Building Cheap Miners : My "Secret"

[VyprBTC]

That's really awesome storx i was thinking about water cooling everything so much better than fans.

in the end i started dismantling and selling off everything though now my warehouse only has 10 rigs, have to decide to buy more gear or end the lease lol.


these servers look really fun to play with though so maybe... but i don't know. decisions decisions.

[1714769025]

1714769025

[1714769025]

1714769025

[1714769025]

1714769025

[PharmEcis]

The prices on the 580s have gone up by at least 50% of what I was getting them for.

One of my ideas wasn't to exactly water cool the GPUs themselves but to do something similar using geothermal.  I have a backhoe so digging ain't a problem, ya know?  I was going to bury a 2k-3k gallon reservoir, run a bunch of pex and then pump that through a series of radiators (having a former automotive shop I have a lot laying around).  The radiators would be in essence a precooler for my geothermal heat pump that will only work in AC.  The colder the incoming air to the exchanger, the cooler the ouput will be.  If I can take 105 degree Texas summer heat (or even the exhaust output of a closed loop system) and turn it into 80 or 85 degree air before it hits the AC system, my AC system will be way more efficient.  I have the majority of the items already to make the precooler, and even the AC system.  Just need time.

I started this venture in January so I have no idea how I'm going to cope with the heat.  Painting the containers a semi gloss white has definitely helped cut down heat absorption and I expect the solar shade to equally help.

If you wouldn't mind, I might need a copy of that script you wrote!

[sundownz]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

[PharmEcis]

So I've got 4 GPUs going on an R815.  I started out to run 6 but HiveOS doesn't load a network driver for the R815.  Instead of scratching my head on how to figure that out, I simply threw in a pcie network card which stole a slot.  The riser I threw the network card in has two slots.  The second slot wouldn't accept a GPU.  I said screw it and settled for four at the moment.  Later on I'll see if I can get a 4 to 1 riser to work.  I have not had success with the 4 to 1's in the 580s but I have in the 360s and 380s.

It took me four solid days to deploy a few more vegas and reconfigure all my gpu rigs which were all HP Proliant boxes.  What a royal pain but it was necessary due to the hodge podge manner in which my little army grew over the last 100 days.  

At this point I consider myself a fairly well versed miner but there is so much more to learn.  I can say that HiveOS, once you understand how to use it, simply makes life easier.  I'm using all three free rigs and I'm seriously contemplating pulling the trigger for the rest of them.  I'm first going to play with some watchdog scripts for the windows boxes and setup a proxy which should simplify management.  Need to come to grips with Power play tables for the vegas as they are a pain to restart when necessary.

However the simplest by far has been an ASIC.  Set it and forget it.

Now up to 55 CPUs, 42 GPUs, 2 ASICs with one left to arrive that might be DOA with all the mother forking ASIC hating going on...   A few dual and quad CPU stragglers to get online, but they are being bitches so they aren't up yet.

[nsummy]

If I want to do more than 8 then I will need to rewire the SAS power. I believe that is what you did. Can you provide details in how to do that?

It's pretty easy.  The SAS power connector has 10 pins.  5 commons / grounds (black).  3 12V (red) and 2 3V (yellow). 

Assuming your cards only need 1 power connector, you are talking a total of 13 power connectors if 3 cars are installed in the system and 5 are on risers.  If the GPU connectors have 2 each on 3 cables that's 6.  You'll get another two out of the SAS connector.  Leaves you short 5 power connectors unless you are going to use splitters.

I've been successful increasing density on my breakout boards by using molex powered risers that I can power three off one pcie power header.  The pcie power header has 3 + and 3 negative at 12V.  Each gets a 12v to 5v step down and then are passed to a molex plug.  In essence I've turned one of the breakout board power connectors into 3 functioning molex connectors that will drive 3 risers saving 2 of pcie power connectors.

What version of Windows are you using?

Since it's quad CPU the DL580s are running Server 2016.  However, the 4 GPU limitation I have experienced on both Server 2016 AND Win10.  The DL360s and 380s run 10 since they are only dual proc.

It honestly sounds like a driver or firmware issue.  Unfortunately with HPE servers you have to pay for driver updates.  If you want to give it another try I would install windows and then install this service pack:  https://www.teimouri.net/review-hpe-service-pack-proliant-2018-03-0-hpe-spp/

Look toward the bottom for this link:

Service Pack for ProLiant (4.81 GB)
MD5 Checksum: a259b671a8cc37e89194d1f050d68424

[sundownz]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

[senseless]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Some servers have a bios setting for throttling in the event of a power failure. It's possible it got stuck in that state? Have you tried a full proper power shut down and restart?

[sundownz]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Some servers have a bios setting for throttling in the event of a power failure. It's possible it got stuck in that state? Have you tried a full proper power shut down and restart?

I have not done a complete "hard" power off -- I will give that a shot.

[sundownz]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Some servers have a bios setting for throttling in the event of a power failure. It's possible it got stuck in that state? Have you tried a full proper power shut down and restart?

I have not done a complete "hard" power off -- I will give that a shot.

Okay tried on two systems. One just a "shut down" then power back on. One with a "shut down" and unplug / replug the system. No effect on either system. Both still doing only 1600 H/S

[Storx]

The prices on the 580s have gone up by at least 50% of what I was getting them for.

One of my ideas wasn't to exactly water cool the GPUs themselves but to do something similar using geothermal.  I have a backhoe so digging ain't a problem, ya know?  I was going to bury a 2k-3k gallon reservoir, run a bunch of pex and then pump that through a series of radiators (having a former automotive shop I have a lot laying around).  The radiators would be in essence a precooler for my geothermal heat pump that will only work in AC.  The colder the incoming air to the exchanger, the cooler the ouput will be.  If I can take 105 degree Texas summer heat (or even the exhaust output of a closed loop system) and turn it into 80 or 85 degree air before it hits the AC system, my AC system will be way more efficient.  I have the majority of the items already to make the precooler, and even the AC system.  Just need time.

I started this venture in January so I have no idea how I'm going to cope with the heat.  Painting the containers a semi gloss white has definitely helped cut down heat absorption and I expect the solar shade to equally help.

If you wouldn't mind, I might need a copy of that script you wrote!

I was going to use automotive radiator also, but you cant mix dissimilar metals, copper and aluminum dont work well and you would have major issues down the line if you tried, thus why i had to source an all copper radiator. i managed to find one on ebay after some careful searching, but my plan B is to add more length to the loop, i have plenty of property still and may even try running some of it down into the earth vertically, someone posted over on another forum that i can purchase some pvc pipe large enough to allow the pipe to run down vertically and use water to frack the sand out by running the water hose down the middle as i disturb the soil with the pvc pipe, then afterwards run the cable down the middle, but im worried it would kink or whatnot. Another way someone mentioned was i could purchase a/c copper line and build a diy radiator without the fins.. idk i just hope the temps stay managable for me, since i spent a few k redoing this system multiple times, mostly on pumps failing (sigh)... my current pump that has lasted the longest is a simple submerged utility pump rated for 100% duty cycle at 80% load i picked up off local hardware store...

In regards to the code let me see if i can find it, what the script was just a simple nvidiainscector batch file to change GPU settings, but i added the lines to run it continuous with a pause for 720 minutes, then after the 720 minutes it would run the next line of code and pause for 720 minutes to run the next lines of code. basically i started the batch on the rigs at a set time of the day manually to keep it stupid, the pauses were 12hrs, so 12hrs during the middle of the day it would run one set of overclock settings, then after the pause would finish it would run the next set and it just looped back and forth over and over 24/7

[sundownz]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Some servers have a bios setting for throttling in the event of a power failure. It's possible it got stuck in that state? Have you tried a full proper power shut down and restart?

I have not done a complete "hard" power off -- I will give that a shot.

Okay tried on two systems. One just a "shut down" then power back on. One with a "shut down" and unplug / replug the system. No effect on either system. Both still doing only 1600 H/S

Apparently this IS, in fact, a thing :

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1447342-dell-r820-slow-after-power-outages

So... that being said I'll have to work on them tomorrow when I have some time.

[Storx]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Im really shocked you have not invested in UPS for your systems man.. i ordered 25 x of the CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD, i got them refurbished off ebay, the guy only had 25 left, so i contacted him to ask if i could buy all 25 at a better rate and he sold them to me for $88 each, but at that time was spring time sales, so i was able to get 20% using the emailed spring code i had sitting in reserves. I have one of these 1500 units on every 6 and less GPU rig i have running right now...

[sundownz]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Im really shocked you have not invested in UPS for your systems man.. i ordered 25 x of the CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD, i got them refurbished off ebay, the guy only had 25 left, so i contacted him to ask if i could buy all 25 at a better rate and he sold them to me for $88 each, but at that time was spring time sales, so i was able to get 20% using the emailed spring code i had sitting in reserves. I have one of these 1500 units on every 6 and less GPU rig i have running right now...

I was about to pull the trigger before all the coins fell off a cliff in value, hah...

I am pricing out a full set of UPS units, though, through some distributors... since I'll need 100+ of them. Gonna just have to suck it up I suppose!

[senseless]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Some servers have a bios setting for throttling in the event of a power failure. It's possible it got stuck in that state? Have you tried a full proper power shut down and restart?

I have not done a complete "hard" power off -- I will give that a shot.

Okay tried on two systems. One just a "shut down" then power back on. One with a "shut down" and unplug / replug the system. No effect on either system. Both still doing only 1600 H/S

Apparently this IS, in fact, a thing :

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1447342-dell-r820-slow-after-power-outages

So... that being said I'll have to work on them tomorrow when I have some time.

One of the responses in that thread... Seems like it'd be the fastest solution in your case.

I did discover that if I shut the server all the way down, pull the plugs, wait 10-15 seconds, then plug it back in. After rebooting, it seems to be acting normal again. So what is it about pulling the power OR changing the performance profile that would fix whatever issue is happening?

[senseless]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Im really shocked you have not invested in UPS for your systems man.. i ordered 25 x of the CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD, i got them refurbished off ebay, the guy only had 25 left, so i contacted him to ask if i could buy all 25 at a better rate and he sold them to me for $88 each, but at that time was spring time sales, so i was able to get 20% using the emailed spring code i had sitting in reserves. I have one of these 1500 units on every 6 and less GPU rig i have running right now...

I was about to pull the trigger before all the coins fell off a cliff in value, hah...

I am pricing out a full set of UPS units, though, through some distributors... since I'll need 100+ of them. Gonna just have to suck it up I suppose!

Check ebay for UPS that would match your input power. You might be able to get a UPS large enough to place it before your distribution panel. I've seen them floating around in the 50kW->100kW range. You also don't really need a UPS, just the auto voltage regulator that most UPS have built in. With the AVR it should keep voltage constant until there is no more power and go to 0 completely preventing over voltage and under voltage situations.

[MinersRus]

So I've got 4 GPUs going on an R815.  I started out to run 6 but HiveOS doesn't load a network driver for the R815.  Instead of scratching my head on how to figure that out, I simply threw in a pcie network card which stole a slot.  The riser I threw the network card in has two slots.  The second slot wouldn't accept a GPU.  I said screw it and settled for four at the moment.  Later on I'll see if I can get a 4 to 1 riser to work.  I have not had success with the 4 to 1's in the 580s but I have in the 360s and 380s.

USB WiFi may be an option.

It took me four solid days to deploy a few more vegas and reconfigure all my gpu rigs which were all HP Proliant boxes.  What a royal pain but it was necessary due to the hodge podge manner in which my little army grew over the last 100 days.  

Need to come to grips with Power play tables for the vegas as they are a pain to restart when necessary.

I have given up on Power play tables and just use the Adrenalin 18.3.4 driver and Wattman with these settings for my Vega 56's:

------------------------------------------------

Core:
P6: 1397 MHz, 950 mv, Min State
P7: 1427 MHz, 1000 mv, Max State

Mem:
P3: 935 MHz Min/Max State, 900 mv

Fan: Min: 3000 RPM, Target: 4900

Temp: Max: 70, Target 60

Power Limit 0

1935 H/s Using 135 Watts

------------------------------------------------

My Vega 56's are PowerColor branded and 935 MHz was the highest I could run at. You may be able to squeeze out the extra 10 MHz and run at 945 MHz

I am using Cast_XMR as I have found that it produces very high stable Hashes. It is also very well maintained. A new version was just released yesterday.

http://www.gandalph3000.com

[MinersRus]

Imminent Hard Fork and Network Attack
Intense Coin experienced an attack to its blockchain on April 15, 2018. In this post we will describe the attack, the implications and our plan for resolution.

https://intensecoin.com/2018/04/16/imminent-hard-fork-and-network-attack

What happened (simple)?

An attacker was able to achieve the majority of hashrate on the Intense Coin network and thus be responsible for all or most of the blocks being added to the chain. This is commonly described as a “51% attack”. As the attacker controlled the majority of the hashrate, they stopped allowing transactions to be included in new blocks. Most significantly, the attacker manipulated timestamps of the blocks to exploit a weakness in the difficulty calculation algorithm of the coin. This manipulation allowed the attacker to find about 8 days worth of blocks in several hours.

I know that some people here were mining this coin so I posted this.

[vapourminer]

i just hope the temps stay managable for me, since i spent a few k redoing this system multiple times, mostly on pumps failing (sigh)... my current pump that has lasted the longest is a simple submerged utility pump rated for 100% duty cycle at 80% load i picked up off local hardware store...

i have geothermal heating/cooling in my house. uses 2000 feet (4x500 foot loops) of pex buried 5 feet down in the back yard and its connected to a 3.5 ton heat pump. system is around 6 years old

the ground loop is driven by two of these pumps in series:

https://www.pexuniverse.com/grundfos-up26-99f-circulator-pump-52722355

but mine say 230v not 120v. but thats the model UR 26 99F

they dont run 24/7 year round but in super cold weather (say like -15F at night to 15F in the day)  the system runs 24/7 for days, switching between high and low power modes.

maybe look into something like that? they look like they are continuous duty but maybe write them and see if its 24/7/365 rated?

[PharmEcis]

The Dells seem to be exhibiting the same trait as when you leave the cover off and they throttle.

I just had two power outages and multiple flickers the last few weeks and I haven't encountered the throttling yet.  I would totally remove power from them for a minute and if that doesn't do it, pull the cmos battery w/ the power out and wait a minute.  That SHOULD do it but you'll have to reconfigure the BIOS to your liking.

I am going to build a 30kwh battery backup system.  I just want enough juice to run everything for an hour.

In regards to 4 GPUs on the 580s, I'll give Windows another shot just for luls but honestly, Hive is so superior and easy it's really not even worth it.  They've been rock solid since I've got them going.

[Storx]

The Dell R815s that I got are running rock solid.

Hard to justify the price at this point, though, IMHO -- unless you get a sweet deal.

Well... I have to take that back a bit now.

My power flickered last night thus turning off all my hardware. Came in, turned all the Dells back on... started XMR-STAK on them all & walked off.

Noticed my pool hash-rate never returned to how it was... every one of my R815s is now ~400 H/S slower than they were before the power flickered (1600 H/S vs. 2000 H/S).

I've tried re-booting and even re-compiling XMR-STAK... seems to be permanent ?!

Any ideas ?

Im really shocked you have not invested in UPS for your systems man.. i ordered 25 x of the CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD, i got them refurbished off ebay, the guy only had 25 left, so i contacted him to ask if i could buy all 25 at a better rate and he sold them to me for $88 each, but at that time was spring time sales, so i was able to get 20% using the emailed spring code i had sitting in reserves. I have one of these 1500 units on every 6 and less GPU rig i have running right now...

I was about to pull the trigger before all the coins fell off a cliff in value, hah...

I am pricing out a full set of UPS units, though, through some distributors... since I'll need 100+ of them. Gonna just have to suck it up I suppose!

Try to source them refurbished or on ebay with bad batteries. I bought 3 from ebay that were server based UPS that just needed new batteries and i picked them up off amazon for a few dollars each, i even went to my local thrift stores and picked up a handful of them for a few dollars and half of them even worked, just needed fresh batteries. The ones i got from local thrift stores i built custom lithium batteries from 18650 cells, i have been collecting thousands of them over time because i was planning to build a DIY tesla powerwall with them along with build battery packs for my Catrike bicycle that i converted to electric assist, i get them free from thrift stores, hardware stores from the recycle bin just ask the store managers, and colleges. The most i got from thrift stores because when someone donates a laptio they cant resell it, so it gets scrapped and disassembled and they pay for someone to take the batteries away.

This is some of the batteries i got last month from going around and asking politely from many locations and picking up some from locations that told me they would place them to the side for me...


Here are some cells im still slowly testing out, i bought 4 tester/chargers units a while back that allows me to test 16 cells at a time, so its only time to test them, i put them on the test and forget about them really and come back when i remember about them, write the capacity on the side of the cell and move on, i store them in bins based on the capacity so my wall cells i assemble have the highest capacity cells. I have probably close to 40,000 cells assembled in my diy powerwall to date that ive never purchased...