eth-miner cookbook

Configures an Ethereum miner with Chef.

Supported OS:

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Stack:

Claymore: https://github.com/nanopool/Claymore-Dual-Miner/releases
AMD Pro Drivers
Rsyslog

Usage

Override the following attributes with a role.

{
"miner": {
    "address": "0xA481BE575cA10e1555F6512E507b85F42509db134"
    "claymore" {
      "pool": "us1.ethermine.org:4444"
    }
  }
}

The cookbook will do the following:

Install packages (wget, lm-sensors, rsyslog)
Download and install the AMD GPU driver
Download and install Claymore
Configure Claymore to run with systemd
Configure remote logging with rsyslog (Template must be edited before use! See the Future section)

Manage

This cookbook can be run on a schedule with chef-client as it is entirely idempotent. An attribute is set after installing the AMD driver to prevent future installation attempts.

The miner configuration lies within a Systemd unit file for the Claymore mining service. The rendered unit file will look something like this:

# Managed by Chef. Do not edit by hand
# Claymore must run as root in order to manage
# GPU fan speed properly

[Unit]
Description=Claymore Etherium Mining Service
After=network.target

# Send standard out to syslog
# Run GPU's at 100%
# Address and worker name are pulled in via attributes
[Service]
Type=simple
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=
User=root
Group=root
Environment=GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
ExecStart=/usr/local/claymore95/ethdcrminer64 \
      -epool us1.ethermine.org:4444 \
      -ewal 0xA481BE575cA10e187F6512E507a45F42509db139.miner-1 \
      -epsw x -mode 1 \
      -tt 68 \
      -allpools 1

# restart claymore if it crashes
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Monitoring

To monitor the miner activity, watch syslog with sudo tail -F /var/log/syslog

Additional insight into your mining environment can be configured by utilizing Netdata, Promethious, Grafana and remote syslog.

Testing

Test Kitchen

Test this cookbook with Test Kitchen

It should be noted that the Claymore service will fail to start due to OpenCL issues with the virtual environment. Testing with real hardware graphics cards will yield the best results.

kitchen converge  // Builds an Ubuntu 16.04 VM and runs the cookbook
kitchen verify    // Runs a series of tests
kitchen destroy   // Destroys the test VM

kitchen test      // Performs all three of the previous steps

Future

Remote logging

Currently this cookbook will install a rsyslog config file for remote logging. The config is disabled (commented) but will dynamically pull in a remote server and port. Centralized logging is possible if the template is uncommented. Future versions of this cookbook will allow this feature to be enabled / disabled with attributes.

To make use of this feature now, override default[:miner][:log][:socket] with a hostname and port.

default[:miner][:log][:socket] = 'logserver.domain:514'

Chef Spec Unit Tests

Unit tests are on the road map. Currently only inspec tests are available.

jsirianni/eth-miner