p2pcoin-0.0.iso.torrentI'm setting up the seeds for the torrent now.
This ISO works as a bootable CD, or you can use unetbootin to write it to a USB stick, or you can extract the files and set it up for PXE booting on your network.
The easiest way to use it is with network configuration. To do that, you need to add a TXT record to your DNS. This needs to coordinate with your DHCP server. If your DHCP servers provide "example.com" as your default search domain, the record needs to be "p2pcoin.example.com", etc. The answer returned needs to be a URL where the box can download the configuration file. In bind 9, it would look like this:
p2pcoin (tab) TXT (tab) "http://www.example.com/p2pcoin/options.txt"
When it boots, it will append "?id=" and the MAC address of eth0 to the URL and then download it. This way, you can specify different options for different boxes, if you need to.
The configuration file takes a bunch of options. The parser is really dumb, so you need to get the format right. Every option needs to be the exact key in all caps, an equal sign, and the value. No spaces, no tabs.
Look in /etc/p2pcoin.defaults for examples of what this file should look like.
BITCOIN_CHAIN_SOURCE=a URL that rsync can use to download blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat (and eventually blk0002.dat, etc)
NAMECOIN_CHAIN_SOURCE=a URL that rsync can use to download the chain files for namecoin (blk*.dat and nameindex.dat)
TEMP_POOL=the full URL for the regular mining pool that you want to use during bootup, before p2pool starts
BACKUP_POOL=the full URL for the backup mining pool that you want to use if there is a problem after p2pool starts, or if the TEMP_POOL has a problem during bootup
BTC_ADDRESS=a bitcoin address where you want your earnings to go
NMC_ADDRESS=a namecoin address where you want your earnings swept to
BTC_ADDR_SOURCE=a URL that returns a bitcoin address
NMC_ADDR_SOURCE=a URL that returns a namecoin address
DONATE=1 (the percentage that you want to donate to the author of p2pool (not to me))
PHOENIX_DEFAULTS_SOURCE=a URL that returns a file with phoenix configuration lines for your cards
You don't need both BTC_ADDRESS and BTC_ADDR_SOURCE, one or the other is fine. Same goes for the NMC versions. It adds ?id=MAC to those web requests if you include them.
If you include a PHOENIX_DEFAULTS_SOURCE, that format is tricky too. It needs to be the exact output of
aticonfig --list-adapters, then a tab, and the options to be passed to phoenix when mining on p2pool, then another tab, and the exact options to be passed to phoenix when mining on the startup pool. Look at /etc/phoenix.defaults for examples of this file.
Side note, please send any good configs to me so that I can include them in future releases.If you are not using network configuration, you should edit /etc/p2pcoin.defaults and /etc/phoenix.defaults directly, which means that you need to set up persistent storage. To do that, you need to have a ext2/3/4 filesystem available on the machine labelled "live-rw". If you are using a USB stick, you can just partition it with a 1 GB FAT partition bootable, and use the rest for persistence. If you are booting from a CD, you can use a USB stick or a hard drive for storage.
If you have enough RAM, which is about 4 GB, it tries to run bitcoind and namecoind completely out of RAM disk, which is very fast. If you don't have enough RAM for that, you will need about 4 GB of persistent storage available.
I've probably forgotten a bunch of stuff. Let me know if anyone has any questions.
