CPU mining with linux on old webservers

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lostmind

Member
Jan 5, 2013
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So for fun, as I had a bunch of older webservers lying on the racks (e3 xeons mostly) I decided I would try out cpu mining while I wait for clients to purchase them or I thought I'd simply run them to use up the spare power and rackspace I have.

I setup xmr-stak on centos (it's the distro I'm most familiar with), found a monero pool, signed up via mymonero and started mining. Didn't take much work at all tbh, though figuring out what you can mine and what to mine and what software to mine with was more work than actually setting up the miners.

Man, 20 servers produce almost nothing huh? :)

The hashrate the pool see's is between 5.1kh/s and 5.9kh/s. In 2 days I've earned 0.0134788755 XMR.

Woohoo!

I have a couple 1070 gpu's that I was considering simply selling to earn a few bucks. Is it worth while to use them for mining? I do have several racks of servers I colocate gear in for my webhosting company and I have plenty of space and power left....

Would love some feedback as I am a complete beginner here.

Thanks!
 

lostmind

Member
Jan 5, 2013
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9
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Hey MiniKnight,

Does having a larger share of the global hashrate have a positive impact on earnings? Better chance to get a coin?
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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XMR hashrate
E5-1220v1 ( 4 active cores , 4 threads ) , 256 H/s , 61w = 4.2 H/s per watt
E5-1240v2 ( 4 active cores , 4 threads ) , 294 H/s , 68w = 4.3 H/s per watt

Aeon
E5-1220v2 ( 4 active cores , 4 threads )
[2018-01-08 15:10:57] speed 2.5s/60s/15m 930.4 929.6 929.6 H/s max: 938.4 H/s

E5-1240v2 ( 4 active cores , 4 threads )
[2018-01-08 15:12:03] speed 2.5s/60s/15m 1054.4 1053.9 1053.6 H/s max: 1071.0 H/s

With 20 x E3 servers , 20 x XMR 256 H/s = 5.1 KH/s

I am mining Aeon with the E3 servers.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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@lostmind your PM has details.

The larger pool just means that over time we stick near an average luck. We also find blocks regularly. We have good days and not so good days but over 7-10 days it averages out. Some of the smaller pools are a bit more feast or famine.

With @Marsh data on those E3's another data point that @MiniKnight maintains is the profitability per 1KH/s for Aeon. Here is his tracker: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/current-aeon-profitability.17882/

Excluding appreciation (it was around $3 when we started at the end of October/ early November and is around $8 now) he is tracking around $1 per 1KH/s. That means with 20x E3 servers, per above, you should expect around $20/ day in revenue which is significantly more than Monero these days.

If you want to have a lot of fun, setup Docker Swarm and use our Docker images to deploy and manage on unused servers.

While $30/ mo per E3 server is not great, you do not have customer churn, customer support, chargebacks, DDoS and other considerations that you have with running customer workloads.
 

lostmind

Member
Jan 5, 2013
36
9
8
@lostmind your PM has details.

The larger pool just means that over time we stick near an average luck. We also find blocks regularly. We have good days and not so good days but over 7-10 days it averages out. Some of the smaller pools are a bit more feast or famine.

With @Marsh data on those E3's another data point that @MiniKnight maintains is the profitability per 1KH/s for Aeon. Here is his tracker: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/current-aeon-profitability.17882/

Excluding appreciation (it was around $3 when we started at the end of October/ early November and is around $8 now) he is tracking around $1 per 1KH/s. That means with 20x E3 servers, per above, you should expect around $20/ day in revenue which is significantly more than Monero these days.

If you want to have a lot of fun, setup Docker Swarm and use our Docker images to deploy and manage on unused servers.

While $30/ mo per E3 server is not great, you do not have customer churn, customer support, chargebacks, DDoS and other considerations that you have with running customer workloads.
Ok, the larger pool size makes some sense to me.

Maybe this is a good excuse to actually toy around with docker and not just have a half assed implementation set on fire and thrown at me (thanks ubersmith).

$30/m for an idle server that would otherwise be collecting dust sounds good to me. Offset a few dollars of fixed costs as well. Plus, I can say I mine cryptocurrencies now and be a cool kid.

Thanks!
 
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