I started a thread similar to this one, and I suppose I'm exactly where the OP is in set up. I have a few ASIC blades I'd like to solo with but I can't verify that the blades are connecting and receiving the block headers from bitcoind running on a linux server. I've tried commands like '$ ss' and cannot see the blade IP addresses in the output. Should I run as -testnet and point the blades at port 18332 and let it run for a while and see if testcoins end up in my wallet?

Also, for bitcoin.conf setting gen=0 will tell bitcoind to not hash using server resources, but will still give block headers to the blades to solve?