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Topic: complete CD/USB/PXE bootable p2pool miner - p2pcoin - page 3. (Read 24148 times)

hero member
Activity: 481
Merit: 502
This is a fantastic idea! Well done sir! I think i'll start using it soon myself Smiley Probably on a HDD rather than a USB stick though..

One thing I would say is please change the name! When I clicked on this I was expecting to see another crazy alt-coin!
hero member
Activity: 742
Merit: 500
With a fleet of rigs, I feel like BAMT is a better choice.  Running a p2pool node on every one of your miners is unnecessary.

Yeah, probably unnecessary.  But it takes no more effort to do.
Until updates come around.
sr. member
Activity: 305
Merit: 250
Trust but confirm!
0.2 torrent file is missing, fix link please so i can add it to my share machine Cheesy
kjj
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1024
With a fleet of rigs, I feel like BAMT is a better choice.  Running a p2pool node on every one of your miners is unnecessary.

Yeah, probably unnecessary.  But it takes no more effort to do.
hero member
Activity: 742
Merit: 500
I would be careful here.  After months of field testing with BAMT (a usb based linux that makes every attempt not to write to the USB more than required) we see that some USB keys will die after a surprisingly short time (sometimes only a few weeks, with considerably less writes than running p2pool would generate).  It varies greatly from one model of key to another, but I would expect crappy keys to die in a matter of days running p2pool.  Maybe you don't care, but it would be best to warn users of this potential clearly.

If you are doing everything you can to avoid writes, and you are still killing drives, the problem is the drives.  I'll put a note at the top, but the answer in p2pcoin is to boot from CD or PXE if anyone is concerned about their flash drive.  Or even just not bother taking the extra time to add persistent storage.
So when you reboot you have to download the block chain again? That sounds like it could add a lot of downtime.

EDIT: Oh. you mention rsync. I missed that.  This sounds nice for someone with only one miner.

It is even nicer for someone with a fleet of miners that wants to configure once and walk away.

I have 4 rigs, each with 1 to 3 cards.  After I made the 0.1 release this morning, I copied it up to my PXE server and rebooted all of the boxes.  Bam, I'm done.  If I didn't have PXE, I could just burn 4 CDs or write 4 new flash drives and swap them.  Since all of the details are stored on the network, I don't have to customize the CD or USB stick for each rig.

Also, if you have enough RAM to use the RAM disk for bitcoin, but you also have persistent storage, stopping the bitcoin service cleanly (which happens during a normal reboot) will update the stored copy.  When it comes back up, it will only have to catch up to what happened when it was down.
With a fleet of rigs, I feel like BAMT is a better choice.  Running a p2pool node on every one of your miners is unnecessary.
kjj
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1024
I would be careful here.  After months of field testing with BAMT (a usb based linux that makes every attempt not to write to the USB more than required) we see that some USB keys will die after a surprisingly short time (sometimes only a few weeks, with considerably less writes than running p2pool would generate).  It varies greatly from one model of key to another, but I would expect crappy keys to die in a matter of days running p2pool.  Maybe you don't care, but it would be best to warn users of this potential clearly.

If you are doing everything you can to avoid writes, and you are still killing drives, the problem is the drives.  I'll put a note at the top, but the answer in p2pcoin is to boot from CD or PXE if anyone is concerned about their flash drive.  Or even just not bother taking the extra time to add persistent storage.
So when you reboot you have to download the block chain again? That sounds like it could add a lot of downtime.

EDIT: Oh. you mention rsync. I missed that.  This sounds nice for someone with only one miner.

It is even nicer for someone with a fleet of miners that wants to configure once and walk away.

I have 4 rigs, each with 1 to 3 cards.  After I made the 0.1 release this morning, I copied it up to my PXE server and rebooted all of the boxes.  Bam, I'm done.  If I didn't have PXE, I could just burn 4 CDs or write 4 new flash drives and swap them.  Since all of the details are stored on the network, I don't have to customize the CD or USB stick for each rig.

Also, if you have enough RAM to use the RAM disk for bitcoin, but you also have persistent storage, stopping the bitcoin service cleanly (which happens during a normal reboot) will update the stored copy.  When it comes back up, it will only have to catch up to what happened when it was down.
hero member
Activity: 742
Merit: 500
I would be careful here.  After months of field testing with BAMT (a usb based linux that makes every attempt not to write to the USB more than required) we see that some USB keys will die after a surprisingly short time (sometimes only a few weeks, with considerably less writes than running p2pool would generate).  It varies greatly from one model of key to another, but I would expect crappy keys to die in a matter of days running p2pool.  Maybe you don't care, but it would be best to warn users of this potential clearly.

If you are doing everything you can to avoid writes, and you are still killing drives, the problem is the drives.  I'll put a note at the top, but the answer in p2pcoin is to boot from CD or PXE if anyone is concerned about their flash drive.  Or even just not bother taking the extra time to add persistent storage.
So when you reboot you have to download the block chain again? That sounds like it could add a lot of downtime.

EDIT: Oh. you mention rsync. I missed that.  This sounds nice for someone with only one miner.
legendary
Activity: 916
Merit: 1003
Everything including forum usernames has a combination of the words "bit", "coin", "pool", "BTC" etc in them.  What's to be confused about? Cheesy
kjj
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1024
The name is confusing.  Makes me think it's another altcoin.

I took linuxcoin and added p2pool.  The first name that popped into my head was p2pcoin, and as far as I can tell, nothing else is using that name.

I'm open to suggestions, but I don't really think it is confusing.
hero member
Activity: 742
Merit: 500
The name is confusing.  Makes me think it's another altcoin.
kjj
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1024
p2pool and bitcoind generate a lot of small writes.  Nobody is worried about this killing usb drives?

I use usb linux on each of my rigs (6) and then point them all to a non-mining machine running bitcoind & p2pool on a HDD.

If you have 4 GB of RAM, it uses ram disk.  Also, no, I'm not worried about killing the USB drive even a little bit.  It would take months or years, and you can get 16 GB sticks for under $20 now.

I would be careful here.  After months of field testing with BAMT (a usb based linux that makes every attempt not to write to the USB more than required) we see that some USB keys will die after a surprisingly short time (sometimes only a few weeks, with considerably less writes than running p2pool would generate).  It varies greatly from one model of key to another, but I would expect crappy keys to die in a matter of days running p2pool.  Maybe you don't care, but it would be best to warn users of this potential clearly.

If you are doing everything you can to avoid writes, and you are still killing drives, the problem is the drives.  I'll put a note at the top, but the answer in p2pcoin is to boot from CD or PXE if anyone is concerned about their flash drive.  Or even just not bother taking the extra time to add persistent storage.
hero member
Activity: 616
Merit: 506
p2pool and bitcoind generate a lot of small writes.  Nobody is worried about this killing usb drives?

I use usb linux on each of my rigs (6) and then point them all to a non-mining machine running bitcoind & p2pool on a HDD.

If you have 4 GB of RAM, it uses ram disk.  Also, no, I'm not worried about killing the USB drive even a little bit.  It would take months or years, and you can get 16 GB sticks for under $20 now.

I would be careful here.  After months of field testing with BAMT (a usb based linux that makes every attempt not to write to the USB more than required) we see that some USB keys will die after a surprisingly short time (sometimes only a few weeks, with considerably less writes than running p2pool would generate).  It varies greatly from one model of key to another, but I would expect crappy keys to die in a matter of days running p2pool.  Maybe you don't care, but it would be best to warn users of this potential clearly.




sr. member
Activity: 305
Merit: 250
Trust but confirm!
Added another line to keep up share. Now im sharing it via 1mb upload and 10mb upload. It should give good speed atleast european downloaders.
legendary
Activity: 1358
Merit: 1002
p2pool and bitcoind generate a lot of small writes.  Nobody is worried about this killing usb drives?

I would be more worried about this killing Hard Disk Drives... Yes, the bitcoin blockchain already killed one of my 500GB drives. That's what I got for running it for months non-stop in a windows environment.

Simple explanation: Blockchain fragmentation killed the disk. <-- How do I know? Because I had to recover the blockchain from the disk and as soon as it hit the fragmented part it was sloooooooooow as hell!
kjj
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1024
So, I think that about a half dozen people have downloaded this so far.  Did anyone get it working?  Does anyone have questions or comments?
sr. member
Activity: 305
Merit: 250
Trust but confirm!
No problem mate im happy to help to share. But for thing itself i do not have atm time to try. Maybe next weekend. But anyway you should edit torrent file in your first post and start keeping revision list also. That way its more easier to download always latest.
kjj
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1024
Im not enought experienced to use this but i love to help new projects, so i dl this and keep it on my torrent client for future downloaders.

Cool, thanks for seeding.

And if you'd like to try it, I'd be happy to try to walk you through setting it up.
kjj
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1024
p2pool and bitcoind generate a lot of small writes.  Nobody is worried about this killing usb drives?

I use usb linux on each of my rigs (6) and then point them all to a non-mining machine running bitcoind & p2pool on a HDD.

If you have 4 GB of RAM, it uses ram disk.  Also, no, I'm not worried about killing the USB drive even a little bit.  It would take months or years, and you can get 16 GB sticks for under $20 now.

Hmm. Interesting.  So it doesn't keep p2pool & blockchain persistent (written to usb drive).  What happens on reboots?

During a clean reboot, it tries to synchronize the bitcoin and namecoin chains to persistent storage, if you have it.  And then when it boots, if it sees a local copy, and if that local copy isn't more than 2 weeks old, it will try to use it, rather than fetching it from the network again.

No attempt is made to save the p2pool database.  Your shares are already in the cloud, so there isn't any point.
sr. member
Activity: 305
Merit: 250
Trust but confirm!
Im not enought experienced to use this but i love to help new projects, so i dl this and keep it on my torrent client for future downloaders.
kjj
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1024
Oh, one other thing.  Bitcoin earnings are generated directly to the address provided, so it is no big deal if the wallet created by bitcoind is lost every time you reboot when using the RAM drive.

The same is not true of namecoin.  There is a script that runs from cron and checks the wallet balance every hour.  If it finds anything, it attempts to send it to the address provided.  This script is not well tested, and even if it were, you'd still have a huge window where a reboot could eat your wallet, and thus coins.  Please keep that in mind.
I don't know how BAMT deals with persistency, but couldn't you do something similar to prevent issues like this? Obviously this would need a UBS stick and not a CD boot.

What I'm thinking of doing in a future release will be to give the option to download the wallet.dat for namecoin from an external source.  There are some security implications of that, of course, but since p2pcoin nodes should be running behind firewalls, it may be a good choice for people that care about the chance of losing their namecoin earnings.
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