Topic: need help going headless (Read 1778 times)

Yes that's what headless means. Just a box with power and internet. For Linux, you can either use SSH, or TightVNC if you prefer a GUI.

What does one mean by headless? Does that mean no monitor, keyboard, and mouse? Just power and ethernet? Because thats what my miners are and they run windows. I just use UltraVNC instead of whatever the linux equivalent is in case I need to interact with it. Otherwise it automatically powers on whenever the power plugs it, automatically logs on, and automatically starts mining, overclocks, underclocks, etc without needing any interaction from me.

Install ssh and byobu onto your linux rig. Then install Putty onto your windows. Sounds like you got this part already done.

When you're in Putty, all I do is enter the IP address of the Linux machine, and click Open. You have to enter a valid username/password for the Linux machine you're logging into. Then you've got a terminal up and running. I havn't bothered with Private keys or anything, but when I move my miners, I'll set them up.

Once you're in there, you can use byobu (or screen) to run your software after you disconnect the SSH session. Both of these allow you to run a program in a "virtial terminal" that you can connect to at any time. For example, I run byobu, which gets me a blank terminal screen, and then I run CGMiner. I press F6, and byobu disconnects, but keeps running in the background, along with CGMiner. I can then close my SSH session without closing CGMiner. If you run CGMiner directly in the SSH session, CGMiner would be closed when you disconnected, so that's why it has to be done this way. If I want to check on CGMiner, I just start a new SSH session, type byobu, and it brings up that CGMiner screen. Press F6 to close, and disconnect. You can do this all day long. I like byobu, as it's dead simple, but I havn't quite figured out how to get byobu to run a program when you reboot the computer. Screen can do this. I learned about byobu from here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJUx_suP_CpjSEdSi8_z9U/edit It's got some GPU specific information, which you might or might not need (I didn't).


From a terminal, you can type "top". That will show you what program are eating the most CPU. To kill a program, you can do "kill -9 cgminer" or whatever program you're trying to kill. As for starting a script, you can place commands into rc.local, and those will be executed on startup.

I've downloaded and installed Putty on my windows lappy, but I have no clue how to use it / log in to my xubuntu machines.  Can you explain that process briefly, or point me to a down-to-earth tutorial?
I installed SSH on one of my two xubuntu rigs (the other one said "out of space" - funny, even though it's using a 4GB flash usb, same as the other one, same persistence size and everything.  OH YEAH and that's another thing, how the heck do I mount this leftover space?  or IS that even leftover space, or is that the reserved space for the persistence file? anyway we can leave that question for very last   ) -- I guess I just don't know if it will work for this or how to even use it.  What I'm looking for is something that would ideally give me a graphical (in a window?) representation of what's happening on my mining rigs, sort of like the X desktop looks on it right at this very moment while I'm typing this message.  I realize that may be asking too much, and I can run in a CL environment if I have to, but...


That's a bridge I'd like to be closer to figuring out how to cross! 
That's a big part of my problem -- I'm 95% *nix retarded.  So I understand "OK I can issue commands inside a terminal" but there are SO MANY commands that do SO MANY things...


Alright:  I vaguely understand what you said there.  I need a bit more clarification on "reattach the session later" -- what exactly does this mean and why would I want to?
Another thing that will help me is an answer to this question:  What's the equivalent of the task manager from windows, in xubuntu?  Like, how can I kill certain progs / apps?  OH and where do I put a script that automatically starts CGMiner upon boot?

Your help is greatly appreciated.  Can you please provide a brief explanation of what each line of code is doing here?


Thank you!

Hey,

You can install Putty on your Windows box to SSH into the XUbuntu machine: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

There's a few others, but Putty is the most common. On the XUbuntu side, you'll have to setup sshd. Not sure if that was done for you, or you've already done that. When you SSH in, I'm not certain on how CGMiner works. If you can query it directly, or not.

One thing I like to do is run things inside screen or dtach so I can reattach the session later on. This is more something you'd do with sessions or ncurses applications, rather than things that daemonize to the background.

Example:

mkdir ~/.dtach
dtach -A ~/.dtach/irc irssi
ctrl + \ to detach
logout

And later: dtach -a ~/.dtach/irc

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further issues getting this working.

Sincerely,
Teran

hello,

i've been mining for some time now (a little over a year) and i have only been familiar with windows in the past (mostly xp).  well when i started mining, then i started using linux.  So i'm kind of a linux noob, but i catch on quick.  So now I'm running Xubuntu 12.04 using CGMiner, and I want to go headless.  I already apt-get installed the ssh on the one rig.  My question is:  How do I then ssh into my rigs (from for example my windows laptop) to see how the CGMiner is doing, etc?  I have googled this problem up and down, and all the results are way too complex / too much information.  It's really just a simple problem -- maybe there's a simple piece of software I can install on my windows lappy in order to ssh into the mining rig?

Thankis for any information you can provide.