We are using the lightning asic tp-link controllers and a remote power switch to power cycle when the USB bus hangs. Does a PC platform give you much of an advantage performance wise or stability wise? It looks like the tuning options are better, but how is the stability? The tp-link boots up pretty quick, I'd hate to have to keep cold-starting a server/pc to recover the USB bus. I guess we could probably root and install this on our TP links without too much difficulty.
We're going to have to put in a couple of servers to do the pool right. The front end and stratums will be on 2 different VM's on one server in the DMZ, and the database and coindaemons will be on the other on our LAN.
so quick question... you on the modded cpuminer with the power fix that makes these ~8W per unit on scrypt?
Also, I figure you are on Linux so... here ya go...
https://github.com/dtbartle/cgminer-gc3355nice cgminer 3.7.2 with gridseed support and full stats minus temps (guess there is not a sensor?) and has the same power fix so ~8W per unit.
I now have one LightningAsic with TP-Link, and two "generic" sets with the wiibox. Both controllers are crap, but the TP-Link at least works and is in English, I couldn't get the wiibox work at all. Eventually I hooked up the "generic" sets to a PC and I'm using cpuminer (can't get cgminer to work with Windows COM ports, will try Linux later). Anyway, I can now compare TP-Link vs. computer-attached solution.
TP-Link has a decent UI (with some minor quirks) with quick status/hashrate overview. That's pretty much where it's advantage ends. It restarts miners every 1-2 hours on wafflepool (~330Kh/s per miner avg), and is almost unusable on clevermining or middlecoin (restarts every 10-20 minutes). If you try to connect more than 10 miners to the box it is restarting miners more often and it also seems to become less responsive, just not powerful enough I guess.
Cpuminer on Windows lacks hashrate stats and I need to run a separate cmd window for each miner, so it's a bit of a hassle (cgminer would be better). However the miners now are running stable for nearly 24 hours at ~340 Kh/s on clevermining, 2% reject rate. Handling 20 miners was not an issue, zero CPU usage on a cheap Celeron, just a few megs of RAM per instance of cpuminer, so it can certainly handle a lot more than that. My next step will be to test it with Raspberry + cgminer + a relay to toggle USB hub power remotely (optional - if the next few days show it to be necessary).