Experience on building a remotely managed mining garage

[zoufou]

Hello every body !

I've gone building my mining garage, now with 9 rigs x6 GPUs and expanding to to 40 rigs before mid February, every rig's consuming ~1000 Watt, so 40x1000 Watt is the maximum i can pull from the wall at this moment.

My target is being able to run an autonomous mining garage with a very minimum effort for on-site intervention, this garage is running 600km from my home, that's for getting colder weather (~3°C now and a max of 26°C in summer), so definitely on-site management will be a headache.

I'm considering the following considerations:

• All rigs are running Linux, i dont trust a Windows OS to be reliable for an industrial scale,
• Using Claymore or Ethminer,
• All my rigs must be reachable through a VPN connection, using SSH console,
• No AC must be used,
• Any air sucking fan, or any other fans must not work 24/7, they must be running only when a temperature threshold is met,

And from my background experience where i'm an IT architect and being passionate of software building, this garage is an awesome playground for me.

This is my in-house rig build:


It's an aluminium rig with a wood plate to host the mobo and the psu.

Temperature monitoring and fan control is done through this piece:


I've built 4 of it, a smart power strip embedding:

• Power relays to control power on 8 sockets (on/off)
• Energy sensors to monitor Volt/Current/Watt consumption on every socket
• A Raspberry Pi system that can make all the smart things with the strip

And at the end, monitoring all of this through a monitoring system, using Zabbix, here's the kind of dashboard i'm getting:


The monitoring system pushes me emails for any thing going wrong and can even make automatic actions like restarting or even shutting down some systems.

Hopefully i'll not have to travel 600km every weekend

Am sharing this experience for you so you can better your farm implementations, and do not hesitate to ask for any help !

[deadsix]

This looks super cool. Please keep updating the thread with photographs as you go along, we love us some Buildout-Porn 

[VyprBTC]

Updates updates updates pretty please

 

[wetblanket]

My target is being able to run an autonomous mining garage with a very minimum effort for on-site intervention, this garage is running 600km from my home, that's for getting colder weather (~3°C now and a max of 26°C in summer), so definitely on-site management will be a headache.

I'm considering the following considerations:

• All rigs are running Linux, i dont trust a Windows OS to be reliable for an industrial scale,
• Using Claymore or Ethminer,
• All my rigs must be reachable through a VPN connection, using SSH console,
• No AC must be used,
• Any air sucking fan, or any other fans must not work 24/7, they must be running only when a temperature threshold is met,

...

Hopefully i'll not have to travel 600km every weekend

A big concern would be rain/dust/pollen/insects/grass - depending on how your shed air intake(s) are set up, any/all of those could be problematic if you cannot be semi-regularly on-site. Do you plan to have air filtering of any sort? If your exhaust fans are temperature-triggered, then insects can easily get in.  I'm super new to mining, but I've read others talking about air/critter filtering, so thought I'd pass it along.

[pbuva]

I use as a dust filter sail for flower growth. If you use the cheapest of them in the hobby market, it is well-drained by the air, it does not tear, and it does not let anything bigger, it's all black after 30 days.

[msuheb]

this is good
 

[ronnylov]

I think you need somebody that can help you on site for simpler tasks. Maybe need to replace a blown fuse, restart a router or something that can't be done over internet. Is it really worth that distance just to get lower outside temps?

[zoufou]

I have swapped out ethos-distro, although it is a very good packed OS to start mining including all the tools you need in one place and the ability to manage everything remotely, i've encountered an issue where no support were given from the ethos chat, the issue were simple: ethos does not recognize any GPU on some rigs, but claymore is running with no problem when launched manually from ethos-distro ...

Not having a reliable support behind ethos-distro were a break point, decided to go build my own linux box with overclock/undervolt and a set of useful miners.

EthOs offered me a cool way to query their API for monitoring data, after going to Claymore on Linux i've discovered there's no remote monitoring API for it, so built my own API on top of Claymore and here's the result:



Updates:

• Some dust started to accumulate, now i have a planing for dust removal every 1 month, have to find some local help,
• Controlling 1000Watt rigs through a 10A (220V) relay board appeared to be a bad idea, the relays fried under current pressure, i'm looking for another solution, maybe static relays instead of mechanical ones.

[Knightly]

Disclaimer: I'm not a miner.

Although in saying that, I'm thinking of getting in to it soon and have been researching.

Remote management sounds great in theory but what if:
-Power is interrupted and everything shuts down?
-Fuse blows?
-Rigs need maintenance;
-Someone steals your shit?

I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons but consider if this is really viable.

Good luck; I'll be interested to see where this goes.

-Knightly

[car1999]

I have a small farm which has similar build with yours, I've implemented all of your features except the last one(Any air sucking fan, or any other fans must not work 24/7, they must be running only when a temperature threshold is met).

I my expireance, 60km is fine, 600km is too far, you have to go to the farm to resolve unknown issues, good luck!

[cashen]

I can fully control all my units from anywhere in the world. I use the following

- Switched PDUs
- Simple Rig Resetter
- AwesomeMiner
- Team Viewer

I have about 22KWs of equipment

[WinningThePooh]

I can fully control all my units from anywhere in the world. I use the following

- Switched PDUs
- Simple Rig Resetter
- AwesomeMiner
- Team Viewer

I have about 22KWs of equipment

any feedback on AwesomeMiner?

[papampi]

Nice...

Keep calm and carry on mining

[Marvell2]

dust is my biggest concern its so anoying to enter the garage and see a layer of dust over everything, you will need to be onsite once every two to thrre months to blow dust and clean since u have open air rigs dust and bugs are a huge enemy.

if you must bring in air use a filter, but for my builds i prefer to just exhuast air from the roof, that way minimize amount of particles coming in.  I run my six fans all the time exhausting they onky use 150watt less than some gpus so just let them run, unless you have an issue with low humidity , for serve farms the cooler the better