I use Awesome Miner software to manage my miners. About 2 months ago I started using the Awesome Miner Antminer Firmware. I tuned them myself - lowered voltages to 8.5V and set frequencies to 762, then, based on number of chips on a board that were not running in their happy zone, I upped voltage by 0.1 and lowered the frequency. After getting the boards so that they were at a point were most of the chips were in their happy zone, I then reduced to individual chip frequencies until I got them very consistently into their happy green zone. For the last month, my 8 S9s (S9s: S9, S9i, S9j - 13.5 to 14.5TH/s), have been running fine. Then today when I came home from work they were all only running for a few minutes each, so I check them and they are running very badly - MANY chips at 0 and red, missing whole boards, all of them only getting up to around a third or less of their regular hash rate. The firmware is set to restart them when there are more than 5 X's on a chain - so they were just setting there restarting themselves every few minutes.
Something appears to have changed around noon or so yesterday. I mine with Nicehash - and they are paying out ever 4 hours. I am generally, as of late, at around 0.00042000 to 0.00046000BTC per 4 hours cycle. But yesterday the payout at 4PM was 0.00054000BTC, then at 8PM it was 0.00055000BTC, at midnight is was 0.00051000BTC, at 4AM this morning it was 0.00064000BTC, at 8AM it was 0.00056000BTC, at noon it was 0.00058000BTC, and at 4PM it was at 0.00059000BTC. Now, I got home and saw them looking all screwed up at around 5PM and Nicehash was showing a significant drop-off after the 4PM payout - so I assume they were still running strong at 4PM as these payout are like 25% higher than normal. I restarted them all via Awesome Miner and that made no difference. I shut off the power to them via the power panel breakers and restarted them. No change. I did it again, but left them off for about 45 minutes, but still not difference. I exported the Awesome Miner history and reviewed it, for the last 30 days, and there is not change in temps or hashrate recorded for these miners before or during this 25% uptick in mining payouts from Nicehash. I NEVER get these kind of jumps in payouts from Niceshash - here and there it may get 0.00048000BTC or something, but nothing like these numbers.
I also checked the power - they are all running on Antminer APW3++ PSUs at 240V and the outlets are testing good. I thought maybe a 120V leg had dropped and they may not have been getting enough power to run properly, but this does not seem to be the case.
When I look at the web interface of the miners with the Awesome Miner Firmware running on them and check the chip frequency page where it also shows the status of the chips - MANY of them are now red 0's and almost all of the rest are in the orange/yellow zone where they are not happy (the green zone). When I was tuning them, when the were like this, I would lower the frequency on those chips by a few selections lower in the drop-down list (like from 750M to 743M or lower) and after doing this a few times which a batch of chips at a time - I got them all into the green zones. This is what is look like now. It's like the frequency is set too high for the voltage and now they are out of the happy green zone again. But, the board frequencies and voltages are the same as I had them, with the same per chip frequencies as well - yet now all 8 miners are acting like I really jacked up the frequencies on the boards. Which could make sense with the much larger payouts on Nicehash. But the web interfaces just don't show like there has been any changes to the voltages or frequencies of anything.
But to have them all running fine for well over a month with no issues and then they all go crazy at the same time - it feels like a virus or hack since everything else seems to check out. But why would they hack me, up the hashing power, and still direct it to my pool? Unless just to cause damage?
So, what do you think? What can I do, check, or whatever at this point to get them back to normal? If I re-install the firmware via using the web interface to flash/update the firmware - would this overwrite the hack/virus? All of my S9's have SD card slots, so I can boot from them directly. I was thinking of trying to boot one from SD with like Braiins OS to see if it works normal like that. But I am worried at this point if whatever is going on here has damaged my miners. Any ideas, suggestions, etc... would be great!
Thanks in advance!
