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I have nearly completed a very nice proxy that will run on BAMT, allowing you to do many advanced, interesting, and silly things with how your GPUs connect to your pools. Basically the local GPUs just all connect to a local proxy instance. The proxy takes care of making sure the work gets done and submitted where you want it to, and nobody sits idle. The proxy can intelligently manage connection to pools without the miner clients ever needing to worry about it... they ask for work, they get work... that's all they need to know.
IMHO, the miner client should be a simple as possible.. it should just mine. Fancy logic doesn't belong down at that level, there should be clear separation between the calculation and the work routing layers. Phoenix fits into this type of design nicely.
This sounds great! And I concur with your overall strategy as it is elegant in its simplicity. Not to say it is simply done--I sure sure couldn't.
Your strategy is sound, and unix-like. Commands should do one simple thing, so I can route them through pipes, grep, and awk, to do fancy things. I appreciate your hard work on this project, I am currently deploying about 5 GH with BAMT, and the setup time is the least I have ever seen, so low I'm no longer bothering to image my drives and make backups, because I have to edit all of two files in about 60 seconds. As such, there is 2.5 BTC on it's way to you shortly (waiting for confirmations to my withdrawl to avoid fees). My only possible request would be to replace or fix munin, I think I broke it when I was messing with hostnames, it is sort of a delicate flower. However, your local pool routing idea is something I have toyed with doing myself, so feel free to work on that as well!
This message makes me happy.. the original goal of BAMT was to make deploying a new miner as fast and simple as possible. Building, configuring and maintaining my own farm was a bit of a nightmare, and BAMT was created so that I would never have to do that again
I'm glad that it is accomplishing it's mission for you, as it has for me.
Thanks for the donation. I was getting sort of burnt out on BAMT a while back, two weeks went by without a single donation (yet hundreds of downloads). Sort of makes you question why bother to spend time on the project, when I could spend the same time making good money at work or just enjoying life. But, in recent days several people have stepped up and provided either monetary support or volunteered their time helping with the project. It's really not about the amount or what I make off donations compared to time spent... if I look at what I'm making per hour working on BAMT its a total joke. It's just the concept of so many people taking and giving nothing back. I can get a rough idea of the number of machines running BAMT by the number of hits on the fix distribution web site (no I am not tracking anyone
and if 1 in 100 has donated time or money, I'd be surprised. Over the years I have worked on several OSS projects where there is absolutely no compensation, but creating software that is directly used to make money, and for no other purpose at all really doesn't feel the same to me, despite the source to BAMT being completely open. Maybe I am wrong to expect people to give something in return for such software, who knows.
OK.. enough rambling, consider this a state of the project type of update heh.
Well since I've already gone on far to long, no harm in talking a little about the future of BAMT I suppose.
There are two major changes in store, one being the proxy based design mentioned earlier. This will allow lots of nice things to be done with work management. Miners can connect to a proxy instance on their own machine, or all your rigs can connect to a central instance, or any mishmash that works for you. Failover, work distribution, pool changes are all done very nicely and without any restarts on the mining client.
The second major change is the web interface. The current munin based stuff is fairly broken, and was intended more of an example of what you could do than as something to be used as is.
It doesn't even work a lot of the time. I hadn't planned on doing much with that kind of thing at all to be honest. I'm not a web guy. However, Fitty has designed a really excellent web interface that makes configuring and tweaking your GPUs very easy. Its impressive stuff, and I think unlike anything found anywhere else. All credit goes to him. This and the proxy should make their way into a "0.5" release in the next couple weeks, if all goes well.
ok.. that is a lot of crap for one message. i'm done.