Setting up BFGMiner with Devices

Question

I have a Dell Poweredge Server R200 set up with BFGMiner. Now I know this is old and not very powerful, but I am curious as to how I should use BFGMiner.

When I ran it initially, it was not able to find any devices (unless I am doing something wrong). I have an Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI ES1000 VGA compatible controller but I dont know how to use this or the CPU for BFGMiner.

Answer 1

Hopefully, this following quote from the gitorious archive of BFGMiner will help to shed some light on your trouble to get BFGMiner to use your CPU:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ON CPU USAGE:

By default, BFGMiner will NOT mine on CPUs unless it is explicitly compiled with support and told to do so. CPU mining for bitcoin is generally considered to be obsolete as it requires considerably more power per hash computed than either GPU, FPGA or ASIC based mining. If you still wish to mine using CPUs you will need to build a custom binary with support enabled (refer to the build notes in README for further information).

The page continues to enumerate flags for the usage of BFGMiner with CPU.

Answer 2

First Servers don't have graphics card like AMD, or NVIDIA. They use an integrated card that is very, very, very low grade because server are used for bootstrap not for graphics processing. BFGMiner will identify your GPU (or graphics card) but if it is low grade as an integrated it will not function because it will have no processing power.

Now if you connect by USB a asic miner to your server, like from Butterfly Labs, or CoinTerra, or Avalon, then you can use BFGMiner and will be able to mine, but now since you don't have an asic running you are not mining.

Answer 3

If you wish to keep with the same hardware, I suspect you'll get more money out of vanity-address mining than to mine bitcoins directly. Even then it might not be very efficient.

Vanity-address mining is like the equivalent of having a personalised number plate on your car; it involves hunting the bitcoin address space for a public address that starts with a short string (up to 8/9 characters is reasonable with some effort) someone chose, and with the right algorithm can be done securely so you never know the final private key in use.

It cannot be done with ASICs at present (AFAIK), but can be done using GPUs so the relative value is higher per hash-checked; though it does a quite-different operation so the very-specific ASICs aren't built to find the addresses.

(see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84569 and https://vanitypool.appspot.com/ for further info/a running pool of wanted addresses).