1. Nicehash or any other mining rental service is a terrible idea to use. Sure they pay you but it is a fraction of what they earn from your gear. Join a PPS pool - you will earn more.
I am new to ASIC mining, so any help would be appreciated.
What pool would you recomend? viaBTC takes a very large commission on withdrawals.
Minerstats says Nicehash is one of the most profitable (sometimes the most profitable of all!):
https://minerstat.com/hardware/aisen-a1-24t.
2. I assume you are talking about Nicehash's AB pool? It sux big time to the point of needing the special driver that Canaan made to run their miners there along with NH having a dedicated AB connection address. The Avalons all work fine on non-rental pools and all pools these days will run AB if the miner can do it - no special driver or connection required.
Yes, Nicehash's AB pool, when changing pool to
stratum+tcp://sha256asicboost.eu.nicehash.com:3368, the miners just stop. Strangely, I tried to mine on Nicehash pool using an Asien A1 miner, well, this one refused to start on Nicehash normal pool, but works just fine on Nicehash AsicBoost pool!
Just make sure the MM and OpenWRT are from the same release dates, they are matched pairs.
They are not all from the same release dates, there are some OpenWRT images that do not have a correspondent in the MM directory.
Also, there is a folder called Nicehash in OpenWRT but no MM nicehash folder:
https://download.canaan-creative.com/avalon841/openwrt/EDIT:
Success, I updated the miners to
[Firmware Version] => Avalon Firmware for avalon8 - 20190711.
OpenWRT version is called Nicehash, this seems to work very well. MM updated to latest as well.
Not sure how to update PMU, if anyone has any idea about this, I would be grateful.
After the upgrade, miners do seem to consume about 100w less and the hashing speed seems a bit higher.
For 4 miners, it used to be about 54,xx, now it is 55,15.
Overall happy.