Starting out with soloing

[bcpokey]

So, pooled mining has become a pretty common and smooth operation, and I certainly enjoy it. But I've picked up a few pieces of hardware and based on rough calculations it seems like in theory it should be more profitable if I were to go solo, but this all relies on calculations using Hash/sec values of a bunch of cards combined.

So my question is, how do you set all your rigs to collectively work on a single block?

Or am I misunderstanding how the whole process works?

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[Meni Rosenfeld]

So, pooled mining has become a pretty common and smooth operation, and I certainly enjoy it. But I've picked up a few pieces of hardware and based on rough calculations it seems like in theory it should be more profitable if I were to go solo, but this all relies on calculations using Hash/sec values of a bunch of cards combined.

So my question is, how do you set all your rigs to collectively work on a single block?

Or am I misunderstanding how the whole process works?

You need to run a Bitcoin daemon and point all your machines to it - instead of using a pool's url and login details, you use your server's IP address and the login details you configured for it. I mined solo with 1 GHash/s but couldn't handle the pressure so I came back to a pool.

[xanadu]

So, pooled mining has become a pretty common and smooth operation, and I certainly enjoy it. But I've picked up a few pieces of hardware and based on rough calculations it seems like in theory it should be more profitable if I were to go solo, but this all relies on calculations using Hash/sec values of a bunch of cards combined.

So my question is, how do you set all your rigs to collectively work on a single block?

Or am I misunderstanding how the whole process works?

You just need to run the actual bitcoin client on one machine in your network with the "-server" option, make sure you configure it with your local username/password and allowed IP addresses.

Once you have that machine up and running properly in -server mode you just point your individual miners at that machine and it will dole out the block work to your miners.

[BookLover]

Marking this thread so I can answer future questions.  Please ask more specific questions, will be glad to help any way I can.

[stickman]

I've actually been wondering about this myself.  Does the server running the bitcoin daemon need to do any actual work in this scenario?  I've been thinking about using my Linode server for running this along with nagios for monitoring my miners.  Thoughts?  Suggestions?

Thanks!

[ffe]

marking

[Raulo]

When mining, the server makes very little more work above the standard non-mining bitcoind. My miner used 20 minutes of CPU time for the last 3000 minutes of uptime. I have severals miners with getwork every 2 secs submitting difficulty 1 solutions which the server verifies (as mostly above the target). Most of the work a deamon does is verifying transactions which is done regardless it is doing getwork or not.

When mining solo, be prepared for very long spells of no blocks from time to time. 3-4 times the average is not that uncommon. And it can be quite frustrating. And sometimes you can mine 4 blocks during the time one is mined on average. Poisson distribution has a very large standard deviation.