Topic: How to Avoid DDoS and Other Downtime - page 2. (Read 5583 times)

I go from about 330mhash a core to 310mhash. Unless my miners are down for 2 hours a day, I'm losing money by doing this. I agree that this isnt really much of a solution. Thy should build failover control into guiminer or something.

Don't like the Flexible Proxy Project?

I haven't used it, but it seems a bit more elegant than running 99 miners on 99 pools to dodge downtime....

I use a C++ proxy that I should eventually release.

Yeah, you'll lose a bit because the secondary miner is set with a lower aggression rate, but with the -f 1 / -f 15 I usually don't lose more than a few MH/sec.  My 6950 drops from ~369 to ~363.  On another machine I have 5830's on I drop from ~ 299 MH/sec to 295 MH/sec when 'failed over' to the secondary.

I'd much rather lose a few percentage points on my secondary miner when it ramps up than lose 100% of the mining when my primary is down.

You could set both primary and secondary miners to say -f 1 and it'd split the mining equally between the both of them and still have full power to one of them if the other goes down.  Of course, then you're splitting your mining, so, it's a judgement call.

Experiment with two miners and different aggression rates, you can start/stop the miner to simulate one of them going down and compare what you'd get at different rates.

I've lost quite a bit of hash time due to downtime.... If I can tweak this enough to avoid downtime all together, I think I will

When I do this it seems I lose about 10% total hash rate. Thats the only reason I don't.

Ah, no worries.  Happy to do it.  I'd bet if everyone set up secondary miners that mined solo, DDoS attacks would probably ease up because there'd be no drop in total network power even if a pool goes down.

Ahhhhh brilliant! Thank you! I'll try to remember to tip you on my next pool cash out, this is really awesome advice man, thank you!

No need to launch GUIMiner twice.  Sorry if I didn't clarify.

In the same GUIMiner window just hit "File -> New OpenCL Miner" and create a secondary miner.  You can then set that miner to use the same GPU/CPU and just point it to a differnent pool/local server and give it the higher -f flag.  Start both up and you're good to go...

This is very, very helpful and I am going to try this asap

thank you


Do I need to make two different directories, or can i just launch the same executable twice (refering to GUI miner, it saves its config in %appdata% directory so if i edit one GUIminer, they all get affected for now)

I'm seeing more and more posts about people freaking out that their favorite pool x got hit with to Denial of Service attack or was down and they lost hours of mining.  There's not a whole lot you can do about the DoS attacks and as some pools get larger, there's people that will attempt to knock the pool's hashing power offline and give them a better shot at finding blocks.  Yeah, it sucks, but that's the way it is.

While the pool operators are doing their best to keep their pools up and running, there's a simple thing that you can do to stop your clients from losing any mining time when the pools get attacked, set up two "miners" for every GPU/CPU.

All you need to do is to set up and run a secondary miner object for each GPU/CPU with a lower "aggression" and point it to either another pool (preferably a smaller one that won't be a target) or to a local bitcoin server so you can solo mine when your primary pool is offline.

For example, I use GUIMiner/Poclbm for most of my mining and I set up two miners for my GPU's.  On one of my GPU's, a 6950, I have one miner pointing to my primary pool I mine for, and another miner, using the same 6950, pointing to my local bitcoin client/server.  I set the primary miner with the flag '-f 1' and the secondary miner with the flag '-f 15'.  I start both and let them run at the same time.  The primary miner runs at just about full speed (~ 369 MH/s), while the secondary miner runs at very low speed (~1 MH/sec).  If there's any connection problems with the primary '-f 1' miner, the secondary '-f 15' miner ramps right up and starts hammering away full speed at solo mining.

There's no reason you couldn't set up your secondary miner to point to another pool, and even a third or fourth miner for the same GPU for even more fallback options.  I know the other miners like Phoenix and Diablo have 'aggression' flags that will do pretty much the same thing at the -f flag with GUIMiner/Poclbm and with a bit of experimentation you can get things set up to fail over easily.

I'm pretty sure one of the reasons folks are doing DoS attacks is to kill a portion of the network power and give better odds in finding a block.  If everyone would just set up their miners to have 2 or 3 fallback options the network power would hardly skip a beat, even if the bigger pools get knocked offline.

Seriously, spend the time to set up secondary/tertiary miners for each of your GPU/CPU's, you won't be sorry.