Using ethOS for Ethereum Mining

ethOS is a 64-bit linux distro that mines Ethereum out-of-the-box, allowing you to control all your rigs from a single location, and drill down to specific GPUs where necessary. ethOS supports eth-proxy/stratum immediately upon installation. 

Features

• Remote configuration: instruct rig to remote reboot, set core clocks, mem clocks, fan control, pool info, and other settings remotely.
• Extremely lightweight: works with weakest possible CPU made in the last 5 generations on only 1 GB of ram.
• Automatic GPU overheat protection: GPUs will automatically turn off if they reach a temperature threshold.
• Stratum Proxy: automatically configured for local stratum proxy, stratum pools can be changed in config.
• Automatic reporting: web panel with detailed rig statistics and event reports (example).
• Boots and Mines: IP assignment via DHCP, hostname defined by mac address.
• Easy KVM: a terminal window opens with focus on boot, no mouse required.
• Easy Update: update to the latest ethOS version with a single command.
• DAG file management: SSD won't run out of space.
• Supports AMD GPUs: any 2GB+ HD 7000 series, any R9 200/300 series, including R9 390/390X/Fury/Nano

How to Get

• ethOS is released pre-loaded on a 16gb SSD, or as a digital download.
• Buy it at gpuShack.com.
• gpuShack accepts major Credit Cards, PayPal, Amazon Payments, and Bitcoin.

Installation

Extract the ZIP file with 7-Zip (don't use the windows native utility, it may generate a corrupt file). Make sure that you have at least 16 GB of free space.

EthOS doesn’t have any multi-step installer. No need for extra customizations, it just works from the get go. Download HDD Raw Copy Tool from here. You will create an exact duplicate of the ISO image to your designated drive. From the FILE option select the .ISO file extracted in the previous step. Click Continue.

Select the drive where you want the ISO image cloned. Is preferable that you use a regular hard drive or an SSD. Double check the selected drive, any data will be forever lost. Click Continue.

Click Start and wait a few minutes.

Restart and boot from the medium where you cloned EthOS, in our case, the Kingston SSD drive. That’s it - the installation is finished.

Basic Setup

After you first boot into EthOS, you are greeted by a nice status widget, showing useful CPU, GPU and Network Stats - alongside the very important Web Stats Panel address.

Let’s start by editing the local configuration file. We can do that by entering: nano /home/ethos/local.conf or just simply nano local.conf, assuming that you are in the root of your home directory. You can use your preferred editor, for example gEdit, a GUI editor, which is bundled in with the distro.

For a solo mining rig, you must first delete the first line from /home/ethos/remote.conf. This ensures that the local settings won’t be overwritten by the default EthOS settings.

The first thing you should set up is the proxywallet variable - a complicated way of saying your address that you want your mined funds sent to. The second step is to input the mining pools you want to mine in proxypool1 and proxypool2 (the second pool is a backup just in case the first one fails!) Below are some extra instructions:

File: /home/ethos/local.conf
# the maximum temperature allowed for your GPUs. After this threshold the mining is stopped maxgputemp: 95

# this is the default setting in EthOS and it is recommended that you leave it as is.
stratumproxy enabled

# We're in Europe so our main mining server must be located as close as possible to have the minimum amount of latency
proxypool1 eu1.ethpool.org:3333

# our backup mining pool
proxypool2 eth-eu.dwarfpool.com:8080
# specific options for ethminer, you can add any parameter that you can find with the command "ethminer --help"

# --farm-recheck n - the amount of milliseconds until the miner checks for work changes. Lower is better. This option depends on your internet connection and your CPU. The default value is 500.

# --cl-global-work n - the OpenCL global work size
flags --cl-global-work 16384 --farm-recheck 200

Your local.conf file should look like this:

If you want to connect to a pool that is not compatible with Stratum proxy, you must put this as the first line of your /home/ethos/local.conf:

pool http://eth1.nanopool.org:8888/WORKER

Run at the command line:

putconf && restart-proxy

Enter your root password (default root password is live). Now your new settings are in place.

One important feature that EthOS has is the remote config option. This makes administering multiple rigs very easy. To take advantage of this, just take your local.conf contents  and upload them on the cloud. We uploaded ours to https://www.dropbox.com/s/5197vx7xlqnt52i/mining.txt?dl=0. so just copy the link in /home/ethos/remote.conf. Now you can overclock, restart, change your mining pools, all by just updating this single file.

You can stop the mining with the minestop command and start it again with minestart.

You can show the output of your miner by entering the command:

show

You can remotely check your mining rigs status from any device by visiting your Status Panel Address:

Overclocking

Before trying to overclock our GPUs, we must first determine the current frequencies of our cards. This is done with:

aticonfig –odgc –adapter=all

We highlighted the values that you should look for - i.e. the frequencies of the GPU processor and Memory.

You must increase the values incrementally, by 5-10 Mhz, until you reach the right balance. Also you should increase the frequencies for the GPU core and memory independently, to isolate any problem you may encounter. After you overclock, you should monitor your GPU's temperature and system stability.

The overclocking process is pretty straightforward. If you have multiple GPUs installed in your system and they are the same brand and model, then you can set the global overclocking variables with these commands:

# set the global GPU core clockglobal
globalcore: 1100
# set the global memory frequency
mem: 1800
# set the global fan power
globalfan: 90

If you have several different GPUs, like we do in our test system, you should overclock them independently, one by one. Remember, the overclocking capabilities of every model can vary greatly.

First, we’ll check our Worker's name. We can see the name easy when we open a terminal:

So in our case: 986ffc. As an alternative, enter this command in your terminal:

hostname

You can see your worker's name as output.Now add this in your /home/ethos/local.conf

# the number represents the frequency of each GPU of the specified Worker
cor 986ffc: 1050 1200 1110
# set the individual memory frequency for every GPU
mem 986ffc: 1600 1700 1700
# fan power for every card in your system
fan 986ffc: 90 90 90

To make the new overclocking settings active, you can restart or run  in the command line:

putconf && ethos-overclock

Repeat the process for every worker in your mining farm.

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