What is Skein PiMP?Skein PiMP is an image of my personal build of the popular PiMP (Portable Instant Mining Platform), which has the following extras installed:
- Reorder's cgminer_skein - Not originally included as part of PiMP, but very much required if you want to get the best out of your GPUs on Skein
- CryptoSwitcher - Enables profitability switching between DGB and MYR, by parsing data from whattomine.com every 60 secs. Typically worth an extra ~25% over straight mining of either coin.
- P2pool nodes - Runs private p2pool nodes for DGB & MYR. Like having your own private pool with no pool fees!
- Merged Mining - p2pool nodes are configured to run with the -merged flag to mine Unitus (UIS). Free coins!
- Dust Cleaner - Set your miners to mine DGB/MYR/UIS to local wallets, and then have them automatically swept to your main wallets or exchange addresses every 3 hours. No more pesky p2pool dust littering your wallets.
Hardware RequirementsProcessor - Really not important. Runs just fine on my crappy AMD Sempron 145.
Memory - I've been running it on 4GB of memory, but I suspect it would cope on 2GB.
GPU(s) - AMD only I'm afraid (they never released an nVidia version of PiMP)
USB stick or HDD - Owing to the disk space required for the blockchains, minimum capacity is 16GB, and it doesn't like running the p2pool nodes on the cheap shitty USB drives. I find it runs just fine on a Sandisk Cruzer Blade.
Getting Started1. Download the zipped image from
http://1drv.ms/1MnLytj and extract it.
2. Write it to a USB drive or HDD, using win32diskimager, which you can get from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/3. If you're using a USB, make sure the BIOS on your rig is set to boot from USB, and then boot into Skein PiMP. If it's a headless rig, you can access it remotely using Remote Desktop Connection (or similar). The password is "live". CryptoSwitcher is set to run on boot, and should automatically start cgminer, mining to
http://mine4free.noip.me (my nodes), on either DGB (port 5031) or MYR (port 5589) - whichever is more profitable according to whattomine.com. Note that if you're accessing remotely, you won't see Cryptoswitcher start because you'll be in a different session.
4. Now to start wallets for all 3 coins. Open the file manager and navigate to the /root/wallets folder. Double click all 3 -qt files to run the wallets for the first time and select the default data directory locations. Note that they'll need to sync the blockchains, which will take some time. While you're waiting, I suggest you get a receiving address for each parent coin (DGB & MYR) by clicking on the "Receive" tab and then "Request Payment". Copy each address to clipboard, then open the browser (IFMI poolmanager icon, top left on the desktop). There are two profiles that need to be edited to include the receiving addresses. They are "Heavy" (for DGB) and "Heavy1" (for MYR). Navigate to them via the "Miner" link near the top left, followed by the "Loaded Config" link on the next page. You will see three pools listed at the top of the config. The top pool will be your private p2pool node. Replace the address after "user" with the receiving address for your local wallet.
Please consider donating your mining time until your p2pool nodes are up and running by leaving the addresses on the other pools alone. Your generosity would be greatly appreciated and will be repaid very quickly by enhanced mining profitability!5. Once your wallets are fully synced (may take a good few hours, so please be patient), it's time to fire up your p2pool nodes. The best way to do this is to edit your /etc/crontab file so that they launch @reboot and then reboot the machine. To edit crontab, open the Root Terminal and type:
nano /etc/crontab
Within crontab you will see some lines beginning with "@reboot" that are commented out with a "#". These lines will start wallets and p2pool nodes @reboot once you delete the "#".
While you're in crontab you'll want to set dust-cleaner up so that it sweeps coins to your own wallets rather than mine, unless you're feeling extra generous! You will see a line entry for each wallet that includes the address to be swept to. Delete my addresses and replace them with your own addresses (you can paste your own addresses into nano using shift+insert).
Once you're finished editing crontab, save it by pressing ctrl+X, y, and enter.
Now type "rb" in the root terminal to reboot.
6. That's it. You're all done. Everything should run @reboot automatically, with dust-cleaner sweeping your mining proceeds to your main wallets/exchange addresses every 3 hours. Note that if you're accessing the rig remotely using Remote Desktop Connection, you won't be able to see the CryptoSwitcher or p2pool nodes running. To verify that they're running correctly after a few minutes visit 127.0.0.1:5031 and 127.0.0.1:5589 in the browser. You should see your p2pool node pages. If you check back again after a few hours, you'll also be able to check the hashrate graphs to verify that you're profit-switching.
Note that the DGB p2pool node can sometimes be a bit flakey. If you notice very high rejects, or if it falls over, delete the digibyte data directory - located in /root/p2pool/data - and reboot.
Finally, a note on securityEach wallet has an RPC username and password set in the .conf file in the data folders (/root/.digibyte, /root/.myriadcoin & /root/.unitus). They are:
rpcuser=dgb-skein, rpcpassword=rockhardpassword
rpcuser=myr-skein, rpcpassword=rockhardpassword
rpcuser=uis-skein, rpcpassword=rockhardpassword
I strongly advise changing these passwords. You will also need to include your new passwords in the scripts that start the p2pool nodes. These are runp2pds.sh and runp2pms.sh, and they're located in /root/p2pool.
Also, if you know what you're doing, and you'd like to support the p2pool networks, please consider forwarding ports 5030, 5031, 5588 & 5589 on your router.
