Environment setup: Remote Proxy for distributing load : Awesome Miner

Remote Proxy is a feature mainly intended for large scale mining operations. Remote Proxy is when a dedicated computer runs the Remote Agent application and connects to a large number of miners and report the status back to Awesome Miner.

When designing a large system, the load on the Awesome Miner main application can be reduced by setting up one or several computers as Remote Proxies for making the majority of all network connections to the miners. A Remote Proxy is a standard Awesome Miner Remote Agent installation that has been configured to be used as a Remote Proxy in Awesome Miner. This feature is currently only supported for External Miners (management of ASIC miners)

Each Remote Proxy instance can be used to manage up to 10,000 miners. Remote Proxy can either run on Windows or Linux.

Installation

Download and run the Awesome Miner Remote Agent Installer.

Configuration

The Remote Agent application is configured via the Awesome Miner main application. To configure a Managed Host to be used as a Remote Proxy, open the Properties dialog of the host via the Options dialog, Managed Hosts section, and enable Use as Remote Proxy as illustrated below.

Note: In case the Remote Proxy is running on Linux, check the box for Remote Agent for Linux as well.

Move existing miners to a Remote Proxy

This section is only applicable in case the miners are already listed in Awesome Miner. By default all miners either don't have any Remote Proxy assigned at all, or use Local to also indicate that no Remote Proxy is used. There are two ways of assigning an External Miner to a Remote Proxy.

Open the Properties for the External Miner and go to the Remote Proxy section
Right click on one or many External Miners in the list of miners in the main window of Awesome Miner, and make the change as illustrated below

Optional: Automatic miner discovery

When a Managed Host is configured to be a Remote Proxy, a new configuration section will be made available - Automatic miner discovery. The discovery feature is similar to the network scan feature in Awesome Miner, but the process is automatic. A Remote Proxy can be configured with multiple IP address ranges where it will scan for new miners and automatically add them to the specified miner group in Awesome Miner. To automate the automatic configuration of new miners, a rule can be specified to be executed for all the added miners. The rule can for example setup API privileges and default pool settings on the miners.

The recommendation is to keep the number of miners per group below 1000 miners for performance reasons. The recommendation is to define multiple IP address ranges and map each range to a specific group, keeping the number of miners per group to less than 1000.

Import via CSV

The IP address range list can be imported via a CSV-file, using the Advanced button. The CSV file format is the following, where each line in the CSV file is representing one range.

The <MinerGroup> is optional and represents the name of the miner group where the discovered miners should be added.

Optional: MAC address identification

When using the Automatic miner discovery, Awesome Miner can optionally be configured to identify miners by MAC address (instead of IP address). The MAC address identification can be enabled via the Options dialog, Mining Settings section.

When using the MAC address identification, the Awesome Miner will identify and keep track of the MAC addresses of all ASIC miners. In case the IP address of an ASIC miner is changed, this change will be detected and the corresponding External Miner in Awesome Miner will be updated with the new IP address.