Topic: Boolberry [BBR] FAQ&HOWTOs (Read 3170 times)

Tnx for the help! I'm pretty fresh in GPU mining, it is fair to say that i have a lot to learn   Will link it in GPU HOWTO post


Check clintar git repo, you'll find not just code for the pool software there but also a significant amount of documentation about rigging a pool: https://github.com/clintar/node-cryptonote-pool

For AMD GPUs on Linux, you can tune the frequencies with aticonfig, which comes with the drivers.

For voltages there are at least two ways. There's the ADL library, which is used by some cgminer versions and others -- it generally needs to be built into applications. I prefer to use AMDOverdriveCtrl manually on the command line, though it has a GUI by default.

I do not use Linux as I cannot control voltage etc there. I have to reduce the voltage and frequency to make mining worthwhile.

That is true. Hopefully someone contributes a pool set up tutorial to reduce network traffic for such a case.

EDIT: In the tutorial https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8821758 i added section 5. that you may find usefull

I am already doing that. But that would require N daemons for N rigs and N network connections to the outside world, which is network usage intensive.

For the network itself a large number of small (private) mining pools is much better than small number of large mining pools. Unfortunately i do not now how to rig up the pool server, hopefully someone will throw in a short tutorial on it!


I never mined litecoin so i'm not sure what exactly do you mean but, unlike other coins you can run the BBR daemon on GPUs of each rig and mine from the daemon (with GPUs). If all the miners that would connect to your local pool are controlled by you than i think you should do this https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8821758 on your every rig and just solo-mine to a single address. Effect would be roughly the same (if i understood you correctly).

Do you have instruction to set up own pool for solo mining?

When I mine litecoin or some other coins, I can use the coin daemon, and use multiple rigs and connect to that daemon. Can you do this with BBR?

Impressive work sonoIO!!!!
Great thanks to you for that!!

You are welcome. I have to document it somewhere, otherwise i'll forget it for sure, it may just be here on the Forum so everyone can use it  

thanks for this. 

This tutorial will show you how to set up Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) encrypted partition on a USB drive (which will be referred to as the “wallet USB”) and use it to store wallet files. Scenario in which you may find it useful is when you are not using encrypted home folder (e.g. when you have setup from this tutorial https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8821758). This will work also if you wish to have your wallet portable so you can use it on different GNU/Linux boxes using their local BBR daemon, but your user ID has to be the same on each Linux box. You can check your user ID by typing (without the leading "$" sign - it just indicates the "command prompt"):


1. Creating wallet USB

If you are using GNU/Linux for the first time it is highly recommended to pull out the power cables from your local hard drives. We will be issuing some very destructive commands and you do not wish to isue them on a wrong drive

To determine which device is the wallet USB, before you plug ti in open the  terminal (by pressing Alt+Crtl+t in Ubuntu) and write following commands:
Now plug in the wallet USB and type:
The uptput wil look something like this:
Which means that the wallet USB is sdc. If you plugged power out of your local hard disks and are running Linux from a USB it will be sdb. Whichever it is remember it as all commands you issue must operate only on that device!
If the output was e.g.
the wallet USB have one partition on it and you should delete it first.

If you will use the wallet USB exclusively for the wallet purposes you should use a USB with small capacity since the following command might take a while to complete. Type:
Be aware that the "badblocks" command is destructive when used with "-w" switch! After a while, the end of output shouls be:
If not use a different USB for the wallet. Now fill the wallet USB with noise:
This will also take a while, but only about 1/4 of the time that previous command took to exacute.

Now type the following (without “$” or “(parted)”):
You now have USB with noise and one partition on it. It is time to create encrypted container by:
Type in strong password for LUKS encryption, then mapp the device:

Now you can make file system on the encrypted device:

You can mount your wallet by:


2. Creating wallet

Now it is time to get wallet application. We will use CLI version of the wallet here. It is assumed that you have all dependencies for compiling it already installed. Type:
For the tutorial to work you'll need the daemon running, as you would have at the end of this tutorial https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8821758
If the daemon is not installed substitute the last command with this one:

Now go in wallet USB and create new wallet:
Check this tutorial https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8814576 and ignore point 3. for the moment. Point 1. is done by

Once you have closed the wallet you may unmount the LUKS partition with wallet files:


3. Using wallet USB

The next time you plug in your wallet USB you'll probably be prompted by the OS with something like this:
... actually i do not know how to insert pretty pictures here Just select "Forget password immediately", type in your LUKS password and press "Connect". That will issue "cryptsetup luksOpen" and "mount" commands for you. The wallet USB will be mounted in something that looks like "/media/ubuntu/XXxxXXXx-xxxX-xxXX-xxXXxxxX". To issue "umount" and "cryptsetup luksClose" commands right click on the USB key lock icon and select "Eject"

Note that, in order to go to the directory with your wallet files you do not gave to type all in "/media/ubuntu/XXxxXXXx-xxxX-xxXX-xxXXxxxX", and that will be very colorfull string. You just type
and hit Tab button, the autocomplete will do the rest. Linux usually mounts a USB in "/media" directory, and "ubuntu" is a user name you get when running (Live) Ubuntu with persistence from a bootable USB. You may notice that such a (Live) "ubuntu" user has UID=999.  

Tnx! Linked the guide in the OP 

Very good FAQ's and HOWTO's sonoIO

Only three more things everyone needs to know: boolberry boolberry boolberry.      

Oh and I wrote a CPU cloud mining guide here: http://boolberry.blue/boolberry-cpu-cloud-mining-guide.php - which is just about still relevant for some extra BBR hashes!

This is tutorial for BBR AMD GPU miner setup on USB flash drive. No sensitive data (e.g. wallet files) will end up on the USB  thus no encryption of the file system is necessary. If you decide to use a wallet on this comp you can store the wallet files on different (encrypted) USB drive, and that is covered by this tutorial https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8822382.

Ingredients:
- GPU mining rig. The rig doesn't need to have HDD but has to have 4GB of RAM
- 8GB USB thumb drive. Even cheap USB 3.0 drive will significantly improve the experience. If you for some reason use USB 2.0 drive arm yourself with a lot of patience, but in the end the miner will work just fine

Recipe:


1. Setting up Ubuntu with Persistance on USB flash drive

Download amd64 Ubuntu 14.04.1 from http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop
Download Universal USB Installer http://www.pendrivelinux.com/downloads/Universal-USB-Installer/Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.5.5.exe
Follow instructions from http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows to create bootable USB with Ubuntu. Make sure you put 4GB persistence file on it. If you wish to have persistence file larger than 4GB, i have no clue how to do it from Win, 4GB will be enough.
From GNU/Linux you can create larger Persistence like this:
- Make bootable USB with persistence of any size
- Mount USB and delete casper-rw file and resize partition with gparted
- Create second partition labeled "casper-rw" on USB, and format it as ext3 or ext4

Regardless of your current OS, and before first reboot, open "/boot/grub/grub.cfg" file on the first partition of your newly created bootable USB to make sure following menuentry has "persistent" option:
If it doesn't, add "persistent" keyword and save file.

Now restart comp and boot it from USB, select "Try Ubuntu without installing" (or "Try Ubuntu") when such a menu pops up. You'll have to make the same selection at every reboot. If you use GNU/Linux for the first time you can make sure that you'll not mess up anything on your HDD by e.g. pulling out power cable from HD before booting from USB. At this point you wish to have only one GPU card plugged in!

Once Ubuntu boots test if persistence is working by opening terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+t) and issue following two commands (without $ char):
After reboot open terminal and:
If you see that "fileOnPersistance" is there you are good to go.


2. Installing dependencies and few tools

Now type:
When gedit opens copy the following in it:
Save and exit. Then:

At one point firewall (ufw) GUI will appear, just press ON and close it. Then you may notice indicator-multiload appeared in tray, you may wish to check preferences of it.

Also, you can use this time to download Download AMD-APP-SDK-v2.9-lnx64.tgz from
http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/opencl-zone/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/

When initialUpdate.sh script finishes, as well as the SDK download, issue command:

When it comes back to life type:


3. Installing AMD stuff

Type:
to install AMD drivers. If you wish to install newest drivers see
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Trusty_Installation_Guide
but it will work fine with "fglrx-updates" drivers. Either way, you'll find more info in the Ubuntu_Trusty_Installation_Guide.

When the driver is installed, type:
and plug in all your AMD GPUs. Now power on comp again and find out in which GPU your monitor should be plugged in to display something. When it boots you may see disturbing message on the screen. Have no fear, just  press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and type in following:

When it boots this time you will have nice and shiny display that uses the AMD drivers. Now, in terminal:
to reboot for final time.

When it comes back, the command:
should return
If not than:


4. Installing and setting up GPU solo miner

Now, and at last:
You are now in the directory where boolbd is, if everything went well. Now:
where

is your BBR address and N is number of GPUs. This will download blockchain, but it will probably not mine with all your cards. When the blockchain is downloaded, type "exit" and hit Enter in the daemon window.
Now, in terminal:

Code:

$ cd ~/.boolb
$ gedit miner_conf.json && cd -

When the editor opens change "thread_delay" to 2000, save and exit the editor. Now (you can get command from history by pressing up arrow on the keyboard):

Code:

$ ./boolbd --start-mining=
 --mining-threads=N

should mine with all your N GPUs.


5. Cloning the USB for multiple AMD mining rigs

(This i have not tested but i'm pretty sure it will work as long as destination USB is not smaller than source USB)
If you are rigging multiple miners you can clone just created (source) USB to another (destination USB).
Boot a Linux box and before plugging in the source or the destination USB issue:

Code:

$ cd && mkdir localTmp && cd localTmp
$ ls -l /dev | grep sd > sdsWithoutUSBs

Now plug in the destination USB and:

Code:

$ ls -l /dev | grep sd > sdsWithDestinationUSB
$ diff sdsWithoutUSBs sdsWithDestinationUSB

may result in

Code:

> SOMETHING   sdd

Now plug in also the source USB and:

Code:

$ ls -l /dev | grep sd > sdsWithBothUSBs
$ diff sdsWithDestinationUSB sdsWithBothUSBs

will then return

Code:

> SOMETHING   sde
> SOMETHING   sde1
> SOMETHING   sde2

In this case sdd is the destination and sde is the source USB. If your letters defer just correct the next command accordingly. Now just clone whole source USB to the destination one:

Code:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/sde of=/dev/sdd bs=1M conv=notrunc

When it is finished, plug in destination USB in to one of the rigs and when it boots up press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and type:

Code:

$ sudo amdconfig --initial -f --adapter=all
$ sudo reboot

After the reboot it should be ready for mining!


6. AMD GPU tweaking

For tweaking of your rig GPUs this is a good starting point

Quote from: teknohog on September 16, 2014, 03:37:35 PM

For AMD GPUs on Linux, you can tune the frequencies with aticonfig, which comes with the drivers.

For voltages there are at least two ways. There's the ADL library, which is used by some cgminer versions and others -- it generally needs to be built into applications. I prefer to use AMDOverdriveCtrl manually on the command line, though it has a GUI by default.

Good luck

You are advised to keep the wallet in encrypted folder/partition of your DiskDrive. If your user account home is not encrypted you can keep the wallet files in a single encrypted folder e.g. by using TrueCrypt, see https://www.grc.com/misc/truecrypt/truecrypt.htm

When creating a new wallet you should:

1. ALWAYS try to re open it to see if you are free of fat-fingers effect. As you noticed, when you are creating a wallet you are not prompted to re-enter your password. Thus, to be sure you typed it in correctly, you should always close the wallet (by typing "exit" in CLI wallet) and re-open it with your intended password.

2. Then you should take away writing permissions from "wallet.bbr.keys" as you do need to write to that file ever again. This will make your OS prompt you if you accidentally try to delete the keys file. You should also take away read permisions for anyone else but your user

3. Than ALWAYS immediately backup "wallet.bbr.keys" file on another storage medium together (if possible) with hash of the file to know after a while that file did not get corrupted on the backup storage medium.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When creating a wallet you can name it how you like, but give it ".bbr" extension. In this example we named it "wallet.bbr", thus keys (encrypted with the wallet password) will end up in the "wallet.bbr.keys" file.

ad. 2.
In GNU/Linux type
to make keys read only and readable only by your user account.

ad. 3.
In GNU/Linux you get hash from a keys file by typing e.g. following:
This will write the "wallet.bbr.keys" file hash to the "SHA256SUM.wallet.bbr.keys" file.
I suppose it is the same in the Mac OS X if you use the command-line.

For Win users, find a OpenSource project that provides executive for calculating hash of a file. I'm shure you will find what you need on github.com or sourceforge.net. Main thing that it calculates the hash locally on your comp, NEVER use online tools for hashing your keys file!

Q: Should I mine BBR solo or in pool?
A: BBR was mined mostly solo from the beginning. See to keep mining as such, as much as possible. Keep in mind that pool mining centralizes the network which is bad for different reasons. BBR network has on average 720 blocks per day. If your miner hashing power is of an order of 0.1% of whole network hashing power (or more) you are encouraged to solo mine BBR. If you are on the boundary or somewhat below of 0.1% network hashing power you are still good mining solo as long as network hashing power is not increasing rapidly. Only when the network hash power is increasing rapidly (0.1%) boundary and below boundary miners will on average earn more mining in pools. An indicator that the hashing power will soon increase rapidly is when the price of BBR starts to increase rapidly, as then the cloud miners jump in for the profit.

When you solo-mine there is no shares or whatnot of pool-mining stuff. When calculating the expected income, you sum up the hashing power of your all miners (that mine to addresses you hold the private keys of) and keep in mind that only the time you are mining that it counts. Laws of statistics will take care of the rest.

(Evolving) FAQ (now in its infancy):

Q: Should I mine BBR solo or in pool?
A: Solo! If your patience alows it. This keeps network decentralised and more resiliant. Longer answer can be found here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8814410

Q: What are differences between BTC reference wallet and BBR wallet from an user perspective?
A: In BTC wallet you are encouraged to use multiple addresses to enhance your privacy. BBR is enforcing privacy at the protocol level so you actually use only one address in each wallet. This means that you have to back up keys file only when you create a wallet, as this single file can reconstruct your wallet and take control of any unspent funds in it anytime in the future. Keys file has a name that ends with "*.bbr.keys". Also, BBR wallet (and keys) are encrypted on your DiskDrive from the beginning, but keep it safely as it can still be brute forced if it gets into wrong hands. Note that, contrary to the BTC wallet, BBR wallet files are where you wish them to be. Thus it is painless to have them contained in a encrypted folder.




TODO

Q: I wish to mine on my comp that has mostly historical value, how do I choose the pool?
A: clintar made an effort that can take this choice burden of your back... clintar, help on explaining this would be much appreciated

This thread is an effort to help newcomers get painless start with BBR tech. If you are a veteran in BTC and noob to BBR you may still find something new here. OP will contain links to different HOWTOs scattered around the thread, and second post contains links to longer answers to certain FAQs. You are advised to see also http://boolberry.org/howto.html if you didn't already.

- CPU cloud mining guide: http://boolberry.blue/boolberry-cpu-cloud-mining-guide.php
- Setting up a mining pool: https://github.com/clintar/node-cryptonote-pool

OS independent HOWTOs:
- First thing to do when creating a wallet: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8814576
- Using CLI wallet: http://boolberry.org/howto.html#wallet
- Using GUI wallet

Win specific HOWTOs:
- Compiling the daemon and wallet: http://boolberry.org/howto.html#winbuild
- Setting up GPU solo miner
- Setting up GPU pool miner
- Setting up CPU pool miner
- Securing a hot wallet
- Backing up and restoring wallet keys file

Mac OS X specific HOWTOs:
- Compiling the daemon and wallet: http://boolberry.org/howto.html#macbuild
- Setting up GPU solo miner
- Setting up GPU pool miner
- Setting up CPU pool miner
- Securing a hot wallet
- Backing up and restoring wallet keys file

GNU/Linux specific HOWTOs:
- Compiling the daemon and wallet: http://boolberry.org/howto.html#linuxbuild
- Setting up GPU solo miner: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8821758
- Setting up GPU pool miner
- Setting up CPU pool miner
- Securing a hot wallet: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8822382
- Backing up and restoring wallet keys file

Following HOWTO would probably be convenient here also:
- Setting up BBR wallet in Tails - It kills several flies with one hit: cheep VPN substitute, portable wallet bootable from any x86_64 arch machine, wallet on encrypted home partition in hardened OS. It would offer wallet security for ppl that are not security experts

This initial proposition of HOWTO subjects will evolve with time.

Newcomers are encouraged to ask questions in this thread. Also a discussion of the established tech is encouraged, if it can add value to this thread - which is FAQ&HOWTOs. The idea is to link monographic posts, at the end of different discussions, in the OP for the easy navigation of noobs for who the thread is intended. Non-noobs are encouraged to make monographic posts which recapitulate certain discussions or answer certain questions, and to contribute with HOWTOs. Additionally, I am asking for help with Win&Mac HOWTOs as I do not have or use those OS.

I will delete any politically colored post, shills and FUDs, or any other emotionally non-neutral post, i.e. anything that is not intended for helping n00bs making their first steps with BBR. The main BBR thread is the place to discuss bleeding edge and planned tech for BBR.

And if you do not like my answers linked in the FAQ post feel free to write yours with an added value, i'll link them instead.