-25W.
2) XP should work fine, especially when you're not worrying about ATI drivers, and its just for USB hashers. If you wanted Linux, Ubuntu is a good one to start with.

[Desolator]

Keep in mind, I think those have 1.8" hard drives so finding an SSD that fits isn't easy.  Also, mining and especially wallet hosting causes a very high amount of write-IO which would kill a drive.  I've heard about people modding these but I think what they do is remove the internal wireless card from the mini PCI-E then get a mini PCI-E SSD like this one:

You're right, those 1.8" HD's are a pain. Just find something cheap with a 2.5".

Umm care to explain why you need a 200MBps SSD just to mine? Downloading a new block from the network every 10 minutes is not what I call "IO intensive".

Also, I had an early Netbook, an Asus EeePc 900. Those mPCIe SSDs don't work in just any slot. The motherboard has to be able to accept mSATA daughtercards.

You don't, just some for like a couple dollars less run at like 60 read/40 write which is crap, lol.