BAMT and Wireless - why does it drop, how do I fix?

[Nancarrow]

I have 3 rigs running BAMT, each with a wireless NIC, and one wireless ADSL modem/router combo to feed them all data and waste my life on my laptop. These rigs have been a real pain since I set them up, it's a lucky day when none of them need a manual reset. There seem to be a number of different faults coming up, but here I'd like to focus on two.

When a rig boots up and starts mining, all is (usually) well. The rig sees my router and communicates with it. When I type iwconfig, it shows the router's essid.

Then, a few hours later, my pool shows me the rig hasn't submitted a share for half an hour or whatever. I can't ssh into it from my laptop, nor see things on the web status thing. So I go downstairs and plug a monitor in, bring up a terminal, iwconfig, and... now there's no bloody essid! What happened? This kind of thing only happens to one rig at a time.

The second problem affects all of them. The router drops its connection, for whatever reason. So I reboot it. The connection is reestablished. At least as far as my laptop is concerned. But the miners do not resume mining. Why not? Why can they not see that we're back online and they need to get back to work?

All help gratefully received!

[1714481290]

1714481290

[1714481290]

1714481290

[AmDD]

I also have issues with BAMT and wireless. I have 2 very similar machines one of which is hardwired and never has any issues while the second will drop the wifi connection at random. (normally seems to happen about 20min after I leave for work in the mornings. :/) Running the latest version with all "fixes".

[Nancarrow]

Well, AmDD, it looks like we're on our own with this one! 

Made some progress... one of my rigs had conked out for a couple of hours just now, and plugging the monitor in I can see iwconfig doesn't show the ssid, usual scenario. Notably, iwscan *did* show the ssid. Restarting the networking scripts seemed to fix it, i.e. running the commands

/etc/init.d/networking restart
/etc/init.d/network-manager restart

Running iwconfig straight away didn't show the ssid, but leaving it half a minute or so after running these did. I also examined /var/log/syslog and it showed a flurry of messages around the disconnection time which I'm going to look at in more detail.

Of course none of this helps to make a 24/7 miner, but what I'll try to do is either

a) understand the message flurry and see if there's some bug I can fix, or
b) add an extra bit of perl to mother to note when this flurry occurs, and restart the network scripts.

Will update this thread if I get anywhere with those.

[boozer]

I had issues with this too.  I removed network manager and installed wicd and things worked fine...  However I moved my rigs to the basement which had too weak of signal, so I havent used wireless in awhile.  But you might try Wicd and see if it works better for you:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=65915.msg774991#msg774991

[paraipan]

Same issues here but on a wired connection. After a couple of hours it doesn't submit any shares and can't ssh into rig either. My screen just shuts off when BAMT is starting X, and CTRL+FX doesn't work either before the lock-ups. This is frustrating, any ideas?

[AmDD]

All weekend I was home and not once did my wifi drop. This morning Ive been at work less than an hour and its not reporting on my pool... Nancarrow, you said about creating some type of script, What if you could setup something to ping your router and if the ping fails it can attempt a reconnect?

Im at a loss as to why this is happening (total linux noob). I cant see it being a signal strength issue because the router is just in the next room, 10ft away. and the same setup worked flawlessly with the exact same hardware in the same location with WinXP.

Aggravating to say the least...

[dunand]

There is one thing you can try but you need another wireless router with Tomato or OpenWrt on it.

- Setup this new router in client mode to your other router.
- Connect your rigs with wire to the client router.

I have BAMT 0.5 running with this setup without problem.

*Imagine your 3 mining rigs in place of the 3 computers on the right side of this image

[AmDD]

I actually have that setup already, it is connecting my second rig via ethernet (the one that stays connected) as well as my Directv. I didnt want to run a cable from there to my wireless rig but i may have to.

I heard that BAMT 0.6 is planned to come out soon, maybe it will address this issue?

[Nancarrow]

Nancarrow, you said about creating some type of script, What if you could setup something to ping your router and if the ping fails it can attempt a reconnect?

I added this bit of perl to mother, obviously change your router's essid as appropriate. So far it has not come up, hope it works when the time comes.

Code:

my $router="SitecomD4ACE3";
my $check=`iwconfig wlan0 | grep $router`;
unless ($check) { # wifi conn has been lost
   $check=`iwscan wlan0 list | grep $router`;
   unless ($check) { # only restart if we can see the router
      system('/etc/init.d/networking restart');
      system('/etc/init.d/network-manager restart');
   }
}

[AmDD]

I'll give it a try when I get home. Thanks!

[lodcrappo]

The network-manager package in BAMT is definitely buggy, although nobody has tracked down exactly what how when or why.  I haven't been able to reproduce the issue here, but I have a limited selection of hardware.

What is known:

While certainly a significant number of people have the problem, most people don't.  This points to it being related to certain hardware (not that any hardware is to blame, just that whatever is buggy on happens in combination with certain hardware, or possible certain dhcp servers).  

It seems to effect wifi users more often than wired.  

A couple people have reported changing routers or dhcp servers made the problem much worse or better/fixed.  Again, settle down, nobody is blaming your router.  It is just that if you have another router laying around, you might be able to make the problem go away very easily.

Removing the network-manager package will resolve the issue:

# apt-get remove network-manager

However, you will no longer have a GUI tool for configuring your network.  For some this is no problem, for others it is challenging.
You may wish to try installing wicd in it's place if you need assistance with network configuration.

Version 0.6 may or may not have this issue, as I have no way to tell

[AmDD]

Nancarrow, after looking at this I realize that I have no clue how or where to add your code.... Care to explain a bit?

lodcrappo, is there any data you can use from us to help identify the issue? How would one setup the network via command line if we were to remove te gui? I want it to boot and connect to my network automatically ( and stay connected ). If that means use the command line then fine, I just need baby steps to do it...

[Nancarrow]

Nancarrow, after looking at this I realize that I have no clue how or where to add your code.... Care to explain a bit?

Well, there's not much point at the moment, because, as it turns out, it does sweet fuck all. 
But the basic idea is: every minute BAMT runs a perl script called 'mother' which is in /opt/bamt. It does various housekeeping and monitoring things, one after the another, and depending on which flags have been set in /etc/bamt/bamt.conf. My idea was just to insert those few lines you see at a suitable break in the proceedings... quite early on in the script really. But to add insult to injury, the last couple of dropped connections have involved the system retaining my router's essid, but not finding its MAC address (so my code thought everything was just peachy). It was easy enough to change my script snippet to check for that instead. But then a few moments later, the rig stopped finding ANY WIRELESS NETWORKS AT ALL.

What I'm going to do instead is work out as much as I possibly can about how to set up and configure a wireless interface using the various binaries in the wireless-tools package. This includes all those commands like iwconfig, iwlist and so on. Then I'm going to take lodcrappo's advice to nuke network-manager from orbit. Then I'll look into the networking script, twiddle that as I need to, then go back to 'mother' and try to write a bombproof way to check how the connection is doing and repair it however I can think of.

THEN, once everything is absolutely perfect as regards my wireless connections, I can start looking at the OTHER half-dozen or so ways in which my rigs screw up on a pretty much daily basis. Do you know, my mobo's cost about £150 each, and they *usually* find my USB sticks on bootup? USUALLY! Fuckers.

[k3rn3l3rr0r]

Hi all,

I experienced the same issue here.

Yesterday I had to move my rig to another room and thus I was forced to switch from wired to wireless connection...

I'm using usb wifi dongle with rt3070 chipset (148f:3070 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2870/RT3070 Wireless Adapter). My router is using WPA2-PSK authentication. After setting up authentication preferences via NetworkManager GUI (nm-applet) I was able to autoconnect to the router after reboot. But the connection droped everytime after ~1-2 hours... This is not good for headless linux mining...

So, I've decided to give wicd a try and now the rig is mining valuable BTC for 9 hours uninterrupted.

Here are the steps I have taken:

Use your terminal (and sudo) or connect over ssh to the rig as root...

// install wicd
root@rig:~# apt-get install wicd wicd-curses

// run wicd-curses
root@rig:~# wicd-curses

In wicd-curses I had to fill in my wlan interface in the preferences (type "P") in my case it was wlan0 (run "iwconfig" in your terminal if you are not sure which interface name to use). Press F10 to save the settings and after that you should see the wireless networks available around listed. In the list move cursor to your router's ESSID and then move left with the cursor to go to the connection config screen. Check the option "Automatically connect to this network" (using space) and optionally fill in your passphrase if you are using encryption on your network. F10 to save the settings again and "Q" to quit wicd-curses. Now all preferences needed to autoconnect after the reboot are set.

// disable network-manager daemon loading on bootup
root@rig:~# update-rc.d -f network-manager remove

// reboot your miner and pray
root@rig:~# shutdown -r now

In my case this approach worked well (on headless machine using ssh connection to the terminal). The rig successfully autoconnected to the wireless network after reboot and doesn't drop the connection without a reason.

I'm running BAMT 0.5c with all "fixes".

Sorry for my bad english - I'm not a native speaker...

Hope this helps someone.

k3rn3l3rr0r

PS: NetworkManager is sometimes PAIN! But especially in Fedora 16/17 it's working pretty well...

[imtiax]

Hi all,

I experienced the same issue here.

Yesterday I had to move my rig to another room and thus I was forced to switch from wired to wireless connection...

I'm using usb wifi dongle with rt3070 chipset (148f:3070 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2870/RT3070 Wireless Adapter). My router is using WPA2-PSK authentication. After setting up authentication preferences via NetworkManager GUI (nm-applet) I was able to autoconnect to the router after reboot. But the connection droped everytime after ~1-2 hours... This is not good for headless linux mining...

So, I've decided to give wicd a try and now the rig is mining valuable BTC for 9 hours uninterrupted.

Here are the steps I have taken:

Use your terminal (and sudo) or connect over ssh to the rig as root...

// install wicd
root@rig:~# apt-get install wicd wicd-curses

// run wicd-curses
root@rig:~# wicd-curses

In wicd-curses I had to fill in my wlan interface in the preferences (type "P") in my case it was wlan0 (run "iwconfig" in your terminal if you are not sure which interface name to use). Press F10 to save the settings and after that you should see the wireless networks available around listed. In the list move cursor to your router's ESSID and then move left with the cursor to go to the connection config screen. Check the option "Automatically connect to this network" (using space) and optionally fill in your passphrase if you are using encryption on your network. F10 to save the settings again and "Q" to quit wicd-curses. Now all preferences needed to autoconnect after the reboot are set.

// disable network-manager daemon loading on bootup
root@rig:~# update-rc.d -f network-manager remove

// reboot your miner and pray
root@rig:~# shutdown -r now

In my case this approach worked well (on headless machine using ssh connection to the terminal). The rig successfully autoconnected to the wireless network after reboot and doesn't drop the connection without a reason.

I'm running BAMT 0.5c with all "fixes".

Sorry for my bad english - I'm not a native speaker...

Hope this helps someone.

k3rn3l3rr0r

PS: NetworkManager is sometimes PAIN! But especially in Fedora 16/17 it's working pretty well...

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR POST, I FOLLOWED IT AND IT WORKS WONDERS.

NO MORE WIFI DISCONNECTS

THANK YOU!

[lonyyi]

Hi all,

I experienced the same issue here.

Yesterday I had to move my rig to another room and thus I was forced to switch from wired to wireless connection...

I'm using usb wifi dongle with rt3070 chipset (148f:3070 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2870/RT3070 Wireless Adapter). My router is using WPA2-PSK authentication. After setting up authentication preferences via NetworkManager GUI (nm-applet) I was able to autoconnect to the router after reboot. But the connection droped everytime after ~1-2 hours... This is not good for headless linux mining...

So, I've decided to give wicd a try and now the rig is mining valuable BTC for 9 hours uninterrupted.

Here are the steps I have taken:

Use your terminal (and sudo) or connect over ssh to the rig as root...

// install wicd
root@rig:~# apt-get install wicd wicd-curses




// run wicd-curses
root@rig:~# wicd-curses

In wicd-curses I had to fill in my wlan interface in the preferences (type "P") in my case it was wlan0 (run "iwconfig" in your terminal if you are not sure which interface name to use). Press F10 to save the settings and after that you should see the wireless networks available around listed. In the list move cursor to your router's ESSID and then move left with the cursor to go to the connection config screen. Check the option "Automatically connect to this network" (using space) and optionally fill in your passphrase if you are using encryption on your network. F10 to save the settings again and "Q" to quit wicd-curses. Now all preferences needed to autoconnect after the reboot are set.

// disable network-manager daemon loading on bootup
root@rig:~# update-rc.d -f network-manager remove

// reboot your miner and pray
root@rig:~# shutdown -r now

In my case this approach worked well (on headless machine using ssh connection to the terminal). The rig successfully autoconnected to the wireless network after reboot and doesn't drop the connection without a reason.

I'm running BAMT 0.5c with all "fixes".

Sorry for my bad english - I'm not a native speaker...

Hope this helps someone.

k3rn3l3rr0r

PS: NetworkManager is sometimes PAIN! But especially in Fedora 16/17 it's working pretty well...

IT Works like a charm!!!
Thank You Very Much