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Assuming you have multiple (30+) computers, what options are there available to do a distributed solo-mine? Can I have them all checking into one bitcoin application over the network, or do I need to create/join a pool?

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    Don't use the same wallet on different computers. See also bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/490/…
    – ripper234
    Oct 16, 2011 at 6:08
  • I'm not planning on running the bitcoin application on all of the computers, just the miner, if that's possible.
    – kiyote
    Oct 16, 2011 at 7:20
  • shouldn't be a problem.
    – ripper234
    Oct 16, 2011 at 7:53

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You can run as few or as many Bitcoin clients as you want. You can have them all pull from the same client, or you can have each miner pull from its own client. Just remember, the mined coins will go to the wallet of the client the miner pulled the work unit from.

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  • Are there any guides to setting this up?
    – kiyote
    Oct 16, 2011 at 4:39
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There is no advantage to "pooling" solo miners. Simply install the client and a miner on each machine. Point the miner at the local client and start mining.

While you can have all the machines pointed to a single client (just give the miner the machine-name or LAN IP address of machine w/ bitcoind/wallet) doing so introduces a single point of failure. If the machine with the wallet goes down you lose the entire network until you fix it. If each machine is using a local bitcoind/wallet and it goes down you only lose 1/30th of the network.

If you feel you must have centralized control I would strongly recommend setting up a private pool and pointing all your rigs towards that. While you still have a single point of failure the server can be simplified to only run the client and pool daemon with no other applications. That combined with no OpenCL/GPU driver complexity and no massive heat/power draw should result in a more stable single point of failure. If your rigs are no climate controlled (warehouse). THe pool server could be put in a clean climate controlled enviroment which should improve uptime. While I strongly recommend fully decentralizing your rigs I would consider this option rather than pointing multiple rigs to same wallet on one rig. Of course it makes more sense the more rigs you have.

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    Is there an automated way of transferring any earned coins to a central wallet? Or would I have to check every miner by hand? I'm looking for automation.
    – kiyote
    Oct 16, 2011 at 7:19
  • @kiyote Not as far as I know. One reason if there is that blocks occur very infrequently. A 2 GH/s rig will only find a block on average once every 36 days. It would be possible to write an automated bitcoind that say once per hour checks value of addresses and if it >0 creates a transaction to send balance to a "central" wallet address. When I solo mined I just logged into each rig once every few days and did a manual transfer. Like I said it occurs rather infrequently.
    – DeathAndTaxes
    Oct 16, 2011 at 23:05
  • @kiyote. I though of another option today. BAMT is a linux distro w/ built in miner. It can be setup so that you can monitor and control multiple rigs running BAMT remotely. While it doesn't do wallet transfer automatically it will notify you when a rig finds a block and which rig found it. This could save some time in doing transfers if you do them manually as you would only need to login to the rig which found a block and do a ontime transfer. This should occur roughly once per 72 days for each GH of hashing power the rig has. days on a 2GH rig has.
    – DeathAndTaxes
    Oct 17, 2011 at 13:30

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