sent you a PM

A follow up seems in order.

Since moving the cubes and proxy machines to a separate network, I have had no / none / zero / not any of the communication problems I was seeing, and it has been 13 days.
Whatever the reason (I'm still not buying the IP address conflict theory, but I'm not going to go back and run a network sniffer to prove it) these little monsters really like being on their own network.

Perhaps that will help someone else who may struggle.

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Hello everyone

Has anyone tried this power supply?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182072&ignorebbr=1

Showing 64 amps available on a single 12v rail.

they're out of the usual cx750m corsair unit.

'snail

Really?

I wrote a nice response to your first post, taking some time to do a little research as I did.  Several others replied to you as I was writing that, and then you came in with this gem.  I deleted my "nice" response.

I'm an IT worker; we talk sometimes about users who "substitute belligerence for brilliance."  I don't think I've ever said this directly to anyone before, but I think you just gave the textbook demonstration of that principle.  You found some software, fired it up, and figured you were going to see magic hit your bank account, with no research?  And then, when other try to point out some shortcomings in your plan, you react in this way; blaming others for your lack of understanding.

Wow.

You've got enough there to do some semi-useful Litecoin mining.  Google can be your friend, and I wish you luck with your future interpersonal interactions.

'Snail.

I found one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835119032 in my "scrounge" bin.  It seems to work well.  A couple of things to note, however:  it will only mount with the airflow reversed from stock (not necessarily a bad thing) and the aluminum case is enough thicker than the plastic fans that you must be really careful in placement to get it to go in.
The cube came right up, though, so I'm happy.

One of my cubes has shut down - I happened to be sitting right by it and heard the relay click.  Red light and bottom pwr light are dark, fan twitches but does not spin.  I've swapped in a power supply that has been running two other cubes, and I get the same symtpoms.

I opened it up and checked the board - I see no evidence of overheat.  I shorted the two power relay leads and all the lights come one, but with no fan I'm not inclined to run it for more than a few seconds that way.

Is it possible that the fan is just bad?  I don't have a similar one to swap in tonight.
While preparing to order a fan, does anyone know what RPM the stock fans run at?  I see another post about a 2900 rpm 90mm fan, but I'd rather not have that noise level.  I guess more importantly, does anyone know what RPM the device wants to see?

Other thoughts about what could cause this?

Thanks in advance

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And that was exactly some of my reasoning for not worrying about the Androids:  Though on the same logical network, the Android device addresses were assigned in a different part of the address space than the addresses I was using for the cubes and the proxies; I have my DHCP leases set for 7 days; my DHCP server pings the address as it's being assigned to be sure that there isn't a "squatter" on the address before offering it.  It's pretty difficult for a lease to expire and create an address conflict under those circumstances.  Further, I saw the same behavior with the proxies in my DHCP space as I did with them assigned statically outside of the DHCP pool.

I haven't spent the time, and probably won't, to dive deeper into what's going on on the network, but I can say with some confidence that it's not an issue of IP address conflicts, unless the android devices are "making up" addresses to use elsewhere in the address space, and managing to do that without causing other devices to squawk about an address conflict.  Ultimately, however, that turns into a Quixotic discussion - there definitely IS something about having cubes on the same network with other devices, likely Androids, and the solution is the same regardless of the root cause: get them isolated from each other.

My solution has been to create a completely separate physical network.  I've used different IP addressing for that network, but since they aren't interconnected, it really doesn't matter.  It's a little bit of an extreme solution, but very effective.

A follow up, and perhaps some help for someone else:

Really short version:  The more you can isolate these on the network the happier they'll be.

Short version:  There might actually be something to that "get the Androids off the network".  Running for 2 days now at above full rated speeds, just in time for the Slush pool to have a pretty good run of luck.  I'm currently showing 106GH/s on the pool - my theoretical maximum for 2 at 38 and one at 30.

Longer version:  I didn't think the Android issue would apply to me, as I don't use the wireless access point as my router, and the cubes and the wireless access point (and thus the Android machines) are on different network switches.  I was watching my network traffic and my bandwidth utilization, both of which were quite low, and so assumed that the problem MUST be the proxy talking to the pool.
Under the heading of "can always learn something new" however, I decided to test the theory, but knew that it would be easier to cut fingers off than to get all the Android devices off my network. 
So....   I took another older consumer level router that I wasn't using anymore, and connected it to my cable modem as a peer to my primary firewall (I have a pretty good internet connection that gives me some flexibility that not everyone would have).  I moved a "hardware" machine and the cubes to that network, set my IP addresses, and started mining.  The improvement was startling.  Almost immediately into the 35 range for the two faster ones, and over the next hour, tickling 39.  The slower one showed similar performance.  I then put a connection from unused network ports on my virtual hosts, and started 2 virtual machines up.  Set the cubes to the virtual machines for the proxy, shut down the "hardware" machine and let them run.  We're coming up on 48 hours since the last time I restarted the cubes for an IP address change, and the numbers are great.  I don't see them rotating between proxies, and so could probably get away with just one VM, but the 2nd one doesn't cost me anything.

Time to upgrade this poor power supply that came with the 3rd cube, and then add a 4th.  Don't tell my wife. 

As a side note:  The "proxy in the cloud" on the Amazon EC2 actually worked pretty well once I got the cubes isolated.  I'm getting a little bit better numbers with the local machines, but if I didn't have these hosts running 24/7/365 already anyway, I'd seriously consider getting the free Amazon account for a year, and letting them pay the electricity for the proxy.

Thanks for the help, and happy mining.

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I'm going slightly nuts here, and would appreciate some additional assistance.

I'm running 3 cubes - 3rd one arrived about a week ago.  2 of them usually run at 38 (high clock) and one of them runs at 30 (low clock) because I don't like how the power leads heat up on that power supply, and I haven't bought a new one yet.

Last Thursday, I was showing 100GH/s at my pool - less than I expected, but reasonable.

Since then, I'm seeing what I consider to be really odd behavior in my proxy(ies).  Specifically, they will run with the usual scrolling display for 10 - 15 seconds, and then stop.  About 45 seconds later they'll start scrolling again.

I've tried Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and 12.04 LTS) on virtual machines on 2 different hosts.  I've actually lost count of how many iterations of linux machines I've tried.  I've tried Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8 on three different machines - all of which have had the cubes running at 38-39 GH/s each in the past.  I've tried multi-homing the Linux virtual machines - one interface "outside" on the public internet, and the second interface "inside" for the cubes to connect to so as to bypass any congestion that my firewall might be adding.

I've been wanting to blame my ISP (Comcast business - no love lost there), so tonight I built an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machine on an Amazon EC2 cloud instance, and it is doing the very same thing - running for 10 -15 seconds, and then pausing.  Here's the strange part - the proxy running on the local machine and the proxy running on the EC2 pause and restart at exactly the same time.

Say what!!!???!!!

So I'm officially stumped.

Tonight I'm down to about 13GH/s on the two "faster" cubes, and and about 12 on the slower one.  That's (almost?) not worth feeding electricity to.

I would be immensely appreciative of someone who has some experience with multiple cubes helping me to walk back through this.  I can't believe that it's connectivity issues with the pool - I'd be hearing about it in the forums, right?

Actually - let's explore that for a moment - anyone else here running multiple cubes through Comcast that can say "yea" or "nay" to connectivity issues to Slush?

Thanks in advance;

'snail

Partway through writing a response about how that couldn't be the reason, I decided it would be faster to simply set the proxies to static IP addresses to prove that it wouldn't change anything.

Huh.  Look at that .

They've run over 7 hours straight with no reboots.  Granted that was overnight, and the reboots seemed more frequent in the afternoon evening hours, but this is somewhat encouraging.

Stay tuned; let's see if they go a day without reboots.

What's odd about this is that I have my DHCP server set up for 7 day leases.  What I understand of the lease renewal says there's no way the clients (proxy machines) are chatting with the DHCP server as often as I've been seeing the reboots...

More to learn I guess, and a chance to affirm my theory that learning new things keeps an aging brain young(er).


Thanks for the idea.

Ok, seeing some weirdness here, and could use some help.  I keep feeling like I'm missing something obvious.

I have 2 cubes.  They occasionally reboot themselves.  What's odd, is that both of them do it within a minute or so of each other.  They'll run for hours at a time, and then stop sending things to the proxies, followed by reboot.

I've tried them both to the same proxy, I've tried them to two proxies on the same machine, I've tried them to different physical machines, and I've tried them to different virtual machines.  I've tried one power supply, and I've tried 2.  I've tried them on a separate network switch (2 cubes and the proxy on the same switch, with an "uplink" to my main network switch), and I've tried them on the main network switch.  Same thing in all cases; run for a while, and then both of them reboot withing a minute or so of each other.

This "feels" like a communication issue, but I haven't found it yet.  I'm not running a consumer router, but rather an open source PC based router / firewall, so I don't think it's a throughput issue to the internet.  I've just tripled the speed of my internet drop, and it's "business class" as opposed to residential (no caps, no blocked ports).

It's starting to affect my earnings a little, as when they happen to be rebooting at the end of a block, the pool I use penalizes me fairly heavily.

In short, I'm a little stumped.  That's actually a little embarrassing, as I'm a network admin / IT manager for a small company, and I'm supposed to be the guy that solves these sorts of issues.

Thoughts?  Any and all help greatly appreciated.

'snail

+1

I'd be interested in why you say that.

It looks like you have the cube pointing to .17 for the pool, but your PC is at .2.  That's not going to work.

The pool on the cube should be set to the same as the IPV4 address on the PC running the proxy software.

That doesn't fit with my experience, and I switched back last night just to be sure before I said anything.

I'm running 2 cubes, and if I point them both at the same instance of the proxy, both run consistently in the 36 range, with my pool reporting a combined of almost 72.  If I point them at two different instances of the proxy, on the same PC, one runs consistently at about 38.8 and the other at about 38.2, with my pool reporting just over 76.  It's a small difference, and I can't say I've been particularly scientific about my testing, but nevertheless it seems to be easily replicated.

YMMV, but I'm a fan of 2 copies of the proxy.

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I've been doing some experimentation, and I've found that when I run my proxies on a Dell T3400 (core2 quad, 8GB ram) I get about 10% better hash rates than when I run on the X1 laptop.  The difference in power consumption is probably significant; next time I have the cubes down for any reason I'll put a watt meter on it and see.

'snail

Probably just a typo - but I notice in one place you're talking about 169 as the third octet in your IP setup, and in another your're talking about 168 (which would be the correct one).

192.168.xxx.255 is generally a broadcast address, not a device.

A crossover cable between your pc and the cube is a good idea, as long as the IP address on the pc is set to 192.168.1.xxx (something other than 254).

'snail

Perhaps, but more information is needed.
Screen shot of the cube config?
What are you using for your proxy?  What is the IP setup on that machine?

Perhaps this can help someone else.

I followed this guide when I got my first cube, and found it easy to set up.  (I actually read the entire thread!)
I did one thing differently, however, and rather than the recommended Corsair PSU, I tried to save a few bucks by buying this one instead: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171084  (Cooler Master 700w)

On the spec sheet, it looks like it should work - 55 amps on the 12 volt rail.

It runs one cube, at high clock speed, and seems to do it pretty well.

My 2nd cube arrived today.

Short version:  That Cooler Master power supply will not even start up 2 cubes at high speed, and with both cubes at low speed they will start up and run for for about three minutes, before the psu shuts down.

I found a Corsair CX750m at a local store.  I've been running both, at high clock speed, for a couple hours now.

In short, don't try to cheap out like I did.  Pay the extra $10 or so for the Corsair.  It seems worth it.

Additionally, I found a Dell Latitude X1 in my "I don't use these but don't want to throw them out" stuff.  It's running 2 copies of the slush proxy (one per cube) on 13 watts when the screen is blanked.  It's running Windows XP, and peaking at about 70% utilization on the cpu.

If I find any issues with either of these setups, I'll post more information.

In the meantime, however, my thanks to all who have participated in this thread and contributed to the information that makes it so easy to get one running.

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