This article is for GPU miners. For ASIC mining, please see the article Connect to ASIC miners on a remote location.
Awesome Miner requires network access to miners in order to make a connection and request information. Remote networks are often protected by a firewall or router while the miners on the remote network only have local IP addresses.
Connect to remote GPU miners without VPN
In a typical setup, Awesome Miner connects to Remote Agent in order to manage and monitor the GPU/CPU mining running on another computer. For GPU miners on a remote location, this typically requires a VPN connection. Instead of communication over VPN, Awesome Miner and Remote Agent can communicate with each other via the Awesome Miner Cloud Services.
Awesome Miner and Remote Agent will both connect to the cloud and setup a communication channel without having any direct connections between each other. This removes the need of VPN and firewall configurations.
Note: Awesome Miner still needs to be running all the time to manage and monitor the miners in this setup. It's only the way it connects to the Remote Agents that is different.
Prerequisites
- You need an active subscription for Awesome Miner
- You need to create an account for Awesome Miner Cloud Services
- Awesome Miner must be installed and running on the computer where you want to manage the mining operations
- Awesome Miner Remote Agent must be installed and running on each remote GPU mining computer where you want to run the mining
- This feature requires Windows 8 or later. Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008) are currently not supported.
Configuration in Awesome Miner
Awesome Miner must be configured to be able to communicate with Remote Agents connected via Cloud Services.
- Click on the Cloud Services button in the Awesome Miner status bar
- Check the box for Enable Remote Agent connections via cloud
- Save the changes
Configuration in Remote Agent
Follow the steps below to configure Remote Agent
- Right click on the Remote Agent icon in the Windows notification area
- Select Connect via cloud
Click Configure
- Enter your Cloud Services account details
- Save the settings and verify the connection status showing up like below
Summary
The Remote Agent will now be listed as a Managed Host in Awesome Miner. It can be viewed via the Awesome Miner Options dialog, Managed Hosts section and it can also be used when defining a Managed Miner, via the Managed Host property.
The connection status for all Remote Agents can be viewed via the Cloud Services web interface, via the page Connect via cloud.
Alternative solutions for GPU miners on remote networks
Primary option: VPN (Virtual Private Network)
A Virtual Private Network is a secure way of connecting to remote networks. There are many ways of setting up VPN networks, where both routers and software solutions are available.
Awesome Miner is not aware of any VPN network existence, but if available it will be used. From an Awesome Miner point of view, a network connection must be possible to establish to the miners, and it's up to the network configuration to make this possible.
Secondary option: Configure port forwarding
This alternative is considered less secure unless correctly configured.
The router on the remote network can be configured to allow port forwarding of requests from Awesome Miner to the miners on the network behind the router. Awesome Miner Remote Agent is by default listening for connections on port 9630.