A few Newbie Litecoin questions

[ViciousDelicious]

Hello everyone, first post here.

I'm very new to Bitcoin and Litecoin. I have both clients, and I've been experimenting with getting an older computer running Ubuntu 12.04 to solo mine for Litecoins. I created the litecoin.conf file in the .litecoin folder, and turned on server option. I'm using CPUminer "minerd". My question is, is there a way to determine if the solo mining is working properly?

There are two options for algorithm, "scrypt" and "sha256d". With scrypt I get about 1.2 khash/sec and with sha256d I get about 1000 khash/sec, but I thought litecoins were only supposed to use scrypt. I like the idea of getting about 1000 times the hash rate with sha256d, but I'm skeptical that it's actually doing anything productive. Are there certain things I can look for in the debug file that will indicate whether or not it's working?

My last question is regarding port forwarding from my router. I set the proper port to be forwarded to my computer's IP address, but at one point the IP address changed and it didn't seem to change the miner's behavior at all. Does solo mining require port forwarding, or is that only necessary for pooling and/or transferring coins?

Hope none of these are terribly stupid questions, I've been searching the forums and google and haven't had much luck figuring out what's going on.

Thanks!

[nethead]

Hello and welcome, 1st post, and its out of the newbie jail? Hm..

[Tesla71]

Welcome!

Some things to your questions:

- you can't use sha256 on litecoins as the algorythm is scrypt
- with CPU -Mining and 1.2 Kh/s you should forget solo mining. You need at least 1000x that to do solo.
- use your graphic card for mining, even if it's an Nvidia its better that nothin (or you CPU), go for Pool-mining (eg. lhpool.eu with pps payout)
. Port forwarding is not essentially on "bigger" networks like litecoin, because there should be enough client you could connect to. For else you should set the IP-address of you PC in the dhcp server of your router to always the same adress and then forward the port

[ViciousDelicious]

Hey,

Thanks for the feedback, still have the same questions though.

When I set the litecoin "minerd" to sha256 (not sure why this option is available if it's not supported) it tells me that it's hashing at over 1000khash/sec. I'm assuming this is incorrect, but I'm wondering how I can confirm this. It doesn't tell me anywhere (that I've found) that it's not working. Quite the contrary, it tells me it's working  almost 1000 times faster using sha256.

Since my first post I have set a static IP address on the machine, but I'm wondering if I need to tell my router to forward incoming ports to the computer for mining or transfers (all incoming ports are blocked by default). The mining software seems to behave the same whether I forward them or not.

Thanks

[Tesla71]

Maybee sha256 is ther to mine other coins than only litecoin (as it is in cgminer).
With solo mining you are not getting any results back until you find a block. If you would mine on a pool, you would see only rejects if you are trying with sha256.
I shows over 1000khash/sec because sha256 is more easier to calculate than scrypt but doesn't help you (imagine of speaking english if the other one only understands chinese).

Its always good to enable that port forwarding as you are getting more conections to download the blockchain and other clients wich are not able to forward ports could also connect to your client then. Although its not really necessary.

[weex]

Sha256 will definitely not get you any litecoins as scrypt is the only algorithm that miners can use to mine ltc. What kind of cpu do you have? Most likely the 1000 hashes per second is more correct but that is pretty slow. While Litecoin was originally developed to be most efficient on cpu mining, you'll most likely want to get an AMD hd 5000/6000/7000 series GPU to have the best result. There are power considerations and other things to know but don't expect too too much at 1kh/s.

You do not need to forward any ports as long as you're seeing 8 or more connections. When you start the program it will go out and connect to as many nodes as it needs or the mining pool or whatever.