200+ antminers what's the most efficiente server setup?

[tapanamacac4]

Hello!

i just acquired more antminers, the electrical and cooling system is ok, but I'm worried about the network. This miner has machines from other owners and a few are using different pools, what I assume won't make much of a difference to the LAN itself.

my question is:
Using the IP report on the antminer software will fix the IP to the MAC address of each machine, so I won't have trouble with IP conflict? If so, or not, what would be the most efficient way to run this opperation smoothly?

[BitMaxz]

If you have miners with the same MAC address you need to manually set their IP from DHCP into Static so that it won't affect each other.
IP reporter software is only used to find the IPs of the miner if you don't know how to use it much better read this guide below.

- Where and how to use IP Reporter

[mikeywith]

my question is:
Using the IP report on the antminer software will fix the IP to the MAC address of each machine, so I won't have trouble with IP conflict? If so, or not, what would be the most efficient way to run this opperation smoothly?

Don't confuse yourself, MAC address should be the least of your concern as it's very unlikely you going to have two miners with the same MAC address, and to answer your question in short, NO.

As far as I understand the ip report button only sends a request to the router asking for an IP address from the DHCP table, it does not really reset your network setting, which means if the used miner comes with the following ip address.

Code:

192.168.1.99

and happens that one of your miners has the same exact IP , the newer miner won't show up on the network.

you should reset all the newly bought miners to factory settings, then assign static IP address and pool information using a script such as > https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2788273.msg28619062#msg28619062

or if your gears are bitmain then use their tools which can be found here > https://shop.bitmain.com/support/download?product=Antminer%20Toolkit
you can watch this video to understand how it works > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0XvCn8DVug

a word of advice, try this on 1-2 miners first, don't go all in , if you make one mistake in setting up the network settings you will need to manually reset everything.

[philipma1957]

Okay  lets pretend  you are  192.168.1.1 router

lets pretend  you have 1-254 addresses.

use  good 6x  48 port  switches

cisco has good ones. used for a good price.

use a 8 port router to the  switches
 
so 254   1 port is    the routers
    253   6 ports are the switches

1-10  for other gear.

A  1 address lost to  router 47 empty ports    start with 11 go to 50
B  1 address lost to  router  47 empty ports   start with 51 go to 90
C  1 address lost to  router  47 empty ports   start with 91 go to 130
D  1 address lost to router   47 empty ports   start with 131 go to 170
E  1 address lost to router   47 empty ports   start  with 171 go to 210
F  1 address lost to router    47 empty ports start    with 211 go to 250

4 left over 251-254

First just hook up

 switch A   do static  assign address

 192.168.1.11   name the worker 011
 192.168.1.12   name the worker 012

end at

192.168.1.50     name the worker 050

once switch a is good do switch b.

I use a black sharpie to number the gear in front and back

you end up with 6 switches and 240 units.

Switch A   11-50    40 pieces of gear all in a row
Switch B
Switch C
Switch D
Switch E
Switch F

very easy to look for gear this way.  But first setup is a lot of work.

[Artemis3]

First and foremost, you cannot have the same macaddress in more than one miner, if you do, you are going to get in trouble, so you have to correct that immediately. This could happen with inappropriate firmware cloning, such as older BraiinsOS installs using the same sdcard image and failing to edit the macaddress text file (usually no longer needed in current versions). Also don't use the same IP in more than one miner, that is also quite troublesome.

That said, it is my suggestion that you don't use dhcp, set them all MANUALLY (in the miner). Also you should set up a dns caching server in your lan. I'd use Linux with dnscrypt-proxy, but there are many choices.

200 miners fit a /24 configuration which is quite common, ie. 192.168.0.10 to 192.168.9.210 (place your dns caching server and router in 192.168.0.1) of course you can use the private IPs you like, such as 10.0.0.10 to 10.0.0.210, etc.

You don't need anything fancy, cat 5e and 100mbps is more than sufficient. You can use "dumb" switches (hubs are a thing of the past), and cascade them: just leave an empty port to connect the next switch to it. You certainly don't need any overcomplicated setup, i assure you that. Alternative you could simply use a master switch and connect all other switches to it, but your going to use more cable that way, it works either way.

Each S9 doesn't use much bandwidth, its like 1 KB/s each, so really, overkill wiring is not needed. You can worry more about the silly dhcp server failing, which is why manual is best, and instant. No wasting time asking dhcp what ip to get assigned, especially not all miners doing that request at the same time when, you know, power goes and returns...

And, please, no windows computers in the LAN. Be strict, linux or bsd only. If you knew the amount of garbage traffic a single windows computer does to a lan, you'd know why (Wireshark can show you). And lets consider possible malware infection. All you need is a web browser, any Linux distro can have those, usually Firefox or Chromium but many others exist. Also avoid OSX and Safari.

BTW: In case you didn't know, the miners run Linux.

This is my opinion based in my own experience.

[tapanamacac4]

What I asked was based on this video from bitmain, it seems to me it is a new functionality of their software.

There's this batch configuring option. My doubt was if it would fix the ip to the router through mac address(which I did before in a smaller farm), setting it directly in the router's configurations; or if this setup would change the gear configurations and set it automatically to static in thar specific ip addres, or would go into DHCP and work only until the next reset.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8BbDtsRVH0

[mikeywith]

What I asked was based on this video from bitmain, it seems to me it is a new functionality of their software.

There's this batch configuring option. My doubt was if it would fix the ip to the router through mac address(which I did before in a smaller farm), setting it directly in the router's configurations; or if this setup would change the gear configurations and set it automatically to static in thar specific ip addres, or would go into DHCP and work only until the next reset.

That is the same program I suggested for you , what it does is alter the network settings on the miners and not the router, those changes will be permanent until you change them, the only downside of using such a tool that sets network settings in bulk is that if you make a single mistake you won't be able to access any of your 200 gears and you will need to reset them manually one by one, so you should really try it on a small scale first until you get comfortable with using it then you can deploy it on all gears.

here is a little trick, when you power the miners, don't do it all at once, let's say you have 5 rows, turn on the first row first, wait for a few seconds, then start the second row and so on so forth, this way, you will know which IP range correspond to which row/set of miners, in that case if you one of your miners has an issue you won't have to search whiting 200 miners, this is a semi-lazy method , if you want everything to perfect you should either label all miners or simply turn the miners on 1 by 1 in order, because DHCP is first come first serve , also make sure your DHCP range is large enough to handle all the miners.