Setup of the ASIC Erupter Blade V2 (Part 2)

As long as you have all of the required parts, assembling your ASIC Erupter Blade mining rig is the easiest part of the process.  As stated in our previous article, when building a rig from Erupter blades, it is highly (extremely highly) recommended that you also purchase the matching backplane and power supply.  These two accessories can greatly simplify rig construction and have your blades up and running in minutes.  If you don't get one that includes the aesthetically pleasing cage, you can mount your backplane to most any surface just as long as you provide for protection from shorting out the underside of the backplane.  My rig was mounted to a wooden board, I used the plastic packaging material for this purpose.

Parts list:

1 Power Supply

1 ASIC Erupter Blade V2 Backplane (supports up to 10 blades)

1-10 ASIC Erupter Blades

1 4, 8, or 16 port Netgear (or equivalent) Ethernet switch*

1 Additional USB/PCI/PCMCIA Ethernet card for your proxy computer host 

3-12 CAT5 or CAT6 Ethernet cables 3FT*

1 Surge Protected 4 or 6 outlet plug strip
1 BFGMinger Software 
1+Fans for cooling**

* = Depends upon how many blades you will be installing
**= Depends upon which fans you select and how you mount them

Things you should already have:

1 Broadband Internet service via your telephone or cable company

1 Complete computer connected to the internet

2 Available electrical outlets and electrical service

 

Assembly:

If you purchased the bitcoin ASIC Erupter Blade open air case pictured above from a vendor like bitcoinrigs.org, you can mostly skip this step.  As you can see, this rig greatly simplifies connecting your backplane to a support.  It's definitely the most aesthetically pleasing option.  If you're tastes are a little bit more McGyver*, you can mount the backplane on an ordinary wooden board.  The one I used (because was unaware of the air case at the time I built my rig) measured 1'x4'x3/4".  Using the packing material that came with the backplane and the existing screw holes (please don't drill your backplane) I was able to secure it using appropriately sized drywall/wood screws.  One note of caution however:  Take care when fastening the board down not to unnecessarily flex/bend it.  Once your board is secured, you can attach the power supply to the connector on the far right side labelled "GND".  The label of the power supply should face to the right away from the backplane such that the bulk of the supply is not interfering the innermost board connector.

*For those who are more into the DIY thing, I highly recommend reading Dogie's Guide.

At this point, in the lower right corner of the backplane you will see a jumper labelled "Power Jumper".  This will essentially function as the on/off switch of the rig.  Once the backplane and power supply have been secured, you will be ready to add an Erupter blade.  I typically started from the inside and worked my way to the left leaving space between boards at first to allow for airflow around each one until filling the rig, but it probably doesn't matter.

With each blade, the backplane, and the power supply installed you will be ready to network the boards.  Originally, when I first networked my rig, I connected it to my wireless router alongside the rest of my network connected devices.  As obvious as it seemed at the time, what I didn't know was that these blades didn't necessarily "play nice" with some wireless routers.

In fairness, you can find instructions on the internet where people have had success with their wireless routers but your mileage may vary.  I chose a far more conservative approach and created an isolated backend network.  This was accomplished by dual homing the stratum proxy host (placing the computer/stratum proxy host on two networks, each network using its own network interface card) with one side of the host connected to the regular internet via my wireless router and the other side of the host connected to the ASIC erupter blades via an ethernet switch.  Although the Erupter Blades could interact with the internet themselves using getwork protocol, using a stratum proxy yielded a far more flexible solution.

Coupled with my own home grown ASIC Erupter tools,  this dual homed configuration made it easier to manage the boards both collectively and individually.  In my setup I am able to assign blades or groups of blades to different mining pools dynamically.

Once assembled and networked with the stratum proxy host (which via its other network interface should be already be connected to the internet via your wireless router) before activating your second interface, you'll need to properly configure the subnet masks on your ASIC blades. 

Erupter Blade Configuration:

Configuration of the mining rig from the point will involve configuring the stratum proxy host and each of the ASIC Erupter Blades.  Depending upon your operating system (usually Windows or some flavor of Unix), the procedure for manipulating your network interfaces will vary.  I used Ubuntu Linux for this setup, so those instructions will be included here.  Windows uses similar commands for configuring its network interface and if there is significant interest in updating this article to include them, I will.  Just leave your comments at the end of the article...

Since we will be configuring the Erupter Blades using the stratum proxy host, we will need to properly configure its network interface first.  If you dual homed the system as recommended, the procedure will be slightly tricky because of the default settings each blade comes typically initialized with.  ASIC Erupter Blades typically come setup to participate on subnet 192.168.1.x.  For many home internet private networks, this subnet also happens to be the default subnet assigned to many wireless routers.  In order to avoid the conflict, we must set the subnet mask of our backend network to 192.168.2.x*.

(*this step is only necessary if your wireless router uses 192.168.1.x as its default subnet, otherwise you may skip the next few steps)

This will involve getting the stratum proxy host to talk to each of our ASIC blades using their default network, and then updating each blade's network settings to allow it to participate on our alternate 192.168.2.x network.  Since we will not need internet connectivity to configure the blades, we will first shut down the internet connected network interface on the stratum server.  To identify the proper network interface to shut down, we will use the 'ifconfig' command:

ifconfig -a

This command will give us the status of all the network interfaces present within the stratum proxy:

In this example, eth0 is the internet connected network interface while eth1 represents our backend network.  We can temporarily disable this interface using the 'ifdown' command as follows:

ifdown eth0

This will essentially disable our connection to the outside internet and free the network 192.168.1.x for us to use to configure each ASIC Erupter Blade.  It is important to note that from the factory, the default settings for each blade will be the same, so in order to avoid conflicts we will be configuring each board one at a time.

Physically this will mean that until all the boards have been given unique IP addresses, only ONE board should be plugged into the back plane at a time.  Once the board has been configured with its own unique IP address, the back plane should be powered down, the board removed, the next board inserted, and the configuration process (described below) repeated.

Step 1:

With our ASIC Erupter Blade and our stratum proxy host computer plugged into our ethernet switch, set the backend network interface to the default network factory setting for the ASIC using the 'ifconfig' command as follows:

ifconfig eth1 inet 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

This will assign our backend network to be the network that an ASIC Erupter Blade configured with factory default settings expects to see.  The configuration web server embedded on our Erupter Blade has a default URL address of:

http://192.168.1.254:8000

Step 2:

Using your favorite browser (I use firefox), navigate to the URL listed above. This should bring up a configuration page similar to:

 

 

Change the IP address to be 192.168.2.200, the Gateway to be 192.168.2.1, and the Primary DNS to be 192.168.2.1.  Lastly press the Update/Restart button to apply the changes.

At this point the ASIC Erupter Blade will be configured for operation but now incompatible with our current network settings.  Power the backplane off, remove the board and insert another board into its place.

Step 3:

Repeat this procedure, only substituting a unique IP address for each blade you configure.  In other words, give each new blade an address in the range of 192.168.2.2xx.  The will enable a greater number of ASIC Erupter Blades to coexist on the backend network without creating network conflicts with each another.

Between each configuration, remember to power off each board and disconnect it from the network.  Although powered off, each board will remember its configuration.  Once all the boards have been configured, you can plug them each into their shared backplane.  Plug everything together and power everything down including the network switch.  Our next step will be to reconfigure the stratum proxy server host.

Stratum Proxy Host Configuration

Now that our ASIC Erupter Blades are configured with unique IP addresses compatible with what will be our backend network subnet, it is time to reconfigure the backend network interface on the stratum proxy host.  We accomplish this by reusing the ifconfig command as follows:

ifconfig eth1 inet 192.168.2.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

This command will assign our second network interface with an IP address that is compatible with our intended backend network's subnet.  Once the interface has been configured, you can power on the ethernet switch followed by the ASIC Erupter Blades....

We may also reconnect our stratum proxy host to the internet through its eth0 network interface using the following:

ifup eth0

This will restore our internet connection just as if we had restarted the system.  In our next article, we will discuss the installation and configuration of the stratum proxy host's software.

Stay tuned!

DP
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