Hey, just flashed this wonderful piece of software on my Antminer Z9 Mini. I have a very specific question / issue: I use minerstat (in case you don't know it, it's a monitoring / management tool for rigs and ASICs). It has a software that runs on the ASIC and a feature that checks profit from a set of pools (let's say A and B in this case) and every 30 mins (as per my setup), if pool B is more profitable than pool A, it sends by SSH a command to restart the ASIC with the updated configuration to mine in the most profitable pool (basically a profit switching mechanism). My question is: does the initial devfee apply every time the machine reboots? Or only when it's power cycled? If it applies every time, how could I get a non-devfee version of this firmware so that I can take advantage of the profit switching mechanism? (of course, by this I mean paying for your software).
Thank you in advance, great work!
Yeah, you bring up an interesting thing that is slightly complicated in terms of component interactions. First, things like minerstat (and awesomeminer) do not handle pool switching as elegantly as they could with cgminer. What I mean by that is the pool can be changed (at least for pre-defined pools) on the fly without restarting things. In general that is not how they work though (awesomeminer does with some right click combination). The second is I can envision some situations where a utility like minerstat might trigger a tamper mechanism (purposefully vague here). I will have to think on how to resolve that interaction, but I wouldn't worry about it at the moment.
If cgminer is restarted by minerstat, then yes, the timer would essentially get restarted each time so that initial devfee would hit each time.
It is in my plan to handle things like this on the server side at some point in the future -- in other words, the timer for dev fees would not get reset when cgminer or the whole miner was restarted. To be honest, I only planned to tackle that piece if the usage scales to a point that necessitates that.... it would mitigate this concern completely, however (while enabling some other capabilities that folk might appreciate).
To your question on a non-devfee version, I am not taking additional "paid" customers on until I can get the previous set upgraded. They have been waiting a long time to get the features that were already in the dev-fee version. I will update the thread when that door for sales opens again.
I know this isn't an ideal answer to your situation and question, but I definitely appreciate you bringing it up. It is a condition I had thought about but forgot to document.
As an aside, when I first started my mining adventures, I did the pool hopping thing, which then grew to "I'll just get more miners and split across the pools"... and then got crazier from there. In the end, my _personal_ experience is that pool hopping cost more than it gained. There are a number of reasons for this including the "difficulty" with the pool gets reset when cgminer restarts, which means your share submission relative to difficulty will take a while to ramp back up. I'm not attempting to dissuade you, just share my similar experience.
Thank you,
Jason