Azure Free Credits for Mining Monero/Other CN-Coins. Super-Easy&Super-Profitable

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

I am mining NIM with it...

From what i can google NIM does not seem to use CryptonightV7. So you didn't use my guide and setup the mining with azure yourself, right? If this is the case, may i suggest that you try my guide at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html?

[vodafone228]

It seems going your route with monero is much more profitable.  So in my case I should delete my current F4, and set up a batch account.
I have to stated that I am also using Orcale and Amazon and so far no problem with the ban hammer.  And GCS too which I used up all the credit already.

updated, followed your script, been running for 5 mins only, hashrate so far 400 h/s but rising.  I will let it run for a few hours and report back.

[vodafone228]

I am mining NIM with it...

From what i can google NIM does not seem to use CryptonightV7. So you didn't use my guide and setup the mining with azure yourself, right? If this is the case, may i suggest that you try my guide at https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_Cryptocurrency.html?

I am getting roughly 300-400h/s in average, from your github page it seems that I should run 1 pool with 3 cores only (because of the credit limit)?  And how do you get 1600 h/s with that?  My free account is valid for 1 month and it has $150 credit, it seems that if I upgrade to pay as you go , I will be able to hold my free credit to next month.  I think I will upgrade and create 1, or 2 more pools to boost up hashrate, or am I doing something wrong with my setup?

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

I am getting roughly 300-400h/s in average, from your github page it seems that I should run 1 pool with 3 cores only (because of the credit limit)?  And how do you get 1600 h/s with that?  My free account is valid for 1 month and it has $150 credit, it seems that if I upgrade to pay as you go , I will be able to hold my free credit to next month.  I think I will upgrade and create 1, or 2 more pools to boost up hashrate, or am I doing something wrong with my setup?

During the extreme price-spike beginning of this year there was a short time-window where mining on your credit-card was actually profitable. Right now (as far as i know) you'll need free azure-credits in order to earn money. There are two main ways how to get free credits to spend on azure:

• If you have a MSDN-subscription (from your day-time-job, i.e. it is paid by the company you work for). Depending on the subscription-type you'll get up to 150$ monthly credit (with that you can afford a pool with 10 F2-VMs which will get you 1600H/s).
• If you open a new azure-account. Then you'll get 150$ credit (but once that's used up, it's gone...).

Obviously, getting the monthly free credits from a MSDN-subscription is much better than just getting the one-off-credit from opening the azure-account. And the more free credits you have, the more VMs can mine for you.

From what you have written it seems that you have just opened a "normal" azure-account with a one-off balance of 150$ azure-credit (i.e. you don't have an MSDN-subscription). I think i read somewhere that the free credits are valid only for the first month... so i would suggest you try to use up your credits within the first month. For your case the table with the suggested number of nodes on my website is not applicable (you just want to spend your credits as fast as possible instead of staying within a monthly budget). Instead you should create as many pools with as many nodes as possible. If you hit the low-priority-quota, you can start creating pools in other regions.
If you have already activated pay-as-you-go of course you should keep an eye on the accumulated cost. Once you reach the 150$, you want to disable all pools and basically shut down your azure-account.

You can also try buying a MSDN-subscription, there are some guys in this forum selling logins for cheap... but i don't know  whether that really works. You might get scammed or azure might ban your account.

[vodafone228]

I am getting roughly 300-400h/s in average, from your github page it seems that I should run 1 pool with 3 cores only (because of the credit limit)?  And how do you get 1600 h/s with that?  My free account is valid for 1 month and it has $150 credit, it seems that if I upgrade to pay as you go , I will be able to hold my free credit to next month.  I think I will upgrade and create 1, or 2 more pools to boost up hashrate, or am I doing something wrong with my setup?

During the extreme price-spike beginning of this year there was a short time-window where mining on your credit-card was actually profitable. Right now (as far as i know) you'll need free azure-credits in order to earn money. There are two main ways how to get free credits to spend on azure:

• If you have a MSDN-subscription (from your day-time-job, i.e. it is paid by the company you work for). Depending on the subscription-type you'll get up to 150$ monthly credit (with that you can afford a pool with 10 F2-VMs which will get you 1600H/s).
• If you open a new azure-account. Then you'll get 150$ credit (but once that's used up, it's gone...).

Obviously, getting the monthly free credits from a MSDN-subscription is much better than just getting the one-off-credit from opening the azure-account. And the more free credits you have, the more VMs can mine for you.

From what you have written it seems that you have just opened a "normal" azure-account with a one-off balance of 150$ azure-credit (i.e. you don't have an MSDN-subscription). I think i read somewhere that the free credits are valid only for the first month... so i would suggest you try to use up your credits within the first month. For your case the table with the suggested number of nodes on my website is not applicable (you just want to spend your credits as fast as possible instead of staying within a monthly budget). Instead you should create as many pools with as many nodes as possible. If you hit the low-priority-quota, you can start creating pools in other regions.
If you have already activated pay-as-you-go of course you should keep an eye on the accumulated cost. Once you reach the 150$, you want to disable all pools and basically shut down your azure-account.

You can also try buying a MSDN-subscription, there are some guys in this forum selling logins for cheap... but i don't know  whether that really works. You might get scammed or azure might ban your account.

Thanks for clarifying.  I think I have the one time only, will look into buying msdn (need further due diligence on this so maybe later).  But for now, I have set up 2 pools Total 10 cores as this is the limit in server location.  I have tried deleting and setting up 2nd pool for couple of time but it never show up on mining pool.   https://www.supportxmr.com  Only showing my initial pool with 3 cores, so I am currently only mining with 3xx h/s.  I even tried setting new pool on another location but that doesn't work either, supportxmr never show more than one miner operating.

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

Thanks for clarifying.  I think I have the one time only, will look into buying msdn (need further due diligence on this so maybe later).  But for now, I have set up 2 pools Total 10 cores as this is the limit in server location.  I have tried deleting and setting up 2nd pool for couple of time but it never show up on mining pool.   https://www.supportxmr.com  Only showing my initial pool with 3 cores, so I am currently only mining with 3xx h/s.  I even tried setting new pool on another location but that doesn't work either, supportxmr never show more than one miner operating.

Did you check the pool-status in the azure-portal? Maybe you have reached the quota for the low-priority-cores. Otherwise all running cores should be mining, and this in turn should be visible on the dashboard of your mining-pool. There could also be a problem with your startup-script, but since you can see that at least one of your pools is running well, i assume that that is ok.

[vodafone228]

Thanks for clarifying.  I think I have the one time only, will look into buying msdn (need further due diligence on this so maybe later).  But for now, I have set up 2 pools Total 10 cores as this is the limit in server location.  I have tried deleting and setting up 2nd pool for couple of time but it never show up on mining pool.   https://www.supportxmr.com  Only showing my initial pool with 3 cores, so I am currently only mining with 3xx h/s.  I even tried setting new pool on another location but that doesn't work either, supportxmr never show more than one miner operating.

Did you check the pool-status in the azure-portal? Maybe you have reached the quota for the low-priority-cores. Otherwise all running cores should be mining, and this in turn should be visible on the dashboard of your mining-pool. There could also be a problem with your startup-script, but since you can see that at least one of your pools is running well, i assume that that is ok.

The script is good I think, like you said the first one is running and I am using the same script on second pool.  When I set both of the pool to 3 nodes Azure will give me warning on reaching limit, I am setting it to 3 nodes and 2 nodes, using 10 cores in total and no warning with this setup.  Still only one miner on mining pool.

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

The script is good I think, like you said the first one is running and I am using the same script on second pool.  When I set both of the pool to 3 nodes Azure will give me warning on reaching limit, I am setting it to 3 nodes and 2 nodes, using 10 cores in total and no warning with this setup.  Still only one miner on mining pool.

And you really can't see a increase in the hashrate? You can connect to the nodes to find out what is wrong (see also my very first post in this thread):
Extra Info: Troubleshooting
Most problems can be diagnosed by looking at the output of the mining-software (xmr-stak). To see the output, you first have to connect to the node. In the azure-portal, go to your pool, then click on "Nodes" on the left pane. The list of the nodes in your pool should appear, click on the node that is making trouble (or any of them if  e.g. you have a hashrate of 0). Then, on the top pane, click "Connect". Fill a username and password and enable admin-rights (the default-value of the expiry-time never works for me - i always just put this a few days in the future).Then click on "OK".
If you are running linux on your desktop actually connecting is really simple: just copy the displayed ssh-commandline to a terminal. If you are running windows you'll have to use putty (you'll just have to fill the displayed server-details. Post in this thread if you need help with this).
Once your ssh-connection is running, type

Code:

nano /mnt/batch/tasks/startup/stdout.txt

You'll have to scroll down a bit get to the log from xmr-stak. Some problems (like connection-problems to your pool) will be obvious when reading the log. Otherwise you can post the relevant parts here and i will try to help you.
Your previous post indicates that you know how to use PuTTY for the SSH-connection... otherwise please post here and i'll try to help you.

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

Hi everybody,
As i have posted here before, besides XMR i am also mining smaller coins. The idea is that for small coins there's a potential for huge gains in the exchange rate if the small coin introduces interesting new features or has clever marketing.
However, i am always suspicious of the different wallet-software offered by the projects. The coin itself might be a scam or their repo might get hacked and the wallet-software might get infected with a trojan. Naturally, it's not feasible for me to do a through code-audit for this type of software.

So this is my solution to the problem of keeping many different wallet-software on my computer:
You'll need:

• a big harddrive, 1TB or more. (This is only relevant if your computer only has a small SSD... if that's the case, you'll need to upgrade)
• a fast internet-connection. For downloading the blockchains of the coins a faster connection is always better

As a basic mechanism to separate the wallet-software from each other and from the rest of my system i use virtual machines. For this purpose the free version of virtualbox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) is working well enough. As a operating system i use fedora linux (https://getfedora.org/... it's very fashionable to complain about windows 10, but unless people stop using it MS will just continue with this shit). Setup the VM to use 4 CPU-cores. Create a virtual HDD with at least 150GB (dynamically allocated, i.e. it actually won't use that much space on your physical harddrive). Don't make the virtual HDD too small, increasing the space later is complicated. After installing fedora, i then take a snapshot of the virtual machine. Then i'll clone a new virtual machine from this snapshot for each wallet software.
This way, even if one wallet-software is infected with a trojan, the trojan cannot access my other wallets in the other virtual machines.

[mk111]

Anyone else having issues?
On SupportXMR my hashrate is 0 and no workers are active for the last 24 hours or so.

I checked on my Azure portal and I have not run out of credits.

Under pools:

Pool usage
1/20 (5%)

Job and job schedule usage
0/100 (0%)

Dedicated cores usage
0/20 (0%)

Low priority cores usage
16/20 (80%)


Any ideas?

[mk111]

Strange. Without me doing anything it started working again.

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

Good to hear that the problem has disappeared. Anyway, in situations like this you can log in to one of your nodes and have a look at the log-file to find out more. I have described the procedure to do this in the first post in this thread.

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

Hi everybody,
FYI: after my azure-account was deactivated before the end of the month, i have found out that the batch-service in the "West US" and the "West US 2"-regions do in fact have different pricing...
Conclusion: If you are experimenting with the region-settings, make sure that you are checking the pricing of the exact region you are testing first.

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

Hi everybody,

FYI: I have updated the used xmr-stak-code to the latest version. I will probably update the next time in october in preparation for the next Monero network update.

[mk111]

Thanks AzureCloudMiningScript.
I am still mining strong on my Azure account

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

You're welcome 

Actually we all have to thank Microsoft for being so generous with the free credits...

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

NIM is Argon2d but much more profitable for CPU-mining than any Cryptonight/CryptonightV7/Cryptonight-Heavy/Cryptonight-... coin (at least for now).
(There may be even more profitable coins but for now I guess NIM is the way to go for CPU-mining)

Yeah, i've been thinking of testing other coins besides XMR in order to find the most profitable thing.
Do you have personal experience mining NIM, especially with azure? What Hashrate can i expect on a server-class CPU? Which mining-software is your favorite?

[mk111]

How about Verus?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4070404.0

System requirements:
Mining and staking wallets are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Currently, you will require an Intel or AMD processor with AES and AVX instructions. Most Intel or AMD CPUs made within the past 5 or 6 years support these instructions. You can check yours specifically by running this free utility: https://www.cpuid.com/ or using the "lscpu" command on Linux.

CPU Mineable
Verus uses VerusHash, the fastest cryptographic hash algorithm in the world on x64 CPUs, equalizing GPUs and offering a credible ASIC solution.

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

Thanks for info. I am currently trying it out and will make a prototype for a azure-script-generator for NIM. Stay tuned!

[AzureCloudMiningScript]

The first version of the mining-script-generator for NIM is ready: check out https://azurecloudminingscript.github.io/Turn_your_Azure_Free_Credits_into_NIMIQ.html