In part 1 we covered the groundwork you need in order to get a miner instance up and running on amazon’s servers. Now we are going to log in and put your info to work.
Before we log in to your instance, we need to set up a worker in your pool. Most will set one up for you by default, but you want to double check. Log in to whatever pool you selected. I suggested doge.hashfaster.com. Go to the worker section on the left side of the page. you should have a section that has worker configurations in it.
It will have your username followed by a box, and another box for a password. Make easy to remember, short entries. The general practice is to use numbers in the first and a single character in the second. The only harm someone could do with this info is that they could mine for you! Make it simple. You don’t want to mine and have it not get credited to your account. Look at the worker info again and remember it. It should be in the form of username.1:password for instance, mine is tinyenormous.1:x
In order to log in to your instance you need
-your key (from amazon)
-the ip address of the instance
There are a lot of ways to ssh, but I’m going to use the terminal.
First I’m going to change the permissions on the key.
chmod 400 /path/to/your/key
next I’m going to wait until the instance shows up in the dashboard and copy the ip address.
Then I type
ssh -i /path/to/your/key ubuntu@PasteYourIPRightHere
and you should be in! On log in, the first prompt will ask you for your pool server address. This will look like
stratum+tcp://stratum-us.doge.hashfaster.com:3339
note that it begins with stratum+tcp and ends with :3339. Those things may change from server to server, but it’s important to have them in there and correct.
Next up is your WORKER username and password.
Enter it exactly as I showed it above
username.1:x
Hit return and your miner will spring to life! In order to check on it’s progress type
cat minerd.log
and it will read the log that your miner is writing.
After a few minutes your pool dashboard should show your speed on it. The pool dashboard number is often off, and should only really be used in order to see if you have successfully connected.
This is obviously just the beginning of cloud mining, so feel free to poke around, fire up more instances, or tweak the settings!
(if this guide has proven useful to you, feel free to tip me in dogecoin at DB7UPpjsUqdWvDPxJcUdnZ3Ymtb4K2KBNQ or send me any type of coin via cryptsy at c99b5ef67fdd3f7e3900b3e8d52f1e37c1197a00 )
Hi,
I see you posted this just yesterday. Is this in any way profitable for you with the increase in difficulty? I like the idea of it and your guide is very awesome, but what kind of profits are you seeing/expecting?
Thank you for answering my question!
Ilia,
That depends on a few factors.
1 how long your time horizon is
2 what your final accepted price is
3 what coin you are mining
For #1 – I mined bitcoins for an afternoon once, about 6 months ago. 1 BTC was worth roughly $100, and I decided that it just wasn’t worth my time to keep mining. Fast forward to today and with 1 BTC = $900 that means I earned about $8 in that one afternoon of mining. I sure wish I had mined for a few weeks now!
This is obviously more of a currency speculation play, but unprofitable things (today) can become profitable in the future.
#2 Obviously the lower your costs are, the more profit (or less loss) you can have. Some people have been able to find free ec2 mining time in various ways. That’s pure profit! Otherwise, it’s really up to the reader to find the most profitable setup and see if it covers their cost.
#3 There are A LOT of other coins out there. With fluctuating prices and difficulty that means that any given coin can be the “most profitable” coin for a period of time. Keeping an eye on which coins are popular will be the biggest boost to your profitability.
I will publish a post on how to gpu mine in the future. That is another facet. GPU mining is much more efficient than cpu mining. The issue is that amazon only offers one kind of gpu enabled instance and those prices have skyrocketed recently due to increased demand. Having 20-30 different kinds of cpu levels gives more wiggle room to try to find some profit.
Hey man I have a question, every time I attempt to connect it asks me for a password when I use ubuntu@, but not when I use root@. But when ever I use root@ I dont have the permissions to run my miner.
as far as I know, the amazon instances are set up to take anything as a root password. They assume that if you have the key then you’re authorized. I’ve never gotten that password prompt though.
If you’re logged in as root, can you sudo to get to your miner? Also what are you using to connect? ssh? over an app, or terminal?