complete CD/USB/PXE bootable p2pool miner - p2pcoin

[kjj]

0.3.1 posted.  CD booting works again, at least for me.  Let me know if anyone else has problems with it.

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[amencon]

Hey kjj,

Just put together a small rig (5830 and 5850 currently with 4GB RAM) and thought I'd test this out.  I know very little about linux as I've only used ubuntu and BT before and haven't used them heavily, so if you can help me get this working I'm sure almost anyone else would be able to do it too.

I downloaded the latest 0.3.1 version and used UNetBootin to burn it to a thumbdrive (32GB).

When I boot from the USB stick I see a boot menu a few options:

Default: error message "cat: can't open '/sys/block/*/removable' : No such file or directory" (repeated many times)
LinuxCoin (all): error message "cat: can't open '/sys/block/*/removable' : No such file or directory" (repeated many times)
p2pcoin: error message "Invalid or corrupt kernel image"

Any idea what the problem might be?

In the meantime I'll try re-downloading the torrent in case the download got corrupted for some reason.

Thanks!

[kjj]

Hey kjj,

Just put together a small rig (5830 and 5850 currently with 4GB RAM) and thought I'd test this out.  I know very little about linux as I've only used ubuntu and BT before and haven't used them heavily, so if you can help me get this working I'm sure almost anyone else would be able to do it too.

I downloaded the latest 0.3.1 version and used UNetBootin to burn it to a thumbdrive (32GB).

When I boot from the USB stick I see a boot menu a few options:

Default: error message "cat: can't open '/sys/block/*/removable' : No such file or directory" (repeated many times)
LinuxCoin (all): error message "cat: can't open '/sys/block/*/removable' : No such file or directory" (repeated many times)
p2pcoin: error message "Invalid or corrupt kernel image"

Any idea what the problem might be?

In the meantime I'll try re-downloading the torrent in case the download got corrupted for some reason.

Thanks!

After you ran unetbootin, did you properly dismount the drive before unplugging it?

[amencon]

Yes I did (both times, as I tried re-downloading formatting stick and re-installing).  Tonight I'll try from scratch using another stick or 2 I have lying around.

[kjj]

I just tested this out.  I didn't have a brand new USB drive, but I have a pile of old ones, so I used DD to zero out a spare 4GB drive.  Then I plugged it into a windows box (XP) and formatted it as FAT32.  Then used unetbootin on Windows to write the 0.3.1 ISO image and used the Windows USB disconnect thing.  Then I switched off one of my rigs, plugged it in, turned it back on.

Booted fine, mining away as I type this.

I googled the messages you are getting, and they weren't very helpful.  Maybe try different RAM?  Seems like a long shot, but someone else reported success that way.

[amencon]

Hmm ok, hopefully will have more luck with another stick tonight then.

As a side note I currently have BAMT mining away (booted up and worked no trouble) on the stick I was originally trying p2pcoin with.

I will still do my best to get p2pcoin up and running rather than just sticking with BAMT though.

[kjj]

0.4 released to upgrade p2pool to 0.11.1.  See forrestv's post.

The network will switch automatically when adoption hits 95%, so there is no hard date.  Better sooner than later, I suppose, but doesn't appear to be super urgent yet.

[amencon]

Ok so with fresh downloaded ISO and a different USB stick it booted up with no trouble, the previous issue must have been something on my end.

Now that its up and running, in the LXTerminal I'm seeing "Waiting for local namecoin node to catch up (986)" over and over again for about 30min now.  I'm assuming this is something I'll just have to wait out?

While this is happening I don't seem to be able to run bitcoin client or the file viewer (when clicked from the menu nothing shows up, no error messages).  Everything else seems to work as it should.

[kjj]

My personal p2pcoin rig farm found a block.  I haven't been watching every coinbase looking for the [P2COINv0] tag, so this might not have been the very first one found with this setup, but it is the first one that I know of.

Amencon, did your node finish downloading the chains and start up?

[amencon]

Sorry for the long delay.

I've been running into some trouble.

First off all my successful boots into the program are for the "Default" option in the boot selection screen.  I still get "Invalid or corrupt kernel image" for he p2pcoin option.

My first few attempts to let the system catch up to the latest namecoin block resulted in the LXTerminal notifying me that it lost connection to the server.  When restarting the program I have to start the updating process over.

I ended up trying the newest 0.4v on another USB stick and this time caught up to the latest namecoin block then it began updating to the latest bitcoin block and it again ended up losing connection to the server.

I don't believe it is any issue with the network connection since throughout this whole process I can browse the internet just fine with Chromium.

Any ideas what may be going wrong?

Edit:  I've also tested this on a few different machines with different hardware setups, they all end up with the same issue.

[kjj]

0.4.1 is out.  It includes the 0.11.2 p2pool release, as well as some improvements when setting up the RAM disks.

If you have persistent storage, you can run with as little as 2 GB RAM (maybe less, but I don't have anything smaller to test with).  It will still try to use RAM for running bitcoind if you have at least 4 GB, and for namecoind if you have at least 6 GB.

If you have no persistent storage and are running entirely in RAM, you now need a bare minimum of 4 GB.  With less than 4 GB, it will start the temporary miners and just leave them running.  With 4 GB, it will start bitcoind and p2pool in RAM and run them.  With 6 GB or more, it will also start namecoind for merged mining.

The TEMP_POOL and BACKUP_POOL options will now translate __CARD_ID__ into the Radeon ID # for each card when it starts phoenix, so you can configure different workers for each card, if you want to.

[kjj]

Sorry for the long delay.

I've been running into some trouble.

First off all my successful boots into the program are for the "Default" option in the boot selection screen.  I still get "Invalid or corrupt kernel image" for he p2pcoin option.

My first few attempts to let the system catch up to the latest namecoin block resulted in the LXTerminal notifying me that it lost connection to the server.  When restarting the program I have to start the updating process over.

I ended up trying the newest 0.4v on another USB stick and this time caught up to the latest namecoin block then it began updating to the latest bitcoin block and it again ended up losing connection to the server.

I don't believe it is any issue with the network connection since throughout this whole process I can browse the internet just fine with Chromium.

Any ideas what may be going wrong?

Edit:  I've also tested this on a few different machines with different hardware setups, they all end up with the same issue.

My turn to apologize for the delay.  I've been out of town a lot over the last week or so.

When it says it loses connection to the server, can you start a new terminal and see if bitcoind is still running?

Even better, try 0.4.1.  I think you may have been running out of memory.  If that was the problem, 0.4.1 should fix it.

[amencon]

Recently made a move so took awhile to set things back up, sorry about that.

Tried out the new 4.1 version and now it tells me that I need more persistent storage or RAM to run.  The system  I'm testing it on has 4GB of RAM.

I'll try to find some time tomorrow to test on my main system with 16GB of RAM.

Edit:

On my main machine it failed to boot for some reason:

Unable to find a medium containing a live file system

/bin/sh: can't access tty: job control turned off

I suspect this is a separate error not related to problems with p2pcoin software.  I'll do some more testing and report back if I can get it up and running.

[rav3n_pl]

Plz update P2pool to fresh version
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.0

[kjj]

There is actually a 0.4.3 version that is on the fixed version of p2pool.

http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/

I haven't posted them here because they also have version 0.6.2 of bitcoind, which has problems.  My understanding was that the version of p2pool that was included in 0.4.1 wasn't the version causing problems on the network.  Let me know if I'm wrong about that.  I'll try to spin up a 0.6.99 setup for testing before the weekend too.

P.S.  My 4 nodes of p2pcoin are all running 0.4.3, which has the 3.1 release of p2pool.  I suspect that my nodes represent a decent fraction of all p2pcoin nodes in the world.

[kjj]

Version 0.6 released.

Lots of little changes, and a few big ones.

Biggest one is BFGminer.  The BFG configuration file is built on startup.  This means that it won't stay across reboots if you have persistent storage.  I use PXE in diskless machines, so I didn't notice this one yesterday.  If there are other misc BFG options that anyone wants the ability to adjust, let me know.

The old BACKUP_POOL= and TEMP_POOL= lines from your config are now the last places in the BFG pool list.  First place is localhost, and you can fill in between them with PEER[0-9]= lines.  I run a small cluster of boxes, each with 1-3 cards.  Now they can all fail over to each other, and the backup pool should only get hit if they are all booting at the same time.  It also means that you can use the same image and configuration for a mining-only box if you don't have enough RAM or flash to run a full bitcoind node.

The heartbeat script now pulls hashing rate from the BFG api instead of from p2pool.  The script isn't very clever, and just reports them in the order given by the BFG api.  It'll need some work before it can properly handle mixed-platform mining rigs.

The old restart logic was per-card and has been disabled.  BFG should recover from single card failures.  If you have external monitoring, that can handle whole-box failures.  In the next release, I'll fix the restart script to restart BFG to handle the odd cases where the BFG process has failed without crashing the whole box.

I also added packages for PHP5-cli and TOR.  I don't think that PHP works yet, and I haven't even tried TOR.  These are mostly included so that I can play with them on my own personal boxes.

[dsky]

Can you add AMD Drivers that support 7770 and 7970 devices please?

Would love to hear from you.

[dsky]

Hm. No Reply?

Any idea how to update the driver myself in a live linux image?

[bitcon]

how do you mine with this? i booted the CD now what?

[dsky]

how do you mine with this? i booted the CD now what?

You have to configure your DNS Server to point to a config.txt file url where your settings are configured.
Read the first two or three posts from kjj in this thread. That makes thinks clear.

Still need help with my HD7770 cards. No ideas?