LBC client update announcementLBC client will auto-update itself to a new version >= 0.990 soon. This version has some long awaited features, so you might want to give them a try:
1. Set own idYou will be able to set your own id with the
-id command line parameter. String may be any of the 63 "word characters" (a-zA-Z0-9_) - no space - and must be between 8 and 32 (inclusive) characters in length.
valid ids:
__rico666__
Colliders_Inc
Elliptic_Epilepsy
etc.
invalid ids:
hello
.-=1337=-.
something_really_long_more_than32
etc.
With this, you will be able to start your LBC clients on different machines under the same id and therefore contribute "as one" to the stats.
If you PM me with the MD5 ids you had so far and you'd like to aggregate, I will move their contributed GKeys to your desired id in the DB.
Of course, the automatic issued md5-id will continue to work, so if you do not want to set an id, just don't. You can - of course - set some arbitrary md5 id
I hope, you are aware this feature gives you some freedom that could be abused, so should there be some profanities appearing in the stats or anything shady I have not taken into account yet, I reserve the right to modify the ids and in severe (recurring) cases to ditch them. If you have to have an own id, try to be unique, try to be funny or just keep some inconspicuous md5 and impress by the #Gkeys next to it.
2. Set a secret/passwortBy setting an id you could assume an arbitrary identity and with such obtain information that's not meant for you (e.g. now with -q "query"). Soon, there also will be a possibility to attach a BTC address to your id for payments of bounties, incentives, grants and unclaimed found bitcoins. *crowd moans*
So it makes sense to protect your id by a password, which is done by the
--secret [oldpwd:]pwd command line parameter. It certainly makes sense to set a password right when setting an id. e.g. like this:
$ LBC -id Hoolakawoola -s x:somesecret -c 4 -t 20
Server message: secret set.
Best generator chosen: gen-hrdcore-skylake-linux64
...And from here on you know it...
From then on, you use LBC as you did so far, only you have to use the -id and -s parameters in addition, else
$ LBC -id Hoolakawoola -s wrongsecret -q
Server answer to 'query' is:
{
"nil" : "wrong secret"
}
or
$ LBC -id Hoolakawoola -s wrongsecret -c 1 -t 1
Best generator chosen: gen-hrdcore-skylake-linux64
Ask for work... Server doesn't like us. Answer: wrong secret.
Yes, the password is stored salted + SHA256 hashed on the server. Should you forget it, all I can do is to remove it or set another one, I can't bring it back (yet :-)).
3. Current SpeedWhen LBC measures the speed of the generator, it does so on one core. The result serves as bootstrap information when asking the server for a certain amount of work. Depending on the system load, the number of cores working, temperature etc., the key generation rate may differ significantly. Therefore, the new LBC client will perform measures of the current performance and show you after each "round":
This is how it looks like on my system (shortened):
$ LBC -c 1 -t 1
Ask for work... got blocks [266052633-266052680] (50 Mkeys)
ooo (0.73 Mkeys/s)
$ LBC -c 2 -t 1
Ask for work... got blocks [266054297-266054392] (100 Mkeys)
oooooo (1.34 Mkeys/s)
$ LBC -c 3 -t 1
Ask for work... got blocks [266055257-266055400] (150 Mkeys)
ooooooooo (1.79 Mkeys/s)
$ LBC -c 4 -t 1
Ask for work... got blocks [266057321-266057512] (201 Mkeys)
oooooooooooo (2.39 Mkeys/s)
Ask for work... got blocks [266057993-266058184] (201 Mkeys)
oooooooooooo (2.45 Mkeys/s)
$ LBC -c 8 -t 1
Ask for work... got blocks [266204457-266204840] (402 Mkeys)
oooooooooooooooooooooooo (3.02 Mkeys/s)
You can see how the 1-core performance (of ~730000 keys/s) drops to around 600000 keys/s when all 4 physical cores are active and the 4 logical cores themself bring only about 150000 keys/s each.
4. Local config fileEntering command line parameters can become tedious. Also, giving the secret on command line may expose this information to other users on the computer. LBC now supports configuration by a config file in JSON-format. If a file lbc.json is found, it is taken as the default config file for LBC. It can look e.g. like this:
{
"cpus": 4,
"id": "Hoolakawoola",
"secret": "somesecret",
"time": 20
}
Of course, the command line parameters still work and have higher precedence. So if you start LBC without any command line parameters and this file is present, it will use 4 CPUs, send the id and secret to the server and ask for 20-minute chunks of work. If you start LBC with -c 2, this will take precedence and despite the information in the config file, it will use only 2 CPU cores.
5. OtherFeature: no_update flag. If you feel uncomfortable with LBC auto-updating, you can use this flag to prevent this behavior
Bugfix: The failing test with LBC -x (expected 4, found 0) has been fixed.
Questions?
Other Updates:
Server:
- mostly manual updates
- what happens when something is found
https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/man/user#found-- how to use pulsed operation to fire up LBC only at nighttime
https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/man/user#pulsed-operation- elaborated on maximum keyrate and physical/logical CPU performance
https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/man/admin#generator-speedGenerator:
Again a tiny performance gain of 1.5% for the avx2 generator, by compiling it with gcc 6.3.0 instead of 5.4.0
Rico