Headless mining with windows

[P4man]

Disclaimer: Ive been mining with linux mostly so far, but wanted to tap in to some overclocking potential of my cards that I can not use on linux (>775 Mhz on my 5850s) or at least I wouldnt know how. So I prepared an old drive with windows 7 and gave it a try.

Now Im trying to remote control the PC, and its hell!

Ive tried remote desktop, VNC, Teamviewer. no matter what I use, when I am remote controlling, I lose all temperature info in cgminer (well, except maybe VNC, dont recall), and when I quit the remote app, one or both videocards will crash and the screen on the miner (which I still have for now) will display horrible corruption.

I think its catalyst doing that? Not sure, but when I launch cgminer automatically on login, it launches before catalyst, and once catalyst loads, I get the same problem. Crashing and corruption. So I have to delay cgminer a bit. All is well when it launches after catalyst it seems.

So how do you windows miners manage your rigs? Im really missing SSH at the point

[P4man]

Lol, while typing that last sentence, I thought, why not see if there is an SSH server port for windows? And there is. And it works. And cgminer runs in it! With temp monitoring, fan control, it all works


http://www.freesshd.com/

Now there is only one small problem, I can not use screen to detach the ssh session and re attach it later. So if I quit putty or my desktop is turned off, cgminer still runs on the mining rig, but I can not access the interface anymore.

So close! And yet, so far.

Is there a windows alternative to "sudo killall" to kill a process? At least that way I could restart cgminer without spawning new instances. Still not great, but better than nohting.

Any other ideas?

[jamesg]

Lol, while typing that last sentence, I thought, why not see if there is an SSH server port for windows? And there is. And it works. And cgminer runs in it! With temp monitoring, fan control, it all works

Now there is only one small problem, I can not use screen to detach the ssh session and re attach it later. So if I quit putty or my desktop is turned off, cgminer still runs on the mining rig, but I can not access the interface anymore.

So close! And yet, so far.

Any ideas?

Use bamt.  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28967.0

[P4man]

How is BAMT going to help me achieve overclocks beyond the hardcoded limits in the BIOS? Thats the whole point I dropped linux and installed windows.

[jamesg]

How is BAMT going to help me achieve overclocks beyond the hardcoded limits in the BIOS? Thats the whole point I dropped linux and installed windows.

I run a rig with 5x5850 and with bamt i run then at 900/300 with the phatk2 kernal and get 373Mh/s per card.

[enquirer]

It is true that remote desktop (either direct or via Live Mesh) breaks the access to hardware, if two or more cards are installed.
However, remote access via logmein.com works fine.

[rahl]

taskkill [/s Computer] [/u Domain\User [/p Password]]] [/fi FilterName] [/pid ProcessID]|[/im ImageName] [/f][/t]

So like "taskkill /IM notepad.exe" should work like killall I think...

Killing miners that way instead of ctrl+c breaks my video drivers though....

[P4man]

Well it seems you can overclock in linux with no problems. Just not in ubuntu, or at least not with the catalyst drivers that ship in 11.04 and 11.10.
I thought I tried it, but clearly I didnt in linuxcoin, as I just did it, and there is no problem bumping up the clocks beyond the "safe"limits. Duh! I just wasted hours installing windows and "linuxising"it for nothing!

I assume BAMT is the same, and it looks neat, but Linuxcoin and cgminer over ssh works fine for me, since I already have it configured on a stick, Ill stick with it. Wasted enough time as it is .

[Turbor]

So how do you windows miners manage your rigs? Im really missing SSH at the point

I use iTeleport on my iPhone. Works well with Win7

[jamesg]

Well it seems you can overclock in linux with no problems. Just not in ubuntu, or at least not with the catalyst drivers that ship in 11.04 and 11.10.
I thought I tried it, but clearly I didnt in linuxcoin, as I just did it, and there is no problem bumping up the clocks beyond the "safe"limits. Duh! I just wasted hours installing windows and "linuxising"it for nothing!

I assume BAMT is the same, and it looks neat, but Linuxcoin and cgminer over ssh works fine for me, since I already have it configured on a stick, Ill stick with it. Wasted enough time as it is .

If you have more than a couple rigs, BAMT makes monitoring a breeze. Take a look -> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33142.msg602707#msg602707

[P4man]

Yeah I saw bamt before, it really does look nice to manage a farm. But I dont have much of a farm to manage Just one dedicated rig and no expansion plans. SSH + screen + cgminer is all I need.

[KaptainBlaZzed]

i use TightVNC and i can control everything just like i can do when i have a monitor hooked to the computer.