Topic: Free cloud-based stratum proxy for Slush & BTCGuild (beta) (Read 46503 times)

Thank you so much for that Windows Azure tutorial! I'm having gut-wrenching trouble with my cube and blades restarting every few minutes, I heard some people got it fixed by using your cloud proxy so I'm excited about giving it a try on my own.

I am working on a solution on this. Keep an eye out .

Take my steps above and change 8332 everywhere to 80.

I don't know if that will work for sure however (never tried) - a corporate firewall generally closely monitors port 80 traffic, if not just doing an HTTP proxy across it. So not sure what your firewall will think about the GetWork protocol.

But worth a try.

How would you go about making the proxy listen on port 80, but transmitting the work it receives over stratum to a selected pool on whatever port stratum is working on the pool?

I have a large network behind corporate firewalls, which I could bypass only with using port 80.
If I can set up a proxy server listening for connections on port 80, I could redirect the mining power over to a necessary port and push it to the pool.

How would I go about that?

This service has now been shut down.

Thank You dbbit and Merry Christmas 

I've not gotten around to decommissioning yet. I'll decommission on the 27th.

Here are the steps to create your own Azure gateway.

I'll show by example of how I would create westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net, port 8332 which connects to BTCGuild. My values will be within []'s. Substitute with your values when more appropriate.

1) Go to www.azure.com and create an account. You can get a free trial account
2) Enter the azure portal (on www.azure.com)
3) On the left of the portal, select 'Virtual Machines'
4) Click "+" at the bottom to create a new Virtual Machine
5a) Click through: Compute \ Virtual Machine \ Quick Create
5b) DNS Name = [westcoastbtc]
5c) Image = Windows Server 2012  (you can host on Linux as well if you're familiar with it. I'm not listing the instructions for that below.)
5d) Size = Extra Small (enough for 10 blades. You can upgrade later)
5e) User name = [shrek]
5f) Password = [donkey]
5g) Region = [West US]
6) Click 'Create a Virtual' machine and have a [beer] until it's done.

7) Click on your new server, and go to Endpoints
Click 'Add' to create a new endpoint
9) Add a Stand-Alone endpoint
10a) Name = [BTCGuild]
10b) Protocol = 'Tcp'
10c) Public Port = [8332]
10d) Private Port = same as 10c. [8332]
11) Click the checkmark to add it

12) Go back to the Dashboard
13) Click 'Connect'. There will be 2 popups, one from Azure, and one from your browser. Click 'Ok' on the azure one, and open your browser one (this is a Remote Desktop Client shortcut).
14) Enter 5e/5f from above for username & password

15) On the Server itself, go into 'Windows Firewall with Advanced Security'
16) Click 'Inbound Rules'
17) New Rule
18a) Port
18b) TCP
18c) Specific local ports = [8332]
19) Click Next
19a) Allow the connection.
20) Click Next
20a) Applies to 'Domain', 'Private', 'Public'
20b) Click Next
21) Name = 'BTCGuild Port'

It should now be set up. Create a batch file with a shortcut, and run the following:

start "BTCGuild Proxy" mining_proxy.exe -o eu-stratum.btcguild.com -p 3333 -gp 8332

(The 'start "BTCGuild Proxy"' part is just because I have dozens of these and I want to customize the title in the taskbar. You can leave it out).

Wow, Now I understand and that Difficulty is set for 1+TH/s and above. Thanks

I can confirm I see this behavior with BTCGuild. The difficulty on those mining proxies are all set to 1024 (by BTCGuild - I have no control), so your miners can sometimes have minutes and minutes without finding any blocks. This should in theory not cause problems over the long term, but because of the way PPLNS work, I can imagine it being an issue with statistic reporting.

PPS servers like Eligious work fine with that level of difficulty though.

My hash rate is going up now, I don't know what you did, but it was right. lol
 Thanks

Interesting. 21m/s as well.

Let me switch some of my blades to BTCGuild and see if there is another issue.

I'm running 50Mbps so speed should not affect my hash rate, here I just took a speed test  



Yes, getWork is a horribly inefficient protocol, we need USB support for our cubes to mine stratum. jesse11

It's at 80% usage currently, so won't be a problem on the server side.

By FAR the biggest performance bottleneck is the speed of your internet between your cube and the server. GetWork is a horribly inefficient protocol (which is why it's not used by pools anymore), so if there is anything slow between you and the server, your performance will suffer. It's a lot better converting from GetWork to Stratum as close as possible to your Blades as possible.

I run my own blades on the proxies, but I have a 40mps connection to the internet. So that is almost as fast as a LAN connection, and I've never seen a slower speed on the cloud proxy vs. my lan proxy. But on a slower connection other people definitely do experience problems.

With "tons of people connected" will it have an effect on performance? I'm at 74.90% on one cube and 78.13% on the other cube. My worker is only showing 6.57 Gh/s. I know it takes an hour for the full amount of Hash rate to be shown.

They're definitely up and running - tons of people connected to it.

These:
    westcoastbtc.cloudapp.net
    BTC Guild: 8884, 8885, 8886
or did you end it? My worker said: offline. Now I changed workers, OnLine.

Which server? I've been connected via westcoastbtc to Eligius, and has not have any service interruption in the last 7 days.

I've shut down NorthEuropeBTC though (just now), since nobody connected to that over the last 7 days, and in preparation of me decommissioning the farm.

The Free cloud-based stratum proxy's are dead 

Great work dbbit 
       First test: I like it! 

Do you have a donation address? Im willing to donate.