ethminer has worked fantastically for me so far (though, I've mostly used it with NVIDIA GPUs - far from it's ideal hardware configuration). Unlike the other miners that I've used, it automatically makes use of all available GPUs, without having to launch multiple instances of the program, which I think is quite brilliant.
So, here's how you go about installing it on your AWS Linux instance (or for that matter, on any Linux installation):
- SSH into your AWS Linux instance
- or open a terminal in your Linux installation if you're installing this on your local machine
- Open the
ethminerreleases page in your browser: https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases - Scroll down the page to find a stable version (a release that doesn't have a
.devstring in it)- Currently, that happens to be
ethminer 0.11.0
- Currently, that happens to be
- Right click on the Linux release link and click
Copy Link Address(if you're using Chrome, or click on the equivalent action for your browser)
- For the version mentioned above (
0.11.0), the link would be: https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases/download/v0.11.0/ethminer-0.11.0-Linux.tar.gz
- Switch to your SSH session (or terminal as appropriate), and download this file using
wget- Type
wgetin your SSH/terminal prompt and paste the link you just copied - For the example above, it should look like:
wget https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases/download/v0.11.0/ethminer-0.11.0-Linux.tar.gz - For reference, the command is:
wget <url-to-download>
- Type
- Extract the archive that'e been downloaded using
tar- For the example above (
0.11.0release), the command would be:
tar -zxf ethminer-0.11.0-Linux.tar.gz - For reference, the command is:
tar -zxf <path-to-tar.gz-file>
- For the example above (
- Copy the
ethminerbinary to your/usr/local/bindirectory (or any directory that's in your$PATH)- Type this into your SSH/terminal prompt (
$):
sudo cp bin/ethminer /usr/local/bin
- Type this into your SSH/terminal prompt (
- Delete the extracted directory (Just for cleanup. You can skip this step if you'd like to leave the extacted file around, though there's no good reason to retain it)
rm -rf bin
- Now you can run
ethminerfrom any directory - For example, here's how you run it to mine with a typical pool:
ethminer -G -S <statum-proxy-host:port> -O <pool-user>.<worker-name>:<worker-password>- Note that the
-Gparameter makesethminermine using available GPUs (actually, they've removed CPU mining support quite some time ago, so-Ghas to be specified)
- Run
ethminer --helpto get a (long) list of it's various parameters
Tips:
- Make sure you run
ethminerin ascreen(ortmux, or something similar) session. If you don't, yourethminerprocess will be killed some time after you disconnect from your SSH session. - Before your first real run, it might be a good idea to run
ethminer -G -M(benchmark mode) to make sure it can actually recognize and can make use of your GPUs, and to get a rough idea of the typical hash rate you can expect from your configuration.
Most importantly: is it profitable?
Bottomline, nope. It's definitely not profitable to mine on AWS. :D (except maybe some of the low difficulty CPU mineable altcoins)
But if you have a mining rig running Linux (and ideally, AMD GPUs), then you can use these steps to get ethminer runnning on it (though, I know it's very trivial for anyone even semi-familiar with Linux).
I'm writing another article describing my experiments with mining on AWS instances. Wrote this so that I could keep that article short and to the point.
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